Description
Book SynopsisThese 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.
Trade ReviewThese stories about the passion for nature are an antidote to climate despair." - Jean-François Gauvin, Professor of Museum Studies and Scientific Heritage at the Université Laval
"Wow! I'm impressed. Stop scrolling on your phones and have a look at this." - Tomson Highway, Cree playwright, author, musician
Table of 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
