Notes

David GeorgeAlexander David George Alexander, who died at his home in St. John's, Newfoundland, in the early hours of July 25, 1980, at the age of forty-one was one of Canada's foremost economic historians. Born in Nanaimo in 1939, he began his university work at Victoria College, graduating with his B.A. from U.B.C. in 1961. His graduate studies took him first to the University of Washington and then to the London School of Economics , his thesis for the latter institution being published in 1970 under the title Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution. In I967 Alexander took an appointment at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and quickly turned his attention to the history of Newfoundland and the Atlantic region of Canada generally. There followed a brilliant series of articles and in 1977 a strikingly original book, The Decay of Trade: An Economic History of the Newfoundland Saltfish Trade, 1935-1965. In 1971 Alexander helped form at Memorial the Maritime History Group, which was given a large collection of shipping records by the Public Record Office in London. His work in cataloguing these records and in the research of the M.H.G., funded by an SSHRC negotiated grant, on the history of shipping in Atlantic Canada occupied much of his time in the last years of his life. But Alexander was never a man to be held to one project or one idea. His was an unusual combination of intellectual gifts; well versed in economic theory and skilled in mathematics, he was also a lucid prose stylist, a man for whom the social sciences and humanities were ultimately one and indivisible. His view of learning was well expressed in his 1975 review article for the Dalhousie Review on "Canadian Higher Education"; and his particular intellectual bent made the Journal of Canadian Studies a natural vehicle for his ideas. He was one of the principal contributors to Acadiensis after its revival in 1971 and his W.S. MacNutt Lecture, the first in the series, will be given at the University of New Brunswick in.October 1980, on the topic "Literacy and Economic Development in Nineteenth Century Newfoundland." Alexander's great and good influence on Memorial University and the Province of Newfoundland was well evidenced at the service held in his honour in St. John's on July 29 which was attended by his wife Anne and son Dominic. Alexander felt an urgent need to relate past and present and his work attracted a wide readership both provincially and nationally . To his students and colleagues he gave of his kindness and encouragement in full measure, most notably in the months of the illness he bore with such fortitude. David Alexander loved the sea and all that great range of human activity associated with it. Born by one of Canada's oceans, he chose to live by another; but he was never of the foreshore alone. In his life as 128 much as in his scholarship he always looked past the headlands to vast beckoning reaches. Notes PETER NEARY University of Western Ontario William Westfall is Associate Professor in the Division of Humanities and Coordinator of the Canadian Studies Programme at York University. Garth Stevenson is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta and the author of Unfulfilled Union: Canadian Federalism andNational Unity. The late David Alexander was Professor and a member of the Maritime History Group in the Department of History at the Memorial University of Newfoundland . His untimely death this summer was an enormous loss to Canadian intellectual and scholarly life. Ralph Matthews is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University and author of There's No Better Place Than Here: Social Change in Three New/oundland Communities. Professor and Chairman of the Department of Economics at Carleton University, N.H. Lithwick has written widely on economic strategy, urban policy, and science policy, among other matters. Historien Fernand Harvey est specialiste du monde ouvrier quebecois au 19ieme siecle de vient de quitter l'Universite du Quebec aRimouski afin d'oeuvrer au nouvel Institut quebecois de recherche sur la culture. Patricia Marchak is Professor in the...