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Context, Connections and Culture: The History of Science in Canada as a Field of Study

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The Romance of Science: Essays in Honour of Trevor H. Levere

Part of the book series: Archimedes ((ARIM,volume 52))

Abstract

This celebration of the broad range of Professor Trevor Levere’s scholarship as a historian of science offers a welcome opportunity to highlight a few of his many contributions to our understanding of the Canadian historical experience of science, and to engage with some challenges that remain. Among the first to offer an overview of the field, Professor Levere earned the admiration – and influenced the work – of many who followed. Themes of context, connection, and culture permeates his influential contributions to the history of science in Canada, inspiring inquiries into ways of moving forward our historically (and historiographically) bound understanding. In a field that remains chronically under-researched, where do we go from here?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Trevor H. Levere, Affinity and Matter: Elements of Chemical Philosophy 1800–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971; reprint ed.: Reading, U.K.: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1993).

  2. 2.

    Jeffrey Cormier, The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Stephen Azzi, Walter Gordon and the Rise of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999); Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); F. Ronald Hayes, The Chaining of Prometheus: Evolution of a Power Structure for Canadian Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), xiii. See also J. Grant Glassco, Report of the Royal Commission on Government Organization, 5 vols. (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer,1962–1963); George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, [1965] (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); Maurice Lamontagne, Science Policy for Canada: Report of the Senate Special Committee on Science Policy, 4 vols. (Ottawa: Special Committee on Science Policy, 1970); G. Bruce Doern, Science and Politics in Canada (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972).

  3. 3.

    T.H.B. Symons, To Know Ourselves: Report of the Commission on Canadian Studies, 2 vols. (Ottawa: AUCC, 1975); Volume 3 appeared later as Thomas H.B. Symons and James E. Page, Some Questions of Balance: Human Resources, Higher Education and Canadian Studies (Ottawa: AUCC, 1982).

  4. 4.

    Symons, To Know Ourselves, I: Chap. 4, esp. 141–5.

  5. 5.

    Ibid.,162–4; the earlier literature included Royal Society of Canada, Fifty Years Retrospect (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1932); H.M. Tory, ed., A History of Science in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1939); and W.S. Wallace, ed., The Royal Canadian Institute Centennial Volume (Toronto: Royal Canadian Institute, 1949).

  6. 6.

    Trevor H. Levere and Richard A. Jarrell, eds., A Curious Field-Book: Science and Society in Canadian History (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974); see also its companion volume, B. Sinclair, N.R. Ball, and J.O. Petersen, eds., Let Us Be Honest and Modest: Technology and Society in Canadian History (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974); Trevor Levere, “What is Canadian About Science in Canadian History?” in R.A. Jarrell and N.R. Ball, eds., Science, Technology, and Canadian History/ Les sciences, la technologie et l’histoire canadienne (Waterloo; Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980), 14–23; Trevor H. Levere, “The History of Science of Canada,” The British Journal for the History of Science 21 (December, 1988), 419–25. Jarrell’s doctoral dissertation concerned the early modern German astronomer Michael Mästlin (1550–1631); he went on to publish The Cold Light of Dawn: A History of Canadian Astronomy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

  7. 7.

    By 1983 Franks recognized around him “a core of insiders focusing on the study of the History of Canadian Science and Technology”: C.E.S. Franks, “Foreword,” in Richard A. Jarrell and Arnold E. Roos, eds., Critical Issues in the History of Canadian Science, Technology and Medicine (Thornhill and Ottawa: HSTC Publications, 1983), vii; Richard Jarrell and Norman Ball, “The Study of the History of Canadian Science and Technology,” in Jarrell and Ball, eds., Science, Technology, and Canadian History,1–7; C.E.S. Franks, “The Kingston Conference and Beyond,” in Jarrell and Ball, eds., Science, Technology, and Canadian History, 9–12; Levere, “History of Science of Canada,” 422; see also Richard Jarrell, “The Infrastructure of an Emerging Field,” Scientia Canadensis 11 (Spring/Summer, 1987), 37–45.

  8. 8.

    Levere, “History of Science of Canada,” 421 (author’s italics); Levere and Jarrell, “General Introduction,” in Levere and Jarrell, eds., A Curious Field-Book, esp. 2, 6,7, 9, 15, 20; cf. n. 44 below.

  9. 9.

    Sinclair, Ball, and Petersen, “Introduction,” in Sinclair, Ball, and Petersen, eds., Let Us Be Honest and Modest, 1; see also Bruce Sinclair, “Canadian Technology: British Traditions and American Influences,” Technology and Culture 20 (January, 1979), 108–23.

