Another Domesday
Man and the Land. By L. Dudley Stamp. (Collins: New Naturalist Series, 25s.) ANOTHER well-polished piece of natural history has slipped off the Collins production line. Like most of its predecessors, this book is stuffed with facts, figures and photographs; the documentation is good and the author moves round his field with the concentric resolution of a combine harvester. Indeed, there are few people who could have said what he has said so well and, one is tempted to say, so often. But although it is to the credit of Dudley Stamp that he organised that new Domesday, the Land Utilisation Survey of Britain, the lay reader will probably want more integration of subject matter than he will find in this volume. The outlook, the width of treatment and the scholarship are excellent, but the sum- total savours of the government report.
Britain has scant land and many people. We have, it seems, about an acre each for all purposes. Mr. Stamp says that if half the population was to be rehoused as it should be at densities adopted for the new towns of Crawley and Harlow,, we should spread 'over • another 2.250,000 acres, an area equal to that of three average- sized counties. It would mean, in effect, that in England we should lose nearly a tenth of the land at present devoted to crops and grass. It certainly means that we must take heed of the use to which our strictly limited land is put. And this is Mr. Stamp's theme in his assessment of man's influence on the face of the land of Britain.
The fact that all the books in the New Naturalist series are produced in the same format is convenient in some ways for the reader, but we are beginning to be aware of a great deal of over- lapping of subject matter. How many times, for instance, have we read of the immediate post-glacial climatic fluxes without learning very much more about them? We arc also becoming rather tired of accounts of the spread of rabbits, Canada weed, squirrels, cock- roaches, ragwort and rice-grass. They have appeared in three if not four or more of these volumes. If other ecological works of this kind are published, the editors would be wise if they considered what has already gone to market under their imprimatur.
JOHN HILLABY
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