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Full Description
These beautifully illustrated stories of natural history in nineteenth-century Canada are about the curious men and women who crossed the oceans from Europe to explore, map, draw, puzzle about, collect and exhibit nature in Canada. Informed by French, British and Indigenous naturalists, they tried to understand what they saw. What did it all mean about the origins of the world? Louisa Blair, an amateur naturalist in Quebec and a transatlantic species herself, tells tales on Darwin, Russell Wallace and James Cook, and lingers on the strange and colourful details of Canada's stubborn resistance to evolutionism and its first natural history museums with their penchant for deformities. These stories feature Indigenous mapmakers, botanical artists, bug-bitten rock fanatics, arctic explorers, and a trio of Quebec women who managed to get plants named after themselves. To make her case, Louisa Blair has gathered a vast collection of vintage illustrations.
In short, muddy boots, cold hands, a pocket full of fossils, a mind full of existential questions.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
NOVELTIES OF NATURE
The heresy of the stars
Astronomical leaps
A hardier mulberry
Botanical usefulness
Pet pigeons
Ornithological obsessions
No rotting flesh
Geological dating
INTERROGATING NATURE
Memory maps
Indigenous natural history
More fun than embroidery
Lady botanists of Quebec
A singular specimen of the potato
Natural history at the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, 1824 to 1840
The beknighted collector
James MacPherson Le Moine
DRAWING NATURE
Drawing dissected mollusc penises
Natural history artists
While her husband mapped the river
Natural history artists in the Canadas
EXPLAINING NATURE
Seasick on the Beagle
Origins of the Origin
Feel it struggling between one's fingers
Alfred Russel Wallace and the theories of evolution
I laughed til my sides were almost sore
How the theory of evolution by natural selection was received
A chaos of fallen rocks
Passionate opposition in Quebec
MAPPING NATURE BY BOAT
No room for idlers
Captain Cook in Quebec
Canada's Arctic Dogsbody
Captain Bernier, 1853-1934
Nothing more human than a ship
The Canadian Arctic Expedition
EXHIBITING NATURE
Les simples curieux
The birth of the great museums
Otis and the safety elevator
World's Fairs
The calf with two heads
The first natural science museums in Quebec
Sinking into the mud
The Geological Survey and the Canadian Museum of Nature
Slate pencils
William Dawson and the Redpath Museum in Montreal
Sentinel species
Natural history and the future of nature
