Acland’s Letters: Eighth Letter
Montreal
Ottawa
Sept. 1, 1860
The city and its architecture
There is something strange in the way in which every place on our journey is progressively more striking than the last. I was struck by the simple life of Newfoundland, interested in the progress of Nova Scotia, astonished at the energy of New Brunswick, instructed by the obvious civilization & marked cultivation of the entrance to Canada, unprepared for the energy displayed by the Price’s trade at the Saguenay, almost awed by the St. Lawrence and the approach to historical Quebec – and now brought to a standstill of many questionings as I sit before the outspread city of Montreal, the towns, the spires, the Banks, the Bridge, the great River, the greater plains, the distant mountains of the States: pausing for many questionings: questionings of the past – the present – the future – of Man – of his dwelling place – of his end – of his Maker. Here are the chords which ring with many notes – round us, the Indians, & their birch Canoes – near us the Governor General & the Commander in Chief — and all state of Monarchy – a little way off the Guard of Honour come up from Republican Boston to wait on the Prince – the gigantic Bridge – bankrupt – the River with its woods ever uttering for willing ears a tale of the great laws by which the world once slowly created is maintained and nourishing.
So it all is – vast – complex – though but the hem of the garment is touched or seen.
Montreal is a fine place — there — that is plain.11 It is situated on the banks of the River – on the left bank or the Northern side – has several handsome churches & other public buildings – with lofty spires, and in one case two towers. To all the public buildings I think one criticism is applicable excepting only the Anglican Cathedral — and some new houses. The French Canadians imported a sense of proportion, but did not bring detailed knowledge – therefore the general forms of their buildings and their distant effect is much better than the nearer view confirms. This is not uncommon either on the continent and was Sir Christopher Wren’s fault also. You will notice at once how it is the converse of Woodward’s buildings as far at least as we know them. But the consequence is that very poor buildings have a splendid distant effect – disappointing in the approach.
Grand arrival
When we landed I thought the spectacle one of the grandest I had ever seen. It will be I doubt not fully described in the ‘Times.’ The scene was a great quay – the background a Market house with a centre & two wings, full 500 feet in length and a triumphal Arch in the front. It seemed moving with human beings, who left a broad way in the middle lined by soldiery, with a long broad carpet glittering its length in a cloudless sky of an Autumnal morning after rain.
Highlights of visit
29th – We are on the eve of leaving Montreal – The objects we have seen of the most import are the Cathedral and its arrangements – the Bridge – its opening – Luncheon – Geology of the shore – Sir W. Logan – Dr. Smallwood of Isle Jesu – Dr. Hall, the Medical Editor – Dr. Nelson, Cartier’s friend.22 The Asile de St. Joseph – the shooting the rapids of the St. Lawrence and conversations on many things with the Governor General. His illness – and my anxieties for the whole party: the American Regiment.
For the right understanding of Montreal it is necessary to bear ever in mind that it is in the old French Canada – was founded Mont Royale by them – is mainly French. It was the seat of Government which in consequence of the late rebellion was transferred to Quebec.33 Incidentally I may remark it is going from Quebec to Ottawa as soon as ever the Parliament buildings at Ottawa are complete.
In all respects therefore Montreal has been & is an important place. The bridge makes it more so: for it connects the island with the main & the North Shore of the St. Lawrence with the South – Upper with Lower Canada. Canada, in its heart, with the States, and, all through the winter, gives an outlet to the Sea.
This was you are aware the object of the Prince’s visit – i.e. the nominal & original object – to open the bridge. We therefore did this at once on our arrival.
In Montreal, Acland also met seventy-year old Dr Wolfred Nelson, a comrade-in-arms of George-Etienne Cartier during the Lower Canada Rebellion in 1837. One of its English-speaking sympathizers, Nelson became a hero when sharp-shooting French Canadians under his command defeated General Gore, a veteran of Waterloo. Like Cartier, Nelson was charged with treason and spent time in exile in New York State. In 1847, he and his physician son are credited with the first use of an anaesthetic (ether) in the Canadas while removing a tumour from a woman’s thigh.
A riot after the rebellion protested the passing of a bill offering compensation for property losses suffered during the Lower Canada Rebellions of 1837-38, rebellions that the protesters considered treasonous. The riot lasted for two days, involved thousands of people, and led to the relocation of the seat of government alternately to Toronto and to Quebec City.