  10. 10.

    Levere, “What is Canadian,” esp. 14, 19; R.A. Jarrell and A.E. Roos, “Preface,” in Jarrell and Roos, eds., Critical Issues, viii–xi. Reviewers duly received the message: see Elizabeth C. Patterson in American Scientist 63 (January–February, 1975), 118–20; Morris Zaslow in Histoire sociale, 9 (1976), 436–38; Christopher C. Smart in Isis 67 (June, 1976), 292–294; Russell Moseley in British Journal for the History of Science 10 (March, 1977), 79–81. Cf. Suzanne Zeller, “Nature’s Gullivers and Crusoes: The Scientific Exploration of British North America, 1800–1870,” in North American Exploration, 3 vols., ed. John L. Allen, III: A Continent Comprehended (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 190–243, 564–77; Suzanne Zeller, “Environment, Culture, and the Reception of Darwin in Canada, 1859–1909,” in Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse, eds., Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 91–122.

  11. 11.

    Richard Drayton, “Science, Medicine, and the British Empire,” in Robin Winks and William Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 5: Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 265–75. Donald Fleming, “Science in Australia, Canada, and the United States: Some Comparative Remarks,” Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of the History of Science 18 (1962),180–96; George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (5 May, 1967), 611–21; Lewis Pyenson, “The Incomplete Transmission of a European Image: Physics at Greater Buenos Aires and Montreal, 1890–1920,” American Philosophical Society Proceedings 122 (April, 1978), 92–114; Yves Gingras, ““La Physique à McGill entre 1920 et 1940: la reception de la mécanique quantique par un communauté scientifique périphérique,” Scientia Canadensis 5/ (January, 1981), 15–40; Richard A. Jarrell, “Colonialism and the Truncation of Science in Ireland and French Canada During the 19th c.,” HSTC Bulletin 5 (May 1981), 140–57; Roy MacLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 5 (1982), 1–16; Clelia Pighetti, Scienza e colonialismo nel Canada ottocentesco (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore 1984); Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, eds., Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), esp. Richard Jarrell, “Differential National Development and Science in the 19th c.: The Problems of Quebec and Ireland,” 323–50; Yves Gingras, Physics and the Rise of Scientific Research in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). Cf. Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley, “Rowan vs. Tory: Conflicting Views of Scientific Research in Canada, 1920–1935,” Scientia Canadensis 12 (Spring/ Summer 1988), 3–21.

  12. 12.

    Drayton, “Science, Medicine, and the British Empire”; Roy MacLeod, “Introduction,” in Roy MacLeod, ed., The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australasia 1888–1988 (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6–7; R.W. Home, “Introduction,” in R.W. Home, ed., Australian Science in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), vii–xxvii; Ian Inkster, “Scientific Enterprise and the Colonial ‘Model’: Observations on Australian Experience in Historical Context,” Social Studies of Science 15 (1985), 677–704; Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell, eds., Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (London and Melbourne: Hutchinsion, 1983); Maurice Crosland, “Presidential Address: History of Science in a National Context,” The British Journal for the History of Science 10 (July, 1977), 95–113.

  13. 13.

    Raymond Duchesne, “Science et société coloniale: les naturalistes du Canada français et leurs correspondants scientifiques (1860–1900),” HSTC Bulletin 5 (May, 1981), 140–57; Raymond Duchesne, “Historiographie des sciences et des techniques au Canada,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 35 (September, 1981), 193–215; Jarrell and Ball, “The Study of the History of Canadian Science,” 5–6; Suzanne Zeller, “The Colonial World as a Geological Metaphor: Strata(gems) of Empire in Victorian Canada,” in Roy MacLeod, ed., Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Osiris 15 (2001), 85–107; see also n. 17 below.

  14. 14.

    A.J. Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Visions of Harold Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 121; David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); see also Diarmid. A. Finnegan, “The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 41 (2008), 369–388; David N. Livingstone, “Keeping Knowledge in Site,” History of Education 39 (November, 2010), 779–85.

  15. 15.

    J.L. Heilbron, “History of Science,” in J.L. Heilbron, ed., The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 370–74; Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny, eds., Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective 1500–1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, “De-centring the ‘Big Picture’: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science,” The British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993), 429–30; see also David Wade Chambers, “Period and Process in Colonial and National Science,” in Reingold and Rothenberg, eds., Scientific Colonialism, 297–321.

  16. 16.

