Scotland's Story
The Story of Scotland. By F. Fraser Darling. (Collins. 4s. 6d.) The Story of Scotland is one of the "Britain in Pictures" series, and, by the test of the pictures, it is a triumphant success. Paintings, lithographs, water-colours, aquatints and drawings, sensitively chosen and well reproduced, make a refreshing change from the impressive but impersonal photographs of wild scenery which we expect to meet in contemporary books about Scotland. Unlike such photographs, these illustrations are full of life—T. H. Shepherd's water-colour (1830) shows not only one of the few pretty Scottish villages, but also a gay and cheerful crowd of babies, soldiers, pedlars and gossips ; E. Duncan's aquatint of Dundee in 1840 gives a charming prospect of the town, and also sets you wondering if the ships in the foreground are whalers, or bringing jute from Calcutta.
In his admirable accompanying text Dr. Fraser Darling, like the artists, always keeps in mind the connexion between landscape and life. In his brief descriptive tour round Scotland he points out that the red soil of the East Lothians favours early potatoes, and consequently the employment of women on piecework jobs in the fields ; discussing the northern islands, he shows how the old red sandstone of Orkney, and the rock and peat of Shetland, have produced different patterns of life. In Orkney the men farm on the good soil ; in Shetland, they follow the sea, leaving the women to work the crofts. Dr. Fraser Darling is not concerned to " sell " Scotland to the stranger in any vulgar sense, and though he has an appreciative eye for the Royal Mile at dusk, or for the view across the Forth, he is very firm that nobody shall overlook the disgrace of the Glasgow slums or the higgledy-piggledy of the new Edinburgh housing.
In his short run through Scottish history, and in his survey of life and industry today, he is rightly not concerned with arguing any special cases, but he does make the reader understand what are Scotland's main problems today—among them, the export of her best talents, the decrease of livestock in the Highlands as the fertility is sucked from the hills, the Hebrides' change-over from a hardy self-sufficiency to a dependence on money and manufactured goods, and the decline of heavy industry, which the war has arrested, but cannot cure. Everywhere he shows a sense of reality, anxious to demonstrate how particular institutions (such as the great agricultural research institutions in Edinburgh and Aberdeen) actually work in practice and not just how they were planned in theory.
This is obviously a book that should be pressed into the hands of all the strangers who at present are making Scotland livelier than in peacetime ; but there are few Scots who would not learn a lot by reading it before passing it on to a Canadian, a Pole, a Norwegian
or an Englishman. JANET ADAM SMITH.
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