John William Dawson: Faith, Hope, and Science

Patrick Colgan is the executive director of the Canadian Museum of
Nature in Ottawa.

As a geologist of international repute and the longtime principal of
McGill University, Dawson was a dominant Canadian intellectual for a
large portion of the last century. Subtitled Faith, Hope, and Science,
this book well explains how he was exemplary in each of these domains.

The author chronicles Dawson’s roots in Pictou, with its Academy—in
which he developed his interest in local geology, paleontology, and
natural theology; his studies at Edinburgh, during which he established
key friendships and found a wife; his life as a lecturer in Nova Scotia,
where he wrote Acadian Geology and became superintendent of education;
his association with McGill, which prospered enormously both
intellectually and financially under his care; and his role in the
founding of the Royal Society of Canada.

Based on thorough scholarship, including vast correspondence, this
balanced and highly readable narrative describes Dawson in all of his
contexts: family man and friend, geologist and devout anti-Darwinian
controversialist, academic administrator and fundraiser, and scientific
and cultural leader in Canada and abroad.