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BOOK REVIEWS
and mineral deposits in Hong Kong, Southern China and South-East Asia. After a lapse of three years, the proceedings have been published, making a very substantial contribution to the study of the geography of Hong Kong.
The book is divided into three parts:
Part I deals with land use and contains eighteen short articles. Of the nineteen authors, eight are graduates of the Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong. With Professor Davis as editor, the book leaves us with a vivid impression akin to a painting which portrays a mother hen directing a group of her young in search of food. The eighteen articles occupy 152 pages or sixty-two per cent of the book's length. According to their nature, the articles are again divided into three sections: industrial planning (five papers), agricultural planning (two) and land use in South-East Asia (eleven). Of the eighteen articles, "Land for Industry and Factors Influencing Location in Hong Kong", "Changes in Agricultural Land Use in Hong Kong", and "The Port of Hong Kong" constitute the core of Part I, providing a basic explanation of the economic development of Hong Kong in recent years and the influence exercised thereon by the geographical setting.
In Part I, only two articles are unrelated to Hong Kong. They are "Mixed Farming and Multiple Cropping in Malaya" by R. Ho, and “The Development and Spread of Agricultural Terracing in China" by J. E. Spencer. The former gave me an opportunity to re-examine the facts about land use in Malaya. In 1962, accepting an invitation from the University of Malaya, I had gone to Kuala Lumpur to participate in the Regional Conference of the International Geographical Union. We had lengthy discussions about land use in Malaya and Professor Ho had kindly accompanied us throughout the post-conference excursion and explained to us the problems concerned. The second article is of absorbing interest to me too, because, over the years I have been groping in a similar field. However, research of this kind entails much reading of the Chinese classics, and I feel that the more I have read, the more difficult it is to jump to conclusions.
One defect that is usually inevitable in any collection of articles is that they generally fail to reflect a uniform standard. As an article is a piece of writing done on request, the people invited to write often show different degrees of seriousness in