Surreptitious excursion
We were to have arrived on Friday – but it had rained with such violence that the streets were impassable and we remained in the steamer three miles below Montreal – We landed however three or four of us incognito – in a dingy – and had a stroll over some fields44 – the Prince being of the party – we got muddy – very – studied boulders – Northern Drift – structure of rocks – jumping – and cigars and got off unsuspected and even unreported –
The next day we landed – went to open a great Exhibition directly in state – then to open the Bridge, then a great Luncheon, at the Bridge of 500 persons given by the Legislature. You have the bill of Fare – we saw the preparations for a dinner to the work people of the line about 1000 I fancy – 100 of our sailors being invited. But all these things let the Illustrated News relate: I had no time to examine the Bridge mechanically: for two days I had rather a sick headache and lay by pretty much all Sunday.
After the royal party’s arrival in Montreal was deferred by rain and by streets mired in mud, Acland’s surreptitious shoreline excursion from the Kingston’s anchorage below Montreal is informed by a chapter in the emerging science of geology.
Rosemount, royal quarters
We were lodged in various houses – I with the Prince – in General Williams house, hired from Rose the Commissioner of Works55 – with a good Library – a splendid view – and some nice pictures – a place altogether in good taste; and its owner Williams, a noble nice fellow – good humoured & witty as strong and firm – and Rose a clever pleasing affable lawyer, beloved and trusted. They have become quite among my intimes – the General has been into my bedroom – where we all hold our personal levees – and finding already three or four there – he says on entering “Good morning, Doctor – now look here, if any fellow insults, worries or disturbs you, just you communicate the same to me – and I am his man.” So pleasantly goes the daily life.
Rosemount, owned by John Rose, was one of the mansions that reflected Montreal’s new prosperity.
Victoria Bridge
Two books among a host have been written worth seeing, one by Hodges which costs £85 – and was got up at an expenditure of near £5000 – a decoy to employers – the other a little handbook you can get at Weale’s, by Legge.88
The Grand Trunk Railway, founded in 1852 in London to build both the bridge and the Montreal-Toronto rail line, had hired the most famous firm of world-wide railway contractors, Peto, Brassey, and Betts.
In his 1859 report to the directors of the Grand Trunk Railway, Thomas Blackwell conveys a sense of the revolution in trade patterns, travel, and communications effected by the railways.
During the five years of its construction, this industrial marvel had been of intense public interest and the subject of a flood of both scientific and popular literature.
Meteorological Observatory
The Observatory is a small wooden hut close by about 10 feet by 6. Outside hang the thermometers with Northern aspect – some made by himself – others American – so precious is a Negretti & Zambra that he keeps it in the house for a Standard. Wet and dry bulbs several – the water reservoir placed above the bulb – Maxima & Minima instruments. Outside also is an Ozonometer, Shönbein’s’s; a long wooden shed with ozone paper placed under several variously coloured glass to receive the impression of various chemical rays: and there is also an ozonometer in his latrine. All are recorded at the usual hours (4 times I think). In the Observatory are his Barometers – some made by himself, others by a London maker (”Barrow’s Patent”?) one Negretti one 6/10 bore boiled by himself.
Now for the registering instruments – The wind is registered in respect of direction by a horizontal rotating disc which receives a pencil (cut by the American cone) the disc rotates in 12 hours. He could not afford to print the papers for hours; his children divide them – A clock, which costs a dollar, carries a 24 inch strip of paper which moves its length in 24 hours: and the Anemometer (Robinson’s) made by himself marks off every mile it runs by a prick from a catch wheel acting as a lever on the paper strip. This strip then gives the miles per hour, when laid on a 2 feet rule. One barometer photographs its nightly maxima & minima by a slit attached to an arm of which one end rests in the mercurial cistern, through a float. Opposite the slit is a Magic Lantern, and on a wall opposite the slit the photographic paper.
The Electrical wire of the 70 foot rod enters opposite a table where he has straw electrometers of different weights with a scale to read off: also under special circumstances he photographs their tension – gold leaf & magnetic – electrometers are in order – and balls for measuring the spark which in a snow storm he has seen pass constantly at 1 and 1/40 inch – He measures the distance of the bulb by a graduated arm which separates them. A conductor passes off into the ground. The 40 foot pole carries a platinum spiked corona.
