De La Nouvelle Research Articles

A Solution to the Multitude of Books: Ephraim Chambers's "Cyclopaedia" (1728) as "The Best Book in the Universe"

Since late twentieth century caption age has been a dominant characterization Western and, increasingly, global culture. These observations have been joined by complaint that it is difficult for individuals to locate information they require, to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources, and to distinguish between knowledge and information-- issues exacerbated by divide between so-called information rich and information poor societies. It is common, in both academic and public spheres, for this set problems to be ascribed to impact electronic information technologies and encapsulated in term explosion.' But this phenomenon is not unprecedented, for as historians book and print culture are beginning to demonstrate, some its essential features were apparent in early modern Europe.2 As Ann Blair has shown, concerns about increasing number were expressed as early as first century after invention printing. By seventeenth century this issue had attracted attention some major figures such as Johann Heinrich Alsted, Jan Amos Comenius, Pierre Bayle, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. he arrived in London in 1641, Comenius was astonished by vast number on display-far more, he thought, than at great Frankfurt book fair. In following year he declared that bookes are grown so common ... that even common countrey people, and women themselves are familiarly acquainted with them.3 His educational program dictated that unity knowledge, once mastered by scholars, must be shared and hence simplified. This required an abbreviation knowledge, some kind magnetic directory for people lost in a sea books.4 In 1680 Leibniz spoke that horrible mass which keeps on growing, so that eventually, he feared, the disorder will become nearly insurmountable. He also argued that this plethora made it more difficult for Republic Letters and academies to communicate any consensus on fundamentals, and so he recommended that royal academies arrange for the quintessence best books to be extracted and to have added to them unrecorded observations best experts each profession.5 More generally, within wider Republic Letters extending beyond learned academies, problem was not just too many but differential access to them in various parts Europe. This is way Pierre Bayle posed issue in his Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres (from 1684), and he offered his Dictionnaire as a book to stand in place of a library to a great many people.6 Thus, for Leibniz and Bayle, both large number and their uneven availability made abridgement imperative. From another perspective Jonathan Swift in 1704 lamented and parodied what he called Index learning, referring to growth epitomes, abridgements, and alphabetical indexes.7 These, he said, were advertised as methods for not reading whole book. Against this background, by mid-eighteenth century there were some extreme responses to rapidly growing number books. But most commentators acknowledged that printing could save and hence knowledge from agents that destroyed manuscripts in past, such as fire, flood, and actions warring armies; there were also calls for aggressive selection, if not culling, books. Indeed, Edward Gibbon, who lamented fate Library Alexandria, was able to console himself with thought that by seventh century it held many not worth preserving: But, if ponderous mass Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in public baths, a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to benefit mankind.8 Placed in this light, David Hume's famous threat 1748 to consign all metaphysical or otherwise worthless to flames can be interpreted not just as a philosophical preference but also as a means managing information overload: When we run over libraries, persuaded these principles, what havoc must we make? …

Voices from Madagascar: An Anthology of Contemporary Francophone Literature / Voix de Madagascar: Anthologie de littérature francophone contemporaine

There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed. With little hope that their voices would be heard outside the island, writers nevertheless have continued to express themselves in French (alongside a literature written in the Malagasy language). Malagasy literature in French had begun in the colonial era with three poets: Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Jacques Rabemananjara, and Flavien Ranaivo, all three presented in Leopold Senghor's celebrated Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache (1948). More recently, although a few Malagasy writers living outside the country have been published in France, the bulk of Malagasy literature today has remained largely unpublished, circulating locally mostly in manuscript form. Voices from Madagascar will bring a wide selection of these texts, both in French and in English, to the North American public.

Quasiperiodic Motions in the Planar Three-Body Problem

Quasiperiodic Motions in the Planar Three-Body Problem

Homage to Chinua Achebe

The publication in 1958 of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was experienced as a significant literary and cultural event in Africa, probably no more so than in his own country, Nigeria, and at his alma mater, University College, Ibadan. I was an undergraduate there at the time, and have retained a vivid memory of its enthusiastic reception by the handful of students and Nigerian faculty who represented what we had then of an interpretive community for what was just beginning to emerge as a new literature in Africa. Achebe's work could not have appeared at a more propitious time, confirming with the force of its achievement a development for which the signs seemed encouraging and yet, at the same time, undecidable. It is important to recall the specific local context in which Achebe's work appeared, in order to understand the intensity of the response it elicited. The year before its publication, Olumbe Bassir, a professor of Biochemistry at Ibadan, had ventured outside his professional field to bring out, under the imprint of the university press, a slim volume entitled West African Verse, an anthology that included poems by both English-speaking and French-speaking poets. It is of considerable interest to observe that it was in this anthology that students at Ibadan first encountered the poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor and the work of other Negritude poets that he had himself brought together in his historic Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache, published in Paris by Presses Universitaires de France in 1948.