    Pierre Boucher, Histoire véritable et naturelle (1664) reprint ed. (Boucherville: Societé Historique de Boucherville, 1964); Lynn Berry, “The Delights of Nature in the New World: A Seventeenth-Century Canadian View of the Environment,” in Warkentin and Podruchny, eds., Decentring the Renaissance, 223–35; Jacques Rousseau, “Pierre Boucher, naturaliste et géographe,” in Boucher, Histoire véritable, 264, 277–78; Auguste Vachon, “Louis Nicolas and the Codex Canadensis,” The Archivist 12 (March-April 1985), 1–2; Raymond Douville, “Boucher, Pierre,” in DCB, Vol. 2, accessed February 14, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/boucher_pierre_2E.html; Greer, ed., Jesuit Relations, chap. 5; François-Marc Gagnon with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World (Tulsa: Gilcrease Museum/Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).

  17. 17.

    J.E. McClellan III and François Regourd, “The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Regime,” in Roy MacLeod, ed., Nature and Empire, Osiris 15 (2001), 31–50; K.A. Young, “Crown Agent-Canadian Correspondent: Michel Sarrazin and the Académie Royale des Sciences, 1697–1734,” French Historical Studies 18/(Fall, 1993), 416–33; Jacques Rousseau, “Jérémie, Lamontagne, Nicolas,” in DCB, Vol. 2, accessed February 14, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/jeremie_nicolas_2E.html; Marie-Emmanuel Chabot OSU, “Guyart, Marie, Marie de l’Incarnation,” in DCB, Vol. 1, accessed February 14, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/guyart_marie_1E.html; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Polarities, Hybridities: What Strategies for Decentring?” in Warkentin and Podruchny, eds., Decentring the Renaissance, 25; Denys Delâge, “L’Influence des amérindiens sur les canadiens et les français au temps de la Nouvelle-France,” Lekton, 2 (Automne, 1992), 163–89; J.I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 580–82.

  18. 18.

    Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring, 1986), 22–27; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 67–162; Suzanne Zeller, “Arctic Moment: The Nova Scotian Institute of Science and the Halifax-Hudson Bay Axis, 1870s–1890s,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 17 (2014), 57–91.

  19. 19.

    Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006); Allan Greer, “The Exchange of Medical Knowledge Between Natives and Jesuits in New France,” in L.M. Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma, eds., El Saber de los Jesuitas (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2005) 137; Deborah Doxtator, “Inclusive and Exclusive Perceptions of Difference: Native and Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History, and Change,” in Warkentin and Podruchny, eds., Decentring the Renaissance, 33–47; Allan Greer, ed., The Jesuit Relations (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 16–19; Sylvie Vincent, “Compatabilité apparente, incompatabilité réelle des versions autochtones et occidentales de l’histoire,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 32 (2000), 96–106; Victoria Dickenson, Drawn From Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Ramsay Cook, “Donnacona Discovers Europe,” in Ramsay Cook, ed., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) ix-xli; Susan Rowley, “Inuit Oral History: The Voyages of Sir Martin Frobisher, 1576–78,” in Stephen Alsford, ed., The Meta Incognita Project (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1993), 211–19; Sylvie Vincent, “L’arrivée des chercheurs de terres,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 22 (1992),19–29; Malcolm Lewis, “Indicators of Unacknowledged Assimilations from the Amerindian Maps on Euro-American Maps,” Imago Mundi 38 (1986), 9–34; Judith Hudson Beattie, “Indian Maps in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives,” Archivaria 21 (Winter, 1985–86,: 166–75.

  20. 20.

    H. Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 12–13 and chap. 7.

  21. 21.

    Trevor H. Levere, Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of Exploration, 1818–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Morris Zaslow, The Opening of the Canadian North, 1870–1914, Canadian Centenary Series Vol. 16 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971); Morris Zaslow, ed., A Century of Canada’s Arctic Islands, 1880–1980, Royal Society of Canada, 23rd Symposium (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada,1981; Bruce W. Hodgins and Shelagh Grant, “The Canadian North: Trends in Recent Historiography,” Acadiensis 16 (Autumn, 1986), 173–86; Ronald E. Doel, Urban Wråkberg, and Suzanne Zeller, “Science, Environment, and the New Arctic,” Journal of Historical Geography 43 (February, 2014). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748813001448.

  22. 22.