Another clock carries a horary ozonometer exposing a portion of the strip to the outer air.
General Sabine is giving him a set of magnetic instruments. He receives the Greenwich Observations – communicates with Glaisher, Quetelet, Henry at Washington & others.1010 He has lately been appointed to give lectures on Meteorology at Montreal McGill College – without salary; and the Government instigated by Cartier & the Governor General have given £100 a year. His observations appear in the Canadian Naturalist – but I should much like the Government to undertake the printing. I have promised a set of the Radcliffe Observations to him and have endeavoured to make his worth known to several persons – I do not find that he can connect yet the observations with any Sanitary conclusions, or principles. He however is now attempting to connect the Sun’s spots with the ozonic observations, & Magnetism. He often has observed at 4 degrees below zero night after night. He made microscopic observations on snow-crystals published by Glaisher, and on many points of Germination. So God speed him.
I went with him afterwards to one or two houses in the village to see the manner of life in this plain but comfortable country parish. Both peasants & farmers seemed well to do in the struggle of life and showed the several characteristics of that struggle in a simple form – no unnecessary things – and the appliances of the country admirably adapted to their needs.
Dr Charles Smallwood’s observatory was first intended to investigate the connection between disease and weather, a subject of considerable interest as a factor in the possible airborne spread of diseases, including cholera. Smallwood’s research also had other applications in areas like agriculture.
During his visit to the observatory, Acland expressed unbridled enthusiasm not only for the physician’s resourcefulness in making his own instruments and for his ingenuity in setting up auto-registering devices for instruments requiring multiple daily recordings, but also for the treasured instruments that he had acquired. These instruments represent their improvement in precision from the beginning of the nineteenth century when the physical sciences turned from description towards mathematical measurement. Acland admired a prized thermometer and a barometer made by Negretti and Zamba, a British optical firm established in 1850 and later appointed scientific instrument-maker to the British Admiralty; an anemometer (Greek: anemos – wind) modelled on an improved design by John T.R. Robinson at the Armagh Observatory in Ireland in 1846; an ozonometer by Christian Friedrich Shönbein, the discoverer in 1840 of this gas with its distinctive chlorine-like smell (Greek: ozein – smell) noticeable in the air after lightning.
The standardization of measurement through improved precise instruments permitted global scientific coordination, an undertaking consciously pursued in the first half of the nineteenth century as a realization of the seventeenth-century baconian idea of science. As envisaged by Bacon, data provided by global observers would lead not only to the analysis of scientific principles but to new applications of them, particularly in industry, which would result in the material betterment of humankind and the relief of human suffering.
Hotel Dieu
The population of Montreal as I have repeatedly implied is essentially Roman Catholic, but I think that the English Protestant population must be gaining ground. I am not sure of this – but certainly more English go to Canada than French – and the English are the more active – but still French life is becoming more energetic and there will be proportionate prosperity – and the legislature will remove some of the causes which depress the French population – of which the law of tenure of land is perhaps the most important. It is singular to see how the Romish element affects everywhere alike the character of the Institutions.1111 The best in Montreal appear to be Roman Catholic. The Hospitals were hurriedly seen – but the new one now in course of erection on a very large scale seemed well managed on the whole. I met there Dr. Hingston, a good & intelligent person1212 – but many internal arrangements, such as a curtain round the beds are on the old and unsatisfactory plans – the ventilation was not good & certainly not a model – It is wholly under management of a sisterhood who were as usual affable & pleasing. The Shop was in capital order – floors washed weekly, not oiled – but they had no reason for their Faith.
In 1659, three nurses from the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph in France were invited by Jeanne Mance, a co-founder of the small religious colony, to work at the first Hotel Dieu hospital established by her in 1642.
Dr William Hingston was a professor of clinical surgery at the Hotel Dieu.
Medical treatments
The General Hospital is a rather poor building – but adequate. I met there Drs. Campbell – Hall – Douglas & Taylor. We had a long conversation concerning Pneumonia & the Type of Disease1313 on which their views were moderate and sensible and tallied much with Watson’s and Latham’s – Hall said he treated Rheumatic Fever with Lemon juice with great success – He wont treat me so however. I mentioned my experience of the Alkaline treatment – and my observations on bloodletting – that I had seen its necessity more frequently in the last two years, or at all events thought it was more required. They all agree that Opium is the sheet anchor in Canadian Cholera. The Chemist told me that Opium with Camphor & Capsium is a favorite pill. I saw cursorily part of the Hotel Dieu, an old & bad building – passably well managed by its sisterhood.
