Science

This richly illustrated book is both a visitor’s guide to one of southwestern Ontario’s most striking landforms – the Elora Gorge on the Upper Grand River – and a thorough, accessible introduction to its natural and recent human history.

The book introduces rivers that flow in bedrock, between rock walls and through precipitous gorges, unlike the subdued terrain that the last Ice Age bequeathed most of southwestern Ontario. It then leads the visitor to three viewpoints on and three excursions through the gorge, with a wealth of information about its rocks, fossils, caves, cliffs, rockslides, rockfalls, floods and erosional processes. It takes the reader through five “ages” of the gorge. In the First Age the gorge bedrock originated as reef limestone 430 million years ago in prehistoric tropical seas. The Second Age saw the gorge rocks make a great, 400-million-year journey from tropical seas to the heart of a continent via plate tectonics. In the Third Age, the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet created conditions 17,000 to 15,000 years ago in which ice lobes, glacial lakes and meltwater spillways interacted to incise the gorge in an ice-free area known as the Ontario Island. In the Fourth Age the gorge, nestled in an immense forest, developed at a slower pace moderated by dense woods, fallen branches and beaver dams. In the Fifth Age, the gorge entered the Anthropocene as European settlers came to disrupt and dominate its development and unlock its secrets.

Full of original photographs, maps and diagrams, Rivers in Rock is an authoritative guide to the Elora Gorge that will fascinate visitors and researchers alike.

A captivating memoir from one of the first zoologists to study wild animals in Africa.

In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffes and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on her extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles Dagg’s realization of that dream and the year she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Her memoir captures her youthful enthusiasm for her journeys—from Zanzibar to Victoria Falls to Mount Kilimanjaro—as well as her naiveté about the complex social and political issues in Africa.

Once in the field, Dagg recorded the complexities of giraffe social relationships but also learned about human relationships in the context of apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Kenya. Hospitality and friendship were readily extended to her as a white woman, but she was shocked by the racism of the colonial whites in Africa.

Reflecting the twenty-three-year-old author’s response to an “exotic” world far removed from her home in Toronto, Pursuing Giraffe is a fascinating account that has much to say about the status of women in the mid-twentieth century, and the book’s foreword by South African novelist Mark Behr (author of The Smell of Apples and Embrace) provides further context for and insights into Dagg’s narrative.

We began with the intention of monographing Chalara and very similar fungi (Excioconidium, etc.). We soon extended the scope of our study to encompass those dimorphic imperfect genera with Chalara-like phialides (Thielaviopsis, Chalaropsis, Stilbochalam, Hughesiella), then to cover two other genera with Chalara-like phialides but having characteristic ancillary sterile structures (Chaetochalara, Sporoschisma). Finally we considered several other genera with phialides having more or less cylindrical collarettes and deep-seated conidiogenous loci (Bloxamia, Endosporostilbe, Ascoconidium, Sporendocladia) or whose descriptions raised the suspicion that they had such attributes (Endoconidium, Columnophora, Milowia). To have extended the study further would have meant including phialidic genera which, although often having relatively deep collarettes, were otherwise not particularly morphologically comparable to Chalara (Catenularia, Phialophora, Phialocephala, Sporoschismopsis).