A Note on Rene Belance

Rene Belance was born in 1915 in Corail, Haiti, not far from the coastal town (and homeland of poets) Jeremie. His mother made a meager living by selling candies in the marketplace. After winning a scholarship to the Lycee Petion of Port-au-Prince, considered the best secondary school in the country, Belance went on to Haiti's Ecole Normale. At twenty-five he published a first collection of poetry, Rythme de mon Coeur (1940); this was soon followed by Luminaires (1941) and a war poem in many sections, Pour Celebrer l'Absence (1943). As Belance later observed, his name was quickly pinned to a party label, quite independently of his own wishes: was classified as a surrealist right away because I had published a book [Luminaires] that was difficult to read.' Pour Celebrer l'Absence in particular became the pretext for polemics about difficulty, illogicality, preciosity and the respect due the lay reader. Mr. Belance compromises his work, his influence, his mission, by a greater number of awkward flaws than is tolerable in so short a book: useless preciosities, naive and unfortunate obscurities, complained Roger Dorsinville. Neither images nor ideas are approached in a simple, direct, intelligible manner. One would be relieved to learn that he calls himself a surrealist and rejects conventional clarity in the name of surrealism.2 When surrealism (in its European form) came to Haiti, late in 1945, in the persons of Andre Breton, Aime Cesaire, Wifredo Lam, Michel Leiris, and Alfred M6traux, Belance was immediately received into their company. Several of Belance's poems appear in important left-leaning anthologies of the postwar period, such as Leopold Sedar Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre3 and Presence Africaine's Haiti: Poetes noirs.4 Some scholars of Caribbean literature have mistakenly attributed to Belance a Parisian residence, while he was, in fact, pursuing rural education projects in Mexico and Haiti: the misjudgement amounts, perhaps, to disbelief that a homegrown voice could command such poetic authority.5 Belance was, meanwhile, pursuing other projects-projects to which he attributed more importance than to his poetic career. After two years of UNESCO-supported study in Mexico, Belance returned to Haiti and founded in the north of the island a school which would answer the need for teachers willing to take up the hard basic tasks of rural development: starting elementary schools, spreading literacy and with it the beginnings of economic and political change. (Fittingly, it was work on rural education projects that first brought Belance and Aime Cesaire together.) In the late 1940s, during the moderate government of Dumarsais Estime, he served for some years as chief administrator in the section of the ministry of national education concerned with teaching adults to read and write Creole/Kreyol. The middle and late

French Fishers, Fur Traders, and Amerindians during the Sixteenth Century: History and Archaeology

L ITTLE is known of the early relationships between the French and Amerindians in North America.1 Giovanni da Verrazzano (1524) and Jacques Cartier (1534-1541), both hired by the king of France, were among the first Europeans to exchange gifts with and to provide detailed descriptions of the indigenous peoples of the Northeast. For the decades following Cartier's expeditions, scholars are faced with a veritable terra incognita, to borrow the expression that appears on the maps of the period. No further documentation attests to French (much less Amerindian) activity in the Northeast until the seventeenth century, beginning with Marc Lescarbot's superb account of Pierra De Gua de Mont's voyages in Histoire de la Nouvelle France (i609) and Samuel de Champlain's narratives (beginning in i603) as well as the earliest travel narratives of the Jesuits (i6i2).2 Only then does the

Francis Cohen, Don Juan, and Casti

Byron was often defensive in acknowledging works from which he borrowed or by which he had been influenced when writing Don Juan. He only admitted taking material from Sir John Dalyell's Shipwrecks and Disasters at Seawhen faced with incontrovertible evidence that he had done so, and the embarrassment forced from him the confession that he was also indebted to 'Tully's Tripoli'.1 In the Preface to Cantos VI, VII and VIII ofDon Juan he drew attention to his borrowing from Castelnau's Histoire de la Nouvelle Russie, perhaps to forestall discovery of another 'plagiarism'.2 But he was especially sensitive about the influence on Don Juan of the Novelle Galanti ofGiambattista Casti.3 Thomas Medwin records the following, from late 1821 or early 1822:

Descartes: Biographie (review)

~38 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35: ~ JANUARY ~997 and on whether it is accessible to all or only to a select few. The function of the intellect and the will in relation to each other is another point of divergence, as is their respective account of limits in human virtue. But these are related to two other philosophical differences concerning matter and the soul. Unlike Maimonides, Aquinas maintains that the soul, qua intellect, is a selfsubsistent , immaterial being. But in its powers it is intellective in that it is directed towards the order of being and appetitive in that it is directed towards the order of good; likewise, it is active in relation to being and passive in relation to the good. This account leads Aquinas to argue for an essential relation between intellect and will, for locating evil in free choice, for a view of human perfection that is both speculative and practical, for multiple agent intellects, and for individual immortality available to all human beings--conclusions that do not readily derive from Maimonides's premises. In the thought of Maimonides, matter is necessarily related to evil and marks a discontinuity between the lunar and sublunar spheres. In the thought of Aquinas, by contrast, there is no such discontinuity, nor is matter the source of evil, because of a participation in goodness as well as being. In other words, matter, for Maimonides, is an ontological principle in the composition of contingent beings but one that has a disruptive influence because it subjugates forms. It poses a barrier to intellectual apprehension and therefore impedes the realization of human perfection, consisting ultimately in a knowledge of God. For Aquinas, matter is not only an ontological principle but also a moral principle. As privation, matter is basically good because of its inclination towards an end and active because of its role in the actualization of forms. Rather than impede human perfection, matter provides an impulse towards it because of a natural desire to an ultimate end, namely, the knowledge of God. The underpinning for these contrasts, as Dobbs-Weinstein shows, is a metaphysics of the Good alongside a metaphysics of Being. It is the former that allows Aquinas to elucidate providence in terms of a participative relationship between creatures and God in a much more explicit and comprehensive way than Maimonides can. Although the study is rich in detail, it is also compact in argumentation and occasionally dense in style. I am surprised that previous work of the author, although clearly evident in several chapters, is neither credited in the endnotes nor listed in the bibliography . Notes are inconveniently compiled at the end and numbered consecutively across all the chapters. Nevertheless, there are few studies comparable in scope and depth. (The most recent is the study in French by Avital Wohlman, Thomasd'Aquin etMa~monide [Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1988].) Dobbs-Weinstein's study is, therefore, a welcome and significant addition to both Maimonidean and Thomistic scholarship. JOSEPH A. BuIJS St.Joseph's College,Edmonton Genevieve Rodis-Lewis. Descartes:Biographie. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1995. Pp. 371 . Paper , FF t5o. In her comprehensive biography of Descartes, Genevi/~ve Rodis-Lewis tells the story that has come to be called the legend of Descartes. There is his father's little philosopher, the BOOK REVIEWS t39 adolescent prodigy allowed to sleep late in a single room at his Jesuit college, the soldierphilosopher meditating while the Thirty Years' War rages about him, the chivalrous disarming without injuring a rival for a young woman's affections, the private interview with Cardinal Bdrulle who directed his life, the meeting with Beeckman in front of a placard announcing a mathematical problem in Breda, the intellectual love affair with Princess Elisabeth, his library containing a dead sheep, the ballet Queen Christina made him write because he wouldn't dance, and his last hours full of acts of continuous piety and devotion. Rodis-Lewis follows Adrien Baillet's Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691) with corrections based on later work, most recently that of Vincent Carraud, Faenestra de Leyde (Nouvelles de la R~publique des Lettres, 1988), Jean-Robert Armogathe (Theologia Cartes /ana, 1977) , and Theo Verbeek (La...

The Republic of Letters

The expression “République des lettress” is still used today. It appears in most recent dictionaries of the French language, and it even occasionally occurs in ordinary conversation or in the press, a pompous and ironic circumlocution to designate the Parisian literary “milieu.” This archaistic and pejorative survival masks (somewhat similarly to the word “rhetoric”) the attention that researchers are now according to the older meaning of this surviving expression, and to the concept of an international exchange of ideas that it represented for scholars of the Ancien Régime. As proof that this scientific interest is recent, Paul Hazard, in the famous Crise de la conscience européenne (1936), devotes not a single line to the “Republic of Letters,” while in the chapter dealing with Pierre Bayle he cites the “Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” (1684), the learned periodical published in Amsterdam by this erudite Calvinist, apparently without feeling a need to explain a title that seemed self-evident. For the history of ideas, this notion was not a subject for history. It resided outside the field of perception of a discipline that was completely devoted to a sort of chemistry of pure ideas, removed from the literary form that carried them, and a fortiori from institutional circuits, and forms of sociability and dialogue that “invent” and spread them, and even more so from the awareness that “scholars” might have had of the solidarity that united them and of the meaning they might be able to attribute to it.