At the General Hospital, founded by the English-speaking populace in 1823, Acland spoke with physicians like Dr Archibald Hall, president of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Canada East, outspoken editor of a medical journal, and lecturer since 1835 at the McGill Faculty of Medicine.
Day care and orphanage
The institution for charitable purposes most remarkable that I saw was the Asile de St Joseph. It is a joint orphanage, refuge for the aged & day nursery1414: the latter is the show thing, and admirable it is. I suppose such institutions are carried on in much the same way. The Children are brought in the morning by their parents & deposited for the day, and bring their food with them. They are kept during the day & taught – when tired lie down on boards or a sort of sofa – and are well disciplined generally. They seemed fairly in health and happy & at home with their Teachers. The fear of all such Institutions is the over working the children. Besides there is a large Orphanage, perhaps 300 inmates in all. This was I am told mainly founded by the Priest or Monk P.V. who obligingly showed me round. The Prince had been expected. I was obliged to personate him & hear these infants sing God save the Queen in French and apostrophize me as Mon Prince, pro formâ (for form’s sake).
Acland visited the Hospice Saint-Joseph founded in 1854 by the Sisters of Charity who had been looking after the needs of the poor in Montreal since their order was founded about 100 years earlier by Marguérite d’Youville.
William Logan, geology
The last institution I should name is the Geological Museum connected with a Survey by Sir W. Logan.1515 This indefatigable person has for many years (20 I think, nearly) – been in the service of Canada as a Geologist. Small allowance was at first made him. Now with a grant of £5000 a year he maintains the Museum which he has founded, the services of Mr. Billing as Paleontologist & Mr. Hart [Hunt] as Chemist – and publishes annual Reports. His work indeed requires him to make a Survey & maps as well as examine and lay down the Geology. His plan is very much to examine and place River beds topographically, noting their Geology on the Margin – If you contemplate the Map you will see what this comes to.
I must now attempt to enter upon the Geology of this district. In detail it is very difficult. In general it is not so. The whole district is very ancient. Ancient Silurian & Devonian, disturbed by Volcanic Action – and in some places by at least triple outpouring of Igneous streams – one through the other. Sir W. Logan has paid much attention to the ancient fossils of the Silurian, and hopes, I can see, to extend the Zoic epoch downwards a long way.
But his Museum is economic as well as Scientific.1616 It shows all the ores – useful & ornamental – Pigments & Manures of Canada – those good for building & for decoration – and splendid they are – ores in all states – and the results of their manipulation.
I urged him to issue a popular Guide book as one of the best means of promoting his objects – and I asked him if he would undertake the direction of an Assistant for the Western districts to connect them with his Canada Survey. Gladly he said – and I have proposed the plan to Sir Edmund Head. It were well worth our while to take up the country to keep the Americans out and make these parallels of latitude our Survey from East to West.1717 The Americans have already published the Natural History of the West coast (State of Washington).
Tomorrow we start for the upper Ottawa, and descend upon Lake Ontario at Brooksville [Brockville] at night. I fear my journals must savour of the sleepy state of midnight.
As the science of geology advanced, geological surveys were established in Britain in 1835 and in New Brunswick in 1838.
At the Museum of Geology, established in 1856, the exhibition of the work of the Geological Survey was important not only for the scientific education of the general public, an important aspect of science, but also for the continued generation of grants. As the first government-funded scientific enterprise in the united Canadas, the Geographic Survey needed to demonstrate its economic usefulness. The museum’s displays included iron; copper, recently used in the wiring of electrical telegraphs; hematite and ochre used in pigments for paints; phosphates and lime from limestone used in improving soil already exhausted in parts of the united Canadas; and splendid building materials like marble, granite, limestone, and slate.
Acland’s recommendation to Logan that mapping by the Geological Survey might also help counter potential American boundary aggressions as the country extended westward echoes a similar suggestion made by the British Association for the Advancement of Science during the Oregon boundary dispute when President Polk campaigned for American expansion beyond the forty-ninth parallel with the slogan of ‘54° 40° or fight.’
