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within each of us; in brief, let us get on with the job of taking our literatur_e seriously, of reading it deeply and widely,· of developing a genuine critical tradition in which mythology is given its just due. And since criticism, as Frye has noted, is ninety per cent conThe origins of Canadian anthropology, 1850-1910* DOUGLAS COLE The Anthropology Division of the Geological Survey of Canada was established on September 1, 1910, under the direction of Dr. Edward Sapir. The founding of a professionally staffed federal anthropological research centre at the Victoria Museum in Ottawa marked the end of a rich era in Canadian anthropology. Early missionaries and explorers apart, the pre-professional period begins in the 1850s with Daniel Wilson and the Canadian Institute, continues through his work, that of Horatio Hale, and the flourishing of the Royal Society of Canada, to the work of the British Association Committee on the North-western Indians which sponsored much of Franz Boas' work, and finally to the appointment of Sapir, a Boas student, to the federal anthropological post. Along the way there are lesser figures, giving voice to ideas and assumptions that were prevalent in British and American anthropological thought, but which often have an indigenous Canadian flavour. At mid-century anthropology is amateur, dilettante, and fabulous; by the turn of the century it has sloughed off some of its worst features and a growing competence and seriousness culminates in the Sapir appointment. The development by *The research for this article was made possible by a grant from the President's Research Committee, Simon Fraser University . Journal of Canadian Studies cerned with teaching, let us promote our literature and its mythology throughout the school system. Let us teach it until it speaks for itself. The country we discover will be our own. the 1880s of what might even be called an incipient Canadian school, not entirely distinctive but mutually influenced, is abruptly halted by the dominance of Boas and the installation of his school at Ottawa. * * * The Canadian Institute of Toronto, modelled on general scientific associations of the time, served as the major forum for the few people in mid-century Canada interested in the new sciences of anthropology and ethnology . Anthropology became a significant interest of the Institute with the arrival of Daniel Wilson at Toronto, as Professor of history and English literature at University College in 1853. Initially interested in prehistoric archeology in his native Scotland, where he had published a major compilation of prehistoric remains and, incidentally, introduced the term "prehistory" into the English language,1 Wilson immediately associated himself with the Canadian Institute founded four years earlier and became, almost as soon, the editor of its magazine, The Canadian Journal. Absorbed in teaching history and literature, in educational administration, in literary studies like his Chatterton of 1869, anthropology was not Wilson's profession. It was, however, his favourite scholarly avocation, and he brought to it all those prodigious gifts of erudition and industry which amaze the professional specialists of the twentieth century. In Canada Wilson was concerned with the 33 nature of prehistoric and primitive man in Europe and America, with the clash of civilized and savage in the new world, and with the transplantation of races from old continents to new. He was entranced by the possibilities which North America offered for arthrC?pological work. To his eyes the continent was a human laboratory where he could see, reproduced on the grandest scale, many of the ethnological problems of Europe's prehistory. For one of his first communications to the Institute, he chose the theme of "coincidence between the primitive antiquities of the Old and New World," pointing out that the races of stone age Europe. practised arts "precisely analogous " to those of the rude aboriginal tribes of America.2 And his major anthropological work, Prehistoric Man, published nine years after settling in Canada, was concerned prima ~ily with this theme of investigating the "living present" of North America in order to recover the "long obliterated past" of European civilization.3 This was Wilson's major anthropological interest, to enquire "into the essential characteristics of man'· using "a comparison of the theoretical ethnology of primitive...

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