Fixed point theory and nonlinear problems

Introduction. Among the most original and far-reaching of the contributions made by Henri Poincare to mathematics was his introduction of the use of topological or qualitative methods in the study of nonlinear problems in analysis. His starting point was the study of the differential equations of celestial mechanics, and in particular of their periodic solutions. His work on this topic began with his thesis in 1879, and was developed in detail in his great three-volume work, Methodes nouvelles de la mechanique celeste, which appeared in the early 1890s and summarized his many memoirs of the intervening period. It continued until his memoir shortly before his death in 1912 in which he put forward the unproved fixed point result usually referred to as last geometric theorem. The ideas introduced by Poincare include the use of fixed point theorems, the continuation method, and the general concept of global analysis. The writer's acquaintance with Poincare's influence came through contact with Solomon Lefschetz and Marston Morse, both of whom were very explicit as to the role of Poincare as an initiator in this direction of mathematical development. In 1934, in the Foreword to his Colloquium volume on The calculus of variations in the large. Morse had put this forward very forcefully in the first paragraph:

Voici des nouvelles de la Conference

Performance & InstructionVolume 20, Issue 2 p. 1-3 Department Voici des nouvelles de la Conference First published: March 1981 https://doi.org/10.1002/pfi.4150200202AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume20, Issue2March 1981Pages 1-3 RelatedInformation

On the existence of periodic solutions of Poincar�'s second sort in the general problem of three bodies moving in plane

In his ‘Methodes Nouvelles de la Mecanique Celeste’ (Sections 42–47), Poincare envisaged the existence of a class (the ‘second sort’) of periodic solutions of the general problem of three bodies, arising by analytical continuation from unperturbed elliptic motion of two bodies about a primary, in which the two orbits are of commensurable period, and of non-zero eccentricity. Existence proofs have been given for the restricted problem case (in which the mass of the third body remains zero) by Arenstorf and Barrar, and for the lunar theory case by Arenstorf. A proof is offered here for the general problem, making use of the symmetry of the equations of motion (with use of the ‘Mirror Theorem’ of Roy and Ovenden) in an extension of the approach used by Barrar for the restricted problem, and using a device proposed by Poincare himself which enables the extension to the general problem to be made.

Un franc-maçon oublié : l'auteur des «Nouvelles de la Cour et de la Ville» (1734-1738)

Françoise Weil : A forgotten freemason. The Nouvelles de la Cour et de la Ville (1734-1738), published in 1879, are unsigned, but thanks to a series of clues, we have been able to identify the author as a certain Pierre de Billy, a Lyon lawyer. The text shows that he was closely linked to the Prince of Carignan and his friends, in other words with the Free-Masons. In fact de Billy was one of the founders of Free-Masonry in Lyon and seems to have been the communicating link between Free-Masons in Paris and Lyon around 1737.

"Enfer et folie", propositions pour une lecture d'un texte de Youcef Sebti

Hell and madness, an analysis of a poem by Youcef Sebti. Hell and madness, a short poem published in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie algérienne, edited by Jean Sénac, is analysed without reference either to the author or to his other works. However, his situation as a citizen of a country now independent after a hundred years of colonization is not ignored. This is an attempt to uncover the deeper meaning of the poem, by dint of sylistic analysis. The problem — to which no definite solution is found — is the following : which value, positive or negative, can be accorded to the second pole of the poem, namely madness ? It seems possible to interpret the whole poem as the life-journey of a man, first through the hell of colonization (or in a more general sense, of oppression) followed by the struggle for independence. But even when he thinks he is out of it, he has to admit that the hell still exists, and that the only way out of it lies through madness. The fact that madness is metaphorically linked with the sea may, along with other indications, show that madness is a kind of liberation, a flight to heaven.

Revolt re‐examined: The 1878 insurrection in New Caledonia

(1975). Revolt re‐examined: The 1878 insurrection in New Caledonia. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 48-63.