Contextualized Notes
In 1860, Montreal with its suburbs was the largest city in the British North American Colonies with a population of 90,000. The city’s growth in population was reflected in its explosion in church building. Thirty-five new churches had been built between 1830-60. When Notre Dame was consecrated in 1829, its Gothic Revival architecture was radically new and its massive scale unprecedented in North America. Christ Church was designed by the same architect as the Anglican cathedral in Fredericton. In both Anglican cathedrals, their Pointed Gothic arches and soaring steeples were deeply symbolic, articulating both the aspiration in the souls of worshipers and commemorating the Resurrection of Christ. Acland, who had supported the choice of the Irish architect, Benjamin Woodward, to build the Oxford Museum in Neo-Gothic style, took this style as a measure of what was best. In the fiercely-contested “battle of the styles” of the period, he found wanting both the baroque elements of Sir Christopher Wren, England’s most famous architect, and Montreal’s plain public buildings from the French colonial period built of gray limestone.
En route to the opening of the Victoria Bridge, the Prince of Wales also opened an exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Like two other Crystal Palaces in the Canadas, the Crystal Palace in Montreal was named for the immense structure built of prefabricated glass panels in London, dubbed the Crystal Palace, that had housed the celebration of industry and progress at the Great Exhibition of the Industries of All Nations in 1851. Montreal’s own later industrial revolution had begun after Britain’s abandonment of the mercantile system in 1846 in favour of free trade. Because the colony was no longer restricted to sending raw materials to Britain for manufacture and importing British manufactured products, a new domestic industrial base was emerging with a wide colonial distribution of products facilitated by the new railways: large-scale flour mills, Redpath’s seven-story refinery for sugar from the West Indies, metal founderies, and shoe factories that employed women and children in a complex division of labour that created the efficiencies characteristic of the industrial economy. By 1865, Montreal’s labour-intensive industries drew so many rural French-Canadians that French speakers once again outnumbered the English population of the city.
In Montreal, Acland also met seventy-year old Dr Wolfred Nelson, a comrade-in-arms of George-Etienne Cartier during the Lower Canada Rebellion in 1837. One of its English-speaking sympathizers, Nelson became a hero when sharp-shooting French Canadians under his command defeated General Gore, a veteran of Waterloo. Like Cartier, Nelson was charged with treason and spent time in exile in New York State. In 1847, he and his physician son are credited with the first use of an anaesthetic (ether) in the Canadas while removing a tumour from a woman’s thigh.
A riot after the rebellion protested the passing of a bill offering compensation for property losses suffered during the Lower Canada Rebellions of 1837-38, rebellions that the protesters considered treasonous. The riot lasted for two days, involved thousands of people, and led to the relocation of the seat of government alternately to Toronto and to Quebec City.
After the royal party’s arrival in Montreal was deferred by rain and by streets mired in mud, Acland’s surreptitious shoreline excursion from the Kingston’s anchorage below Montreal is informed by a chapter in the emerging science of geology. As he and his fellow adventurers examined shoreline boulders and northern drift, it was as though they had stepped into an illustration in Chapter 15 of Charles Lyell’s seminal work, Principles of Geology (1830-33), with its caption: “Boulders drifted by ice on shores of the St. Lawrence.” In the force of ice that propelled boulders in ice-packs piled as high as twenty or thirty feet on the shoreline, Lyell found further evidence for his foundational theory that the earth’s crust is formed from successive dynamic changes that occurred not only over long periods from the beginning of time but are still incessantly occurring.
Rosemount, owned by John Rose, was one of the mansions that reflected Montreal’s new prosperity. A thriving commercial lawyer, John Rose served on the board of directors of Montreal banks, an insurance company, a telegraph company, and the Grand Trunk Railway. His house, extended and refurbished for the royal visit, was leased by General Sir William Fenwick Williams, the fifty-nine-year-old Commander-in-Chief of the British North American forces. The general’s military career had taken him to British stations at Gibraltar, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and to nine years in the Turkish-Persian border region. He subsequently achieved fame for his defense of the mountainous Turkish stronghold at Kars during the Crimean War as well as for his spirited surrender at the end of the siege, admired even by the Russian general. Major Christopher Teesdale, the prince’s equerry, had served under him at Kars.
