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functional plan: the house was usually protected from northwest winds by farm buildings, which also defined the dooryard space, or that area where most family activity took place. Garden plots were laid down wherever conditions were best, little thought being given to overall design. The authors give a good overview of the naturalistic style of gardening, but are at times inconsistent. They devote considerable space to Bernard M’Mahon’s essay on landscape gardening (largely copied from English sources) but ignore the work of Andre Parmentier, America’s first professional landscaper and the man who made possible Andrew Jackson Downing’s sudden appearance. The discussion of Downing is good, but too little emphasis is given to his essays in the Horticulturist, where he clarified and expanded the ideas presented in his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (first published in 1841, not 1849).

The second part of the volume, devoted to “popular plants for particular eras”, is most disappointing. Plant lists of unexplained derivation record a plethora of confusing vegetable productions. Whereas the previous section on garden design was broken down according to the occupation of the gardener, the plant lists are broken down solely by period and one is led to believe that a rare rhododendron would have been found as frequently in a wealthy merchant’s garden as in a farmer’s dooryard. The problem is compounded by the rather arbitrary period divisions used, which in no way correspond to those established for the gardens themselves. The period during which a particular species was popular is particularly important in view of the fact that Americans were slow to adopt new styles of gardening but quick to adopt new plants: frequently, the only sure way to identify a “period” garden is by species content. The lists printed in this work, having all the drawbacks of those from which they were compiled, give no indication of the relative popularity of a particluar plant species among specific groups, regions or time periods. It is impossible to expect even knowledgeable gardeners to select appropriate tree, shrub and vine species from a list of over 360 for the 1850-1900 period alone. While this criticism might be made of all such lists, the lists of the Favrettis have their own peculiar drawbacks. Thus the American elm (Ulmus americana) is left out of the period from 1600 to 1699 when Americans were just beginning to recognize its qualities; the silver maple (Acer saccharinum) is noted for some periods but not between 1850 and 1900 when it was one of the most planted trees in all of America.

Hastily compiled and published, For Every House a Garden is perhaps suitable for the laymen, but certainly not for the serious scholar. There is no bibliography, sources are rarely noted and the illustrations (ranging from good to bad) are inadequately identified and explained. This is unfortunate, for a small additional effort on the part of the authors would have made it a volume worthy of every historical geographer’s attention.

Uniuersity of Illinois DARYL G. WATSON

HENRY GLASSIE, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Pp. xiv+ 231. $12.50)

The serious student of American culture is, ipso facto, an admirer of Henry Glassie and his academic works. For more than a decade Glassie has been a leader among the growing company of American scholars who are working to decipher the meaning of material artifacts in order to cast light on the pre-industrial vernacular history of the United States. Glassie’s success in this enterprise has resulted partly from his meticulous treat- ment of detail, his graceful and lively style of writing and drawing and a catholic range of intellectual interests, which extend far beyond his own field of American folklore. But above all, Glassie’s most impressive quality is his insistence on asking hard and far- reaching questions about the large meanings of small objects, and on demanding rigorous answers to those questions. Few men are his equal when it comes to resolving the in- cessant tension between fact and idea, between specific and general, between apparent chaos and underlying order.

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It is not surprising, then, that Folk Housing in Middle Virginia is a book to be read at any of several levels. Superficially, it deals with the old houses of Louisa and part of Goochland Counties, Virginia, a poverty-stricken, isolated, rural region which Glassie argues is representative of the lowland South, itself a region that has been badly neglected in the literature of American folk building. Even at this simple descriptive level the book is a welcome addition to the literature. Typically, Glassie’s descriptions and illustrations are elegant and clear.

But the book’s real claim to attention stems from Glassie’s deeper motives. Like so many students of material culture, he has turned to the study of tangible artifacts because he believes conventional history to be seriously and inherently flawed by its reliance on written documents. Such documents, he argues, are written by a small segment of a small lettered t%te, who commonly ignore the affairs of the vast majority of unlettered folk. Many past writers, furthermore, like writers today, are at best prejudiced, at worst mendacious. And, since the choice of past documents is unsystematic (we take what we can and do our best with it), we cannot hope to obtain anything approaching the whole truth about past affairs if we rely on such writings.