Contestée: La circulation des élites*

International MigrationVolume 8, Issue 1-2 p. 39-49 Contestée: La circulation des élites* PAUL LADAME, Search for more papers by this author PAUL LADAME, Search for more papers by this author First published: January‐April 1970 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.1970.tb01070.xCitations: 4 * Déjà paru dans I'Annuaire de la nouvelle société Helvétique, 1970 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume8, Issue1-2January‐April 1970Pages 39-49 RelatedInformation

Book Notes

BOOK REVIEWS 149 On the other hand, "a history which were only a lofty generalisation would go astray in pure speculation and would deduce its content from principles without making sure that the bulk of facts produced in reality could find its proper place within its frame" (ibid.). Hence, between the anecdotic and fantastic, history asserts its own exigencies, which are authenticity and intelligibility expressed in a true system of human evolution. In the last chapter of Part I, Callot makes interesting observations concerning the problem of prevision or prediction in history. He mentions two types, the long4erm and the shortterm type, which he calls the type of prediction on the basis of history of philosophy, and the type of prediction on a sociological basis, respectively (p. 216). As is well known, Hegel developed his dialectical method in a constructive critique of Kant's doctrine of antinomies. In his Encyclopgdie, he observes that Kant's discovery of the inevitability of antinomies is "one of the most important and profound developments in modern philosophy." This association of ideas invites certainly to a further constructive critique and should be discussed in a book whose main subject is the antinomies in history. Furthermore, Marx's contribution to the development of dialectic and, in particular, his doctrine of "contradictions " as presented in Capital is far too important to be passed over in silence. The connection between Marxian dialectic and the Correspondence principle in physics (Bohr), to which Callot seems to refer on page 264, is so obvious that it should not be neglected in a book which otherwise bears testimony of erudition and intrepidity. I quite agree with Fernand Braudel that the author owes us another volume where the thinking of Marx and his historiographical descendants up to Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique is closely scrutinized. By taking such a step, Callot would probably create a still more suitable basis for the discussion of the problems of history of philosophy and science, of which he, in Part II of the book, gives an instructive and lengthy report. JOHANNES WI~-HANSEN University of Copenhagen BOOK NOTES New Editions Pierre Bayle, Oeuvres diverses, I. Avec une introduction par Elisabeth Labrousse. Hildesheim, C~eorge Olms, Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964. xx -{- 760 pp. Subscription price per volume, DM 118. (Individual volumes, DM 148.) In view of the revival of interest in Pierre Bayle's thought and influence, it is fortunate that this excellent photoreproduction edition of his Oeuvres diverses, which have been so difficult to obtain, will now again be available. The four volumes, published first in 1727, bring together all of Bayle's works other than the Dictionnaire historique et critique, plus many of his letters. The present photoreproduetion edition will include all the works except the letters , since a new edition, including a very large number of those not in the Oeuvres diverses is now being prepared by a group of scholars under the direction of Madame Labrousse for the International Archives of the History of Ideas series. The first volume consists of the issues of the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres during Bayle's editorship, from its inception in 1684, until Bayle withdrew because of illness in 1687. Madame Labrousse, in her fine Introduction, discusses the history of this journalistic venture, and its importance in European intellectual history. The flight of so many French refugees to the Netherlands made it possible to set up a journal in Holland, written in French, that would review works in theology, philosophy, natural science, mathematics, history, etc. The capital, the publisher, the printers, the author and most of the readers were all refugees from Louis XIu persecutions. Bayle, while teaching philosophy at the ]~cole illustre of Rotterdam and writing some of his famous works, like the Ce que c'est la France toute catholique and Commentaire philosophique, undertook to review what was going on in the Republic of Letters. His objectivity, erudition, wit, and critical ability made the effort a success, and led to the series of other efforts, such as Jean Le Clerc's Bibliotheque choisie, and Henri Basnage de Beauval's Histoire des ouvrages des Sgavans. Bayle discussed the issues of the day--the...

