131 Book Reviews/Comptes rendus research output and, in 1951, it was replaced by six different disciplinary journals, one of which was the Canadian Journal of Physics. The physicists finally had their own journal. The final section of the book, Changing Definitions, describes the efforts of the physicists to establish an identity with a collective voice, to become what the author calls a "social category" (p. 117). This did not prove to be easy because there were two groups of physicists with different views of themselves and of how they should be viewed by others. Physicists working in industry wanted to form a professional association similar to that of the engineers; the academic physicists, on the other hand, saw themselves as "professionals," not in the legal sense as engineers and medical doctors did, but in what the author calls an "ethical sense" (p. 118). The book describes in detail the struggle between these two factions which came to a head following the second World War and centred around the issue of pending federal legislation concerning collective bargaining. The industrial group wanted to establish a Canadian Association of Professional Physicists (C.A.P.P.) to represent the interest of "those whose employment depends on the utilization of the science of physics" (p. 130) and applied for a federal charter. The academic physicists, however, felt that such an approach "depreciated university physicists" (p. 131). The final outcome was really preordained, at least in part, because the university physicists outnumbered their industrial colleagues. In the end the C.A.P.P. failed to get a federal charter and, in 1951, the Canadian Association of Physicists (C.A.P.) was established. Canadian physicists had developed from "...a simple aggregate of individuals at the end of the first World War [to] a well constituted group...that could now defend its long- and short-term interests...and define implicitly and explicitly the place due scientific research among other societal activities" (p. 149). This book provides an excellent account of that journey. Richardson, Douglas. A Not Unsightly Building: University College and its History. Toronto: Mosaic Press for University College, (1990). ix, 174 pages. Price: $29.95. Reviewed by Charles M. Johnston, Professor Emeritus of History, McMaster University. Many years ago, while visiting the University of Toronto campus with a friend who happened to be a student there, I was regaled on its wonders and solemnly advised how it, unlike presumably most other Canadian campuses, including 132 Book Reviews/Comptes rendus my own, reflected the true meaning of a university. The centre-piece of the tour was University College, or simply UC, the subject of the book under review. Clearly I had been less than appreciative of the architectural splendour set before me in those far-off days and was told as much. Yet the discomfiture left over from that occasion became less acute when I learned much later that even John Langton, Toronto's vice-president when University College was completed in 1859, chose to refer to it guardedly as a "not unsightly building," the words which actually form the title that art historian and author Douglas Richardson has given to his richly illustrated and well-structured coffee table book. But it appears that Langton's praising-with-faint-damns was more ironic than anything else, bemused as he was by the chequered history of the varied attempts to accommodate the institution which had first been mooted as the University of King's College in the days of the Rev. John Strachan. In its own graphic way that unhappy record, as it unfolds in this book, reveals not only the vagaries of colonial architecture but provides insights into the tortured politics of pre-confederation Ontario. The personification of the colonial establishment that functioned as the "Family Compact," the formidable Bishop Strachan, the man the Upper Canadian left loved to hate, had predictably sought to entrench the influence and ideology of that establishment in an institution of higher learning. But that hopeful scheme had fallen prey to bitter partisan strife as reformers successfully did battle with Strachan's cohorts. As a consequence this projected church institution materialized instead as University College in 1849, a state institution dismissed by its opponents as a 'godless' departure from the bishop's original proposal. In other words, A Not Unsightly Building opens a new window on the charged politics of Upper Canada from pre-rebellion times to the arrival of responsible government. All this is helped along by the chapter on institutional history contributed by the late Gerald Craig who had already done much to illuminate the province's political past in his well-received Upper Canada: The Formative Years. A former colleague, Maurice Careless, has done much the same for UC's municipal, social, and economic environment and in thè process has extended the themes he has already dealt with so ably in his biography of George Brown, the publisher and entrepreneur who after his own fashion personified the changing political cosmos at the mid-century. We are also r e m i n d e d that the c o l l e g e ' s a r c h i t e c t u r a l o r i g i n s w e r e accompanied by the technological wonder of that generation: the railway. Far from being a mere mechanical monster that noisily galvanized the economy of the