The Grand Trunk Railway, founded in 1852 in London to build both the bridge and the Montreal-Toronto rail line, had hired the most famous firm of world-wide railway contractors, Peto, Brassey, and Betts. For the design of the bridge, the contractors engaged Robert Stephenson, son of George Stephenson, the inventor in the 1820’s of the first railway locomotive. His wrought-iron tubular bridge set on piers had also been used for bridges over the Nile in Egypt and over the Straits of Menai in Wales. Constructing the piers posed a particular challenge. Based on the estimate of the Canadian geologist, William Logan, that in the spring run-off 1,000,000 tons of ice per minute would pass the bridge, twenty-four V-shaped piers designed to minimize the impact of the ice were built by diverting water with temporary coffer dams. For the tubular superstructure, 10,000 pieces of iron precisely perforated with holes for half a million rivets were pre-fabricated in England at a new factory near Liverpool called The Canada Works. On site in Montreal, with almost no adjustments needed they were riveted in place by teams of riveters, including two boys between the ages of eight and twelve, using portable forges and small hammers.
In his 1859 report to the directors of the Grand Trunk Railway, Thomas Blackwell conveys a sense of the revolution in trade patterns, travel, and communications effected by the railways. The new network connected New Orleans with Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, and the Atlantic port of Portland, Maine. It could transport flour and wheat from the West, carry cotton from Mississippi to mills in Montreal and England, facilitate mineral exploitation in the Canadas, and drastically reduce the time of travel for both passengers and for mail. Combined with the practice of sorting mail in transit on special post office cars, delivery of mail from Windsor to Quebec City was reduced from about ten days to forty-nine hours. However, the spectre of bankruptcy loomed beneath this achievement. The Grand Trunk’s actual costs were premised on future hopes with no guarantee of their realization. The cost of building the bridge and rail line between Montreal and Toronto was probably in excess of Blackwell’s estimate of £10,000 per mile. Operating the rail line required 3,000 employees, half of them needed for maintenance work. As well, by 1860 in its typical pattern of mergers and acquisitions the Grand Trunk’s expenditures included the purchase of the lines from Montreal to Portland and from Toronto to Sarnia.
During the five years of its construction, this industrial marvel had been of intense public interest and the subject of a flood of both scientific and popular literature. In his book, A Glance at the Victoria Bridge and the Men Who Built It, Charles Legge, a Canadian engineer who supervised the bridge’s simultaneous construction from the south shore, described the seasonal work force, sometimes in excess of 3,000. It included 450 quarry workers, 300 sailors operating barges and steamboats, teamsters with 140 horses, carpenters, and timekeepers as well as inspectors of masonry, tube work, and painting and divers who inspected the coffer dams from beneath the river’s cold currents. Legge also captured the heady spirit of the times and its belief in the progress of civilization symbolized in the revolution effected by railways. He spoke of rivers spanned, deserts crossed, impassable marshes bridged, valleys filled, mountains levelled and of the piercing sound of locomotives bringing liberty and civilization to the country of the pharaohs, India, and the wilds of America. Like Thomas Blackwell, the managing director of the Grand Trunk, Legge also had the highest praise for James Hodges who made arrangements for housing the workers along the banks of the river, for a school, church, hospital beds, doctors, and a well-provisioned library, epitomizing the social gospel that preached the importance of care for the working class in this period.
Dr Charles Smallwood’s observatory was first intended to investigate the connection between disease and weather, a subject of considerable interest as a factor in the possible airborne spread of diseases, including cholera. Smallwood’s research also had other applications in areas like agriculture.
During his visit to the observatory, Acland expressed unbridled enthusiasm not only for the physician’s resourcefulness in making his own instruments and for his ingenuity in setting up auto-registering devices for instruments requiring multiple daily recordings, but also for the treasured instruments that he had acquired. These instruments represent their improvement in precision from the beginning of the nineteenth century when the physical sciences turned from description towards mathematical measurement. Acland admired a prized thermometer and a barometer made by Negretti and Zamba, a British optical firm established in 1850 and later appointed scientific instrument-maker to the British Admiralty; an anemometer (Greek: anemos – wind) modelled on an improved design by John T.R. Robinson at the Armagh Observatory in Ireland in 1846; an ozonometer by Christian Friedrich Shönbein, the discoverer in 1840 of this gas with its distinctive chlorine-like smell (Greek: ozein – smell) noticeable in the air after lightning.