To be sure, Glassie does not urge book-burning, but he insists that written documents can best serve in an ancillary or corroborative role. Basic historic data, he argues, should derive not from what men said, but from what they did-from the reading of artifacts which our ancestors left behind as mute testimony to their actions and their thoughts. This line of argument, of course, is basically archaeological, or anthropogeographical, and Glassie’s closest relatives are scholars like William Hoskins and Glassie’s mentor, Fred Kniffen, to whom the book is dedicated. In his allegiance to the Kniffen-Hoskins tradition, Glassie even disdains sampling within his sample area : instead, he has examined and measured every single folk house in the Louisa-Goochland district. In all, he has recorded some 156 houses which were built before the days of pattern-books, when the outside world of the nineteenth and twentieth centures came crowding in to destroy the old folk world of rural Virginia once and for all.

At first glance, Glassie’s concern with houses before the twentieth century, and with only a small poor corner of a forgotten region, may seem parochial, and it is easy to imagine a casual browser picking up this handsome book and consigning it to a coffee table-along with a collection of sensitive water-colours of Virginia bird life. Yet as the subtitle suggests, this book is more than an exercise in antiquarianism. Glassie’s ultimate ambition is to understand the thinking of those who built the houses of middle Virginia -as he puts it, “to get inside their minds”. This is not a modest ambition but it is an essential ambition for those who try-as Glassie does-to understand the “mental processes” underlying the tangible artifacts which dot the landscape of middle Virginia, and, by extension, the landscape of other parts of the world where written history is sparse or absent.

Glassie’s approach to these fundamental problems is immediately determined by his dissatisfaction with traditional history. Having castigated much documentary history as “unscientific”, he is necessarily constrained to employ methods which are scientific. His initial assumptions are thus predictable: that there is an orderly and knowable structure behind the raw data of his early Virginia houses. That structure, he asserts, lies in the minds of the farmer-builders, the vessels of early southern culture. To decipher the mental structure which underlies the physical structures, Glassie sets out to identify the formal architectural “rules” which unconsciously guided and constrained the folk builder. In describing what he calls “the architectural competence”, he takes a first step towards what he hopes will describe patterns of logic in the minds of the people who built the houses.

In this initial stage of analysis, Glassie is at his best. In order to decipher the relation- ship of traditional spaces, he has to work out the unwritten units of measurement which those traditional Virginia craftsmen employed, and then to show how those spaces could be added, subtracted, subdivided and combined to form a repertoire of forms which appear as real houses on the land. It is a fine job of detective work and a fascinating

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chronicle of how a first-rate mind can crack a seemingly impossible form of code. Glassie modestly gives credit to Claude Levi-Strauss for the inspiration of his binary logic and the notions of underlying structural order, but to my way of thinking, the structuralism is quite incidental here.

Once the “language” is worked out, Glassie sets about to arrange it, and the reader is led gently through a genealogy of middle Virginia architecture. It is a far cry from conventional architectural history, however, for Glassie dismisses the traditional lumpings of architectural fashion, to show how the elementary rules of the “competence” were combined as time passed. Here, as in previous sections, Glassie works out the structure of logic in a series of binary choices which enable the reader to move forward, backward or sideways in creating a classification of housing which makes intellectual order of the seeming chaos encountered on the ground by the field observer. As the story emerges, we are shown how the architectural rules changed only very gradually during the seventeenth century and most of the eighteenth, but were suddenly and abruptly modified in the late eighteenth century, as traditional folk thinking was forced to incorporate and absorb the impact of formal Georgian ideas from overseas. Although the traditional competence was changed, it did not collapse, but in all, the result was a revolution in architecture which Glassie argues is not unrelated to the political Revolution of the same period.

It is a fascinating idea, of course, and such ideas appear with increasing frequency as Glassie begins to speculate about the meaning of architectural changes in middle Vir- ginia. But how can we know whether or not the idea is true? Glassie makes a convincing case that there ~~7,s a major change in architectural thinking around the time of the Revolution, and it is certainly tempting to believe there was a connection between the two separate events. But we do not know and we cannot know. Above all, such assertions -however intriguing-cannot be proven or disproven by structural analysis, no matter how rigorous it may be.