budding metropolis of Toronto, this Victorian species of high-tech became a 133 Book Reviews/Comptes rendus metaphor for progress and provided humanity with startlingly new ways of perceiving space and envisioning time. And fittingly enough, as Richardson's book demonstrates so well, UC, when finally completed and opened, did much the same sort of thing in another sphere. Admittedly the politics of architecture — the fierce and divisive competition between a series of professionals before the Toronto firm of Cumberland and Storm were finally given the green light to put up the college — quite often got in the way. But happily the end result was an eclectic combination of styles, with the growingly popular pre-Gothic Romanesque and Italian Gothic appearing to predominate. This architectural blend provided the one-time 'muddy York' with a much needed and heady perspective of civilization and, more importantly perhaps, a vision of how that civilization could flourish. University College, though designed primarily like all such institutions in Victorian times to embody and transmit the ultimate verities of the past, was arguably as much a badge of the future and a symbol of metropolitanism as the railway that brought material prosperity and immigrants to an ever-expanding Toronto. The reader will also learn, as already implied, that the city was not just a major railway depot and home to aspiring publishing magnates such as George Brown and commercial giants such as William McMaster (who would leave the bulk of his estate to fund University College's neighbour 'across the park', the Baptist institution that would understandably take his name and incidentally pollute the picturesque creek that meandered through the Toronto campus). No, it would also embrace and encourage the creative genius of the invariably European-born architects, artists, and draughtsmen who devoted their efforts to the many and varied plans that ultimately went into the fashioning of not only University College, but of other notable buildings in the city. The fruits of their labours are lavishly presented in Richardson's study, and particularly striking are the multicoloured drawings prepared by W.G. Storm, a partner in the firm that submitted the final college plan. The book must also have been an archivist's and librarian's dream come true for many of the photographs, drawings, and plans (selected primarily from the archives of the University of Toronto) had obviously been kept in a well-preserved state for just such a commemorative publication as this. Like the architectural and institutional history that accompanies them, the photographs in particular reveal a Toronto that was in many ways as eclectic as UC's architecture. Just as the institution's beginnings were scarred by political and professional infighting, so a bare thirty years after its opening it was imperilled by the fire that swept through it on a wintry night in 1890. The careless use of candles and 134 Book Reviews/Comptes rendus inadequate fire-fighting apparatus combined to turn much of the building into an empty shell. Making effective use of contemporary accounts, Richardson is particularly good at measuring first, the dismayed reaction of the faculty, student, and citizen to the disaster, and then the varied and inspired steps to restore the structure. A p a r t f r o m p r o v i d i n g a s e n s e of m o o d and the h i s t o r i c a l s e t t i n g , Richardson's main contribution, of course, is in the realm of architectural history and detail (although occasionally there seem to be a few too many technical specifics and some unnecessary repetition of historical items). For the most part, however, he presents his material, textual as well as illustrative, in such an imaginative way as to ensure the warm response of those who have any kind of commitment to understanding the social role played by architecture and to exploring their community's past and its artistic triumphs. For what it's worth, this reviewer will certainly look at UC in a profoundly more sensitive fashion than he did as an undergraduate so long ago. MacLeod, Malcolm. A Bridge Built Halfway: A History of Memorial University College, 1925-1950. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, (1990). xxx, 376 pages. Price: $34.95. Reviewed by Michiel Horn, Department of History, Glendon College of York University. For most Canadians the history of Canada's tenth province is virtually a closed book. The history of higher education in Newfoundland has much the same status even with professional historians. We may know that there is a Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, but few of us have any idea what it is supposed to be a memorial to or, indeed, about any other aspect of the history of the institution. Anybody wishing to end such ignorance should read A Bridge Built Halfway. Written by Malcolm MacLeod, a member of Memorial's department of history, it deals lovingly and exhaustively, sometimes almost exhaustingly, with the first twenty-five years of Memorial University College (M.U.C.), from its founding in 1925 as a memorial to the Newfounlanders who died overseas during the Great War, to 1950, the year in which the institution graduated its own students for the first time. Professor MacLeod has done a prodigious amount of research and has written a volume that in many ways is a model of its kind. His chapters, in