The standardization of measurement through improved precise instruments permitted global scientific coordination, an undertaking consciously pursued in the first half of the nineteenth century as a realization of the seventeenth-century baconian idea of science. As envisaged by Bacon, data provided by global observers would lead not only to the analysis of scientific principles but to new applications of them, particularly in industry, which would result in the material betterment of humankind and the relief of human suffering. As part of the nineteenth-century scientific network, Smallwood had been promised a set of magnetic instruments from the Kew Magnetic Observatory by General Sabine who was director of a global chain of magnetic observatories, including one in Toronto. Smallwood drew on these global studies which by the 1850’s had connected magnetic activity with an eleven year cycle of the sun’s spots. He also corresponded with Adolphe Quetelet, founder and director of the Brussels Observatory; James Glaisher, Superintendent of the Department of Meteorology and Magnetism at Greenwich and founding member of the British Meteorological Society (1850); Joseph Henry, director of the Smithsonian, who had prioritized the study of meteorology. In an article in the Canadian Naturalist, founded in 1856, Smallwood made an important contribution to the scientific community through his microscopic observations on snow crystals and his study of how different electrical states in the atmosphere affect the growth of snow crystals. In 1862 Smallwood donated his instruments to McGill. His donation became the foundation of the university’s observatory and marks the beginning of a shift from enthusiastic amateurs like this physician/meteorologist towards academic and public institutions that would push private scientific undertakings to the margins in the twentieth century. Henry Acland was included among the nineteenth-century enthusiasts in his enjoyment of an observatory with a revolving roof installed in the backyard of his Oxford home.
In 1659, three nurses from the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph in France were invited by Jeanne Mance, a co-founder of the small religious colony, to work at the first Hotel Dieu hospital established by her in 1642. Since 1676, this order of nuns had administered the hospital which had been repeatedly re-built after fires. In 1860, they were in the process of re-locating to a new 210-bed hospital on spacious grounds away from the contagion and noise of the city. At the new Hotel Dieu hospital, Acland remarked on the administrative competence and affability of the nursing sisters, a typical good model of nursing that had been disrupted in England since the dissolution of the monasteries during the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. In the cholera epidemic at Oxford in 1854, nurses dispatched to the homes of patients were simply chosen on parish recommendations of good character; they were instructed by attending physicians, and supervised by an Oxford lady. Immediately after the epidemic, as the Crimean War gained momentum some then joined Florence Nightingale who, at the time of the royal tour in 1860, was still at the beginning of her long and tenacious campaign to establish nursing as a respectable profession for women through training schools in hospitals. A lifelong supporter of advances in the nursing profession, in 1874 Acland wrote a preface to a Handbook for Hospital Sisters praising the training and organization of hospital nurses in battling the evils that beset the poor in the great urban population and the rural agricultural classes. His remark in Montreal that the nuns, though affable, had no reason for their faith reflects the common prejudice that Roman Catholic belief was blind and lacking in intelligent understanding.
Dr William Hingston was a professor of clinical surgery at the Hotel Dieu. Known for his daring dexterity, in 1863 he was the first surgeon in Canada to remove a kidney. After his election as mayor of Montreal in 1875, he carried out a far-reaching reform of the city’s sanitation system. Before the end of the century this Canadian doctor became the vice-president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and was knighted by Queen Victoria.
At the General Hospital, founded by the English-speaking populace in 1823, Acland spoke with physicians like Dr Archibald Hall, president of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Canada East, outspoken editor of a medical journal, and lecturer since 1835 at the McGill Faculty of Medicine. Their discussion included the medical treatment of rheumatic fever which had been on the rise since the late eighteenth century and of cholera which first spread through the Canadas in 1832 and had since recurred repeatedly.
The physicians also discussed the “type of pneumonia” and the merits of bloodletting. Since neither causes nor cures of diseases were known, scientific contributions to medical literature included clinical observations such as the characteristic course or type of a fever. Acland mentions a report on the type of pneumonia by Watson and Latham who was a former president of the Royal College of Physicians. Discussions on the treatment of pneumonia included a heated debate at the University of Edinburgh in which proponents of bloodletting, used for 2,000 years, maintained that an improvement observed in pneumonia patients after a decrease in bloodletting was in fact the result of a change in the type of that disease.
