The Magic Ground

Patrick Colgan is the executive director of the Canadian Museum of
Nature in Ottawa.

Harold Horwood may be the author of 22 diverse books, but he is not a
successful participant in each of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. This
textually rich and romantic series of essays that celebrates the joys of
hobby farming near Annapolis Royal is unfortunately corrupted by factual
errors, interpretative misunderstandings, emotional nonsense, and
curmudgeonly prejudices.

There are incorrect attributions (the phrase “survival of the
fittest” was coined by Spencer, not Huxley) and equations (communities
of cells and species). There are falsehoods (hexachlorophene as a
violent poison, viral symbioses, programming for death, bodily
electricity free of chemistry), bogus concepts (morphic fields,
reticulate and directed evolution), and miscellaneous howlers (“you
can see quite plainly that [any large bird] is a feathered dinosaur”).
Cheap shots are taken at outdated mechanical science, inept governments,
and greedy corporations. The Department of National Defence may not be
pleased to learn of “the perverse love of cruelty and bloodshed which
unfortunately dwells in the heart of the mobster and the professional
soldier.” In the final analysis, The Magic Ground is an indigestible
mélange of natural history and mystical twaddle.