Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/153

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1922 SHORT NOTICES 145 attempt to establish more precisely the origins of the French-Canadian population. Mr. Hamilton detects possible sources of error in the methods of his predecessors in this interesting field. Thus he finds with Professor Dionne a tendency in Tanguay and others to identify the emigrant's port of sailing with his real home, though he admits that the chance of going seriously astray from this cause would be less in the first and all-important period of settlement, owing to the greater immobility of the home population at that earlier time. Mr. Hamilton's own investigations are based on the work of Dr. Dionne, and he pursues Dr. Dionne's method of tracing the place-name in the family name. But he finds himself compelled to reject many of the conjectured etymologies, and bases his own statistics on no more than 2,974 of Dr. Dionne's 9,000 names. The important figures for his argument are in his tables on pp. 71-3 : Normandy 14 per cent. (Lortie 19 per cent.) and lle-de-France 5 per cent. (Lortie 12 per cent.) Mr. Hamilton agrees emphatically with all other investigators, Rameau excepted, that the basic population is Norman, and he offsets the fact that he has appreciably reduced Lortie's percentage of Norman emigrants with the observation that the percentage was undoubtedly at its highest in the earliest period, and that the Norman settlers who were first in the field would set their mark on later settlers from other parts of France. He follows this up with a consideration, interesting but not exhaustive, of the Norman characteristics, social and linguistic, of the French- Canadian of to-day. Mr. Hamilton's reduction of Lortie's percentage of emigrants from the lle-de-France is supported by the statement, which might have been more fully supported by documents, that all those who crossed to Canada in an official, military, or commercial capacity were registered in Paris and that many such returned with their families to France ; further, that the several detachments of orphan girls who emi- grated as filles du roi were also concentrated and registered in Paris. In a separate chapter the French- Acadian population is submitted to a similar investigation. Mr. Hamilton finds here that Brittany stands first with 16 per cent., followed by Normandy with 13 per cent. The monograph, though its author is a Canadian, has been written in Germany and at a certain disadvantage. Some of the writer's political references are rather ingenuous ; he includes Drummond and Campbell in a list of French- Canadian poets. This makes all the more praiseworthy the care with which he has done what lay within his reach. He is inclined to over- emphasize his main thesis of Norman (and Germanic) origins, but his statistics are not invalidated thereby, and they will have to be considered carefully by any who enter this field. There is a fairly extensive biblio- graphy and a full index. B. F. A curious omission in the Dictionary of National Biography has now been supplied by the publication of the first volume of The Life and Works of Sir Henry Mainwaring, edited by G. E. Manwaring (Navy Records Society, 1920). Mainwaring, an Oxford bachelor of arts, first sprang into prominence by his success as a pirate during the years 1613-16. He then received a full pardon, and in gratitude wrote and presented to James I his famous Discourse of Pirates. From this time onwards his VOL. XXXVII. NO. CXLV. L