That point would scarcely be worth making, except for the fact that, from the very beginning of Folk Housing, the reader is Ied to believe that he will learn about the “deep” inner workings of the middle Virginian mind if only he applies himself sufficiently to careful measurement and rigorous logic. Thus we are told: “Sundry superficial ele- ments [of folk architecture] changing at the same time and rate are likely to be indicators of a deep principle. Apparently unrelated aspects of houses-say, the height of a chimney and the color of a front door-might vary together in time. Noticing such surface changes can lead toward the recognition of structures of thought, much as the harpooner looks for disturbances on the water to find the whale beneath” (pp. 116-17). The very analogy, however, reveals a serious flaw in the argument. Whales and harpoons are both tangible objects, and they are linked by a tangible line: if the whale is landed, there is no doubt about the fact. But where is the line that connects a tangible house with an intangible idea? One wishes, of course, that the structure of mind and the structure of architecture were both equally knowable, and that the two could be linked with certainty, if only we were wise enough and rigorous enough. But it is not so. One can suspect that simultaneous changes in numerous architectural elements may reflect major social and cultural changes, but there is no scientific method that will tell us whether our suspicions are valid or not. No matter how rigorous our manipulation of data may be, the ultimate test of truth in historic investigation is precisely the same test which has always been employed by good historians: internal consistency. Structural notions may help to organize data in inno- vative ways, and they have obviously served to do exactly that in Glassie’s study of middle Virginia. But they will never bridge that awful chasm between fact and idea, nor can they test a bridge which is built by other means.

Henry Glassie is aware of these limitations. And, because he is an honest scholar, he confronts the issue squarely: “An interpretation of the house’s meanings and function . . . is at its most controlled, an essay in probabilities, and, at its least controlled, an act of pure courage. But hypothesis and a bit of scholastic overreaching are better than nothing” (p. 117). Glassie is too hard on himself, of course. It is not really “overreaching”

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to make a leap of imagination from fact to generalization, from artefact to idea: it is simply the scholar’s stock in trade. But scholarly leaps are best performed by someone who has first prepared himself. Part of that preparation is the collection and recording of data, and Glassie has done that superbly. Part is the careful reading of scholarly and other literature, irrespectvie of academic boundary lines: Glassie’s bibliography is awesome, reaching into anthropology, archaeology, geography, sociology, art history, biography, travel lore, even into novels and poetry. Part of the preparation is the careful organization of data, and that is where the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and Chomsky’s grammar come in.

The weakest parts of the book, to this reviewer, are where Glassie tries to force his own insights about middle Virginian folk thinking into Procrustean pigeon-holes labelled “extensive” and “intensive”. Correspondingly, I found the most illuminating passages stuck in like raisins in a rich cake, where Glassie breaks loose from his models and speculates freely about what he considers middle Virginians to have been thinking and doing during the traumatic formative years of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies. The richest stuff comes toward the end where, in a chapter entitled ‘A little history’, he thrusts before our eyes the vision of an early nineteenth-century southern culture forced to “curl in upon itself like a dying spider”. In the reflected images of those folk houses, Glassie sees evidence of the gradual alienation of man from man, and man from nature-a drift which the isolated folk minds of middle Virginia resisted “with gallant reluctance” but ultimately in vain. 1 would be willing to suggest that Glassie’s speculations about the character of southern culture will be read and re-read in future years, long after the structuralism has been forgotten.

Glassie, apparently, would agree. Towards the end of the book (p. 185), we find his methodological credo, which any aspiring student of material culture would do well to reflect on carefully: “Once the artificat, whether document or house, has been analyzed, the student has a choice. He may stop: from the angle of scientific method, he cannot go farther. Or he may adopt the risky sort of explanation traditional to history and move from assembled facts to correlations to hypothetical causes, thus eschewing methodo- logical purity for understanding. I prefer the latter course. . . . [But] correlative guesswork should be kept back, kept aside, until it becomes unavoidable”.

Even in its failures, this is a brilliant book, for it shows us not only how far we can go in using mechanical techniques to make sense of the tangible world, but where-in honest caution-we must necessarily and inevitably stop.

Pennsylvania State University PIERCE LEWIS

JOHN HEMMING, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (London: Macmillan, 1978. Pp. xvii + 677. E9.95)

“You tell us that God sent you”, said an Indian chief to a French missionary in MaranhZo at the beginning of the seventeenth century. “Why did he not send you sooner ?’ This must have been a difficult question to answer and John Hemming does not attempt to do so. Rather, his subject is what happened when the missionaries did arrive among the Indians of Brazil along with fortune-seekers, soldiers, administrators and other bearers of the kit and caboodle of empire. Warfare, slavery and disease destroyed Indian society, and Portuguese settlers took possession of the tribal lands. The conflict was brutal, prolonged and, in Amazonia, it is not yet over. Hemming does not intend his account of these events for the specialist on Brazil but has written instead for the educated general reader.

He opens the book with a discussion of the reactions of the Europeans to their first encounters with the Indians and then devotes several chapters to the fate of the Indians of the east coast of Brazil during the early years of colonization. In the second part of the book, he describes in turn the destruction of the Jesuit missions of Paraguay and