John William Dawson: Faith, Hope, and Science by Susan Sheets-Pyenson (review)

256 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Susan Sheets-Pyenson. John William Dawson: Faith, Hope, and Sdence McGill-Queen's University Press. xxii,274· $44.95 J.W. Dawson was the leading, even the dominant figure in late Victorian science in Canada. Geologist. and above all palaeontologist, he was an organizer, an adminstratof, a successful fund-raiser, and a controversialist in science. A staunch Presbyterian, he popularized, in volume after volume, a biblical gloss on palaeontology. A tireless educator, he was founding principal ofMcGill, first president of the Royal Society ofCanada, and selfappointed spokesman of Canadian science. He took a major share in the credit for bringing first the American Association and then the British Association for the Advancement of Science to Montreal. He was also, frequently and strikingly, on the losing side: He fought against Darwinian evolution. He argued for organic origins in the debate about Eozoon Canadense, the suppositious dawn animal of Canada that turned out to be mineral in origin. He was honoured when the Royal Society of London invited him to give the Bakerian Lecture, then felt mortified when they declined to publish it in their Philosophical Transactions. He tried unsuccessfully for a chair in Edinburgh, and tried and failed in his attempts first at international geological union, and then at imperial scientific federation. He was committed to his family (the treatment here of his children is a fine one), and he was especially and aggressively supportive of his geological son George. And, as a Protestant educator and scientist, he failed to take advantage of Catholic support for science in a society that divided along sectarian as well as linguistic lines. He was, in short, a challenge for his biographer, which helps to explain the long gap between the publication of his official biography, in fact his autobiography, and this account. Sheets-Pyenson has taken up the challenge with sympathy and energy, aiming, generally successfully, at a portrayal of character, personality, and science. Her preparation has been thorough, witness her earlier inventory of the Dawson correspondence. The core of the account, based on Dawson's own papers, is thorough and reliable , but makes less use of what should be supporting scholarship, and so is sometimes wanting in the matter of social and scientific contexts. The nineteenth-century politicS of the Royal Society of London are well displayed in Boas Hall's book; drawing on this would have made for a richer picture in the account of Dawson's engagements with that society. There were wars between science and religion, but they were less clear-cut and less pervasive than Sheets-Pyenson suggests; Frank Turner and Bernie Lightman are among thosewhose accounts could readilyhave enriched this one, as could Brown's earlier study of the Metaphysical Society. There are besides minor errors here, unimportant for the main account yet still disconcerting. William Logan, born in Montreal, is twice referred to as a British geologist; Leonard Homer, correctly identified as Lyell's father-in- HUMANITIES 257 law on one page, is elsewhere wrongly credited with being Dawson's father-in-law; and Murchison and Ramsay were directors ofthe Geological Survey of Great Britain, not of Canada. The account of Dawson's career in its public dimension, at McGill (notably including the establishment of the Redpath Museum), in the RSC, and in the BAAS, is a convincing one. Science, and especially scientific research, was part of the core ofDawson's being as well as his achievement, and we learn here of the importance of his Acadian Geology in its several editions; it would have been useful to have more information about the content of that volume. We do later in the book get a neat account of Dawson's views on glaciers, a controversial topic then. The general primacy of geology in North American science is one of the points convincingly established bySheets-Pyenson. She alsohandles Dawson's successinfundraising with skill; in that context, and in view of the importance of geology for mining, it would have been useful to learn more about the value of Dawson's work for the mining industry in Nov~ Scotia and elsewhere in what was to become Canada. Dawso·n's Protestantism is clearly shown...