Acland visited the Hospice Saint-Joseph founded in 1854 by the Sisters of Charity who had been looking after the needs of the poor in Montreal since their order was founded about 100 years earlier by Marguérite d’Youville. Their orphanage was intended less to accommodate children without parents than as a place of temporary refuge for children to help their families through times of crisis due to illness, for example, or the precarious employment that was increasingly common in Montreal’s industrial work force. More recently, to fulfill a need of working parents a day nursery for children had been established, the first of its kind in the Canadas. The children were taught numbers through singing, used wooden letters to acquire literacy, and were taught fables and some geography. The nursery had been established at the instigation of Victor Rousselot, a Sulpician priest whose name graces a park in present-day Montreal. It was modelled on the ‘salles d’asile’ in France which were similar to the infant schools in England first established in 1816 by Robert Owen for the children of workers at his cotton mills in New Lanark, Scotland. In 1859, the Duke of Newcastle had been named Chair of a Royal Commission to investigate the state of education in England, including the infant schools which had a tendency to include too much formal instruction at an early age.
As the science of geology advanced, geological surveys were established in Britain in 1835 and in New Brunswick in 1838. Similarly, in 1842 the government of the united Canadas established the Geological Survey of Canada with William Logan as its director. This pioneering geologist had achieved subsequently an international reputation for his acclaimed exhibition of Canadian minerals in 1851 in London at the Great Exhibition of the Industries of All Nations, he had been honoured by the French Emperor and British scientific societies, and in 1856 was knighted by Queen Victoria.
His task with the Geological Survey was to explore and map the vast wilderness from Lake Superior to the Gaspé for potential mineral exploitation and soil quality and to issue annual reports. Following the advice of Charles Lyell given during a chance meeting in New York in 1842, Logan began by identifying Canada’s large geological regions using the classifications for sequential geological periods within the Paleozoic era, the era in which fossils indicate the presence of life. The periods had only in recent decades been given names by British geologists: Cambrian, the oldest period; Silurian (named for a Celtic tribe in Wales); and Devonian (based on observations in Devon). In the Canadas, the flat rocks extending from Montreal to the Detroit River belonged to the Silurian period; the undulating or folded rock disturbed by volcanic action extending through the Eastern Townships and Gaspé Peninsula belonged to the Devonian period. Further north, the Pre-Cambrian Shield, pre-dating the Cambrian period, extended from Lake Huron to the Gulf of St Lawrence.
To explore and map these regions, during seasonal field-trips William Logan travelled on foot or by canoe with an Indigenous guide and worked from dawn to dusk determining locations astronomically, measuring elevations, examining samples, noting stratigraphic thicknesses. He was aided in his scientific work by Thomas Sterry Hunt, a pioneering geo-chemist whose chemical analysis of Pre-Cambrian rocks affirmed that they were the oldest in the Globe and by Elkanah Billings, the Survey’s paleontologist who began his career as an enthusiastic amateur interested in fossils on rock faces along the Rideau River. In 1856, Billings established the Canadian Naturalist and in the course of his distinguished career named hundreds of new species, a dozen new genera, and contributed to the international scientific community with nearly a hundred articles in Canadian, American, and British journals.
At the Museum of Geology, established in 1856, the exhibition of the work of the Geological Survey was important not only for the scientific education of the general public, an important aspect of science, but also for the continued generation of grants. As the first government-funded scientific enterprise in the united Canadas, the Geographic Survey needed to demonstrate its economic usefulness. The museum’s displays included iron; copper, recently used in the wiring of electrical telegraphs; hematite and ochre used in pigments for paints; phosphates and lime from limestone used in improving soil already exhausted in parts of the united Canadas; and splendid building materials like marble, granite, limestone, and slate.
Acland’s recommendation to Logan that mapping by the Geological Survey might also help counter potential American boundary aggressions as the country extended westward echoes a similar suggestion made by the British Association for the Advancement of Science during the Oregon boundary dispute when President Polk campaigned for American expansion beyond the forty-ninth parallel with the slogan of ‘54° 40° or fight.’