The Vertebrate Fauna of Isle au Haut, Maine

Isle au Haut, settled since 1792, is a remote of 4,700 acres in outer reaches of Penobscot Bay, Maine. Its historical background and environmental nature are briefly described. Listed are 5 species of freshwater fishes, 3 amphibians, 3 reptiles, 123 birds, and 15 mammals recorded there. These are based on observations and specimens collected during two weeks on in summer of 1963. Distributional implications of insular faunas such as this are discussed. INTRODUCTION Of myriad islands along Maine's drowned coastline, Isle au Haut, in outer waters of Penobscot Bay, in Knox County, is as remote from mainland as any except much smaller Monhegan, Machias Seal, and Matinicus islands, and Mount Desert Rock. Biologically, it has been explored only slightly. Since 1946, with large gift of land from heirs of Ernest W. Bowditch of Boston, major portion of Isle au Haut has been a part of Acadia National Park, although distant by 25 miles from headquarters area on Mount Desert Island. As yet has been little developed and pressure of summer tourists has not been felt. An inventory of fauna of Isle au Haut seems desirable, and this has been encouraged by Paul G. Favour, Jr., Park Naturalist based at Bar Harbor. As a result, it was my privilege to spend 12 days at Isle au Haut from July 24 to August 4, 1963. My son accompanied me during part of this time, and assisted with collections and observations over a large part of island. Local residents were most helpful and cooperative in providing information. The experience was delightful and unique, both sociologically and biologically. Incomplete as they necessarily were, after such a brief period on Isle au Haut, my findings are here presented as a basis from which future studies may be made. Acknowledgments.-Without assistance of many people this work would not have been accomplished. Paul G. Favour, Jr., helped with arrangements and expedited study in many ways. Much useful support was had from Pearl Prescott, Stanley E. Dodge, Virginia MacDonald, Lee 'Chapin, and Shirley J. Marine. Others who assisted in various ways (some identified by initials only in text) were following: Gordon 'Chapin (GC), Mabelle Chapin, Barbara D. DeWitt, George Greenlaw, Mrs. Fred Hoskins (FH), Ted Hoskins, Leon Liscomb, Bennie and Noyes MacDonald, Hollis Neville, and Milton Weller. To all of these I am deeply grateful. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Isle au Haut, sometimes called outermost island in Penobscot Bay, was known to Indians, who camped here in summer. In their shell heaps and burial sites are found remains of deer, otter, mink, muskrat, and waterfowl. Samuel de Champlain, exploring coast in 1604, gave spot its present name, the high island variously spelled as Ille Haulte and l'isle haute in 1613 and 1632 editions of Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France occidentale. The nearby

Champlain's English Log

In Lieutenant-Commander Waters' paper ‘The Development of the English and the Dutchman's Log' (this Journal, 9, 70) there is an illustration (Fig. 1, p. 73) of the English log, reproduced from Champlain's Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France Occidentale. The device illustrated, though no doubt correct in intention, could not have performed the function stated, namely, of floating ‘vertically in the water presenting its full face to the ship's wake' (p. 74). This raises the suspicion that Champlain had not examined the log minutely enough, if at all, or at least had failed to instruct his draughtsman properly.

Canadian Nationalism: An Historical Approach

T HE great seed-bed of nationalism in the Americas was the Revolution of the Thirteen Colonies. This is obvious in the case of the Latin American countries which drew so much of their inspiration not only from the North American War for Independence but from the Declaration of Independence and the pattern of the American Constitution. It is not so obvious in the case of Canada whose still disunited colonies of that day reacted against the Revolution, and whose advance to full nationhood followed a path very different from that of the other twenty-one American nations. Nevertheless the important elements of Canadian nationalism were present during the Revolutionary period, even if in embryonic form, and an understanding of Canadian nationalism today will be made clearer by a reference to them. The oldest and most firmly rooted element was that of the French Canadians of the Province of Quebec, Les Canadiens de la Nouvelle France, brought by conquest under the British flag and crown. In I763 they numbered only some 6o,ooo but already they were a compact, thoroughly acclimatized Canadien society with a tenacious and happy peasantry, a devoted if provincially-minded parish clergy, and an intelligent, welltrained even if small elite of clergy, lawyers, and seigneurs. Those wishing to do so had returned to France by their free choice, offered by the British Government, and from that day Les Canadiens have been committed completely to life in the New World and to the ideal of 'survivance' in a North America dominated by an overwhelming English-speaking majority. Only a tenuous cultural tie with France remained, and although at times it has had some significance among the educated, especially during the past seventy-five years, it has never been a fundamental source of French Canada's strength. Love of soil, Church, -and language have been the bulwarks of French-Canadian culture, and in particular the Church has been the one institution to which French Canada could look for inspiration and guidance. The rationalism and paganism of the French Revolution destroyed almost completely any lingering loyalties to Old France after I763. It was not strange that the bells of Quebec rang to mark the defeat of Napoleon. All this goes far to explain later French-Canadian attitudes not only toward the British connexion, but toward the Confederation agreement 1 This paper was originally prepared for the Conference on Commonwealth Studies arranged by the British Council at Oxford from 29 June to IO July I953, and is reproduced, with some small amendments, with the concurrence of the British Council. i66