    Levere, Science and the Canadian Arctic, chapter 10; Trevor H. Levere, “Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Continental Shelf, and a New Arctic Continent,” The British Journal for the History of Science 21 (June, 1988), esp. 236, 247; Suzanne Zeller and Christopher Jacob Ries, “Wild Men In and Out of Science: Finding a Place in the Disciplinary Borderlands of Arctic Canada and Greenland,” Journal of Historical Geography 43 (February, 2014). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748813001436; see also Ernest Thompson Seton, The Arctic Prairies (Toronto: William Briggs, 1911); Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Friendly Arctic (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921); Report of the Royal Commission Appointed by Order-in-Council of Date May 20, 1919, to Investigate the Possibilities of the Reindeer and Musk-Ox Industries in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Regions of Canada (Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1922); and Michael Bravo, “Measuring Danes and Eskimos,” in Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, eds., Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2002), 235–73.

  23. 23.

    R.W. Home, “Humboldtian Science Revisited: An Australian Case Study,” History of Science 33 (1995), 1–22; Trevor H. Levere, “Elements in the Structure of Victorian Science or Cannon Revisited,” in J.D. North and J.J. Roche, eds., The Light of Nature (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 1985), 433–49; Trevor H. Levere, “Sabine, Sir Edward,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography [DCB], Vol. 11 (Toronto and Quebec: University of Toronto Press and les presses de l’Université Laval, 2003–) accessed February 16, 2014. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/sabine_edward_11E.html; Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Susan Faye Cannon, “Humboldtian Science,” in Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Dawson and Science History Publications, 1978), 73–110; Suzanne Zeller, “Humboldt and the Habitability of Canada’s Great Northwest,” The Geographical Review 96 (July, 2006), 382–98; Suzanne Zeller, “Recalibrating Empire: Humboldtian Climatology in the Reports of the Palliser and Hind Expeditions to British North America’s Great North West, 1857–58,” in Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas, ed. Vera M. Kutzinski, Ottmar Ette, and Laura Dassow Walls (Berlin: Verlag Walter Frey, 2012), 70–116; Suzanne Zeller, “The Spirit of Bacon: Science and Self-Perception in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1830–1870,” Scientia Canadensis, 8 (Fall/Winter, 1989), 79–101.

  24. 24.

    Suzanne Zeller, “Reflections on Time and Place: The Nova Scotian Institute of Science in Its First 150 Years.” Proceedings of the Nova Scotian Institute of Science 48 (2015), 5–61; Zeller, “Recalibrating Empire”; Suzanne Zeller, “Humboldt and the Habitability of Canada’s Great Northwest,” in Mathewson and Sluiter, eds., Humboldt in the Americas, 382–98; Suzanne Zeller, “Classical Codes: Biogeographical Assessments of Environment in Victorian Canada,” Journal of Historical Geography 24 (1998), 20–35; Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation, reprint ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).

  25. 25.

    See esp. the essays by Laura Dassow Walls, Christiana Borchart Moreno and Segundo y Moreno Yánez, Christopher Iannini, Michael Dettelbach, and Ottmar Ette in Kutzinski, Ette, and Walls, eds., Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas; Kent Mathewson and Andrew Sluiter, eds., Humboldt in the Americas, special issue of The Geographical Review 96 (July, 2006); Ottmar Ette and Oliver Lubrich, “Die andere Reise durch das Universum,” in Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos, ed., Ottmar Ette and Oliver Lubrich (Frankfurt: Eichborn Verlag, 2004), 905–20; Ottmar Ette, Weltbewusstsein: Alexander von Humboldt und das unvollendete Projekt einder anderen Moderne (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002); Ottmar Ette et al., eds., Alexander von Humboldt: Aufbruch in die Moderne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001); Michael Dettelbach, “The Face of Nature: Precise Measurement, Mapping, and Sensibility in the Works of Alexander von Humboldt,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 30 (1999), 473–504; Michael Dettelbach, “Global Physics and Aesthetic Empire: Humboldt’s Physical Portraits of the Tropics,” in David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 258–92; Suzanne Zeller, “Recalibrating Empire.”

  26. 26.

    Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) Introduction and Chapter 7, esp. 243; on Quetelet’s connection to Humboldt, see Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 108, 134; Frank H. Hankins, Quetelet as Statistician (New York: Columbia University, 1908), 20; Patrick Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 166–67, 171; Jean-Guy Nadeau, “Taché, Joseph-Charles,” DCB, Vol. 12, accessed February 20, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/tache_joseph_charles_12E.html; cf. Richard A. Jarrell, “L’ultramontanisme et la science au Canada français,” in Fournier, Gingras, and Keel, Sciences et médecine, 41–68.

  27. 27.

    On further Scandinavian connections, see Jennifer Hubbard, A Science on the Scales: The Rise of Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Biology, 1898–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science, reprint ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; f.p. 1981); Trevor H. Levere, “Dr. Thomas Beddoes: Chemistry, Medicine, and the Perils of Democracy,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 63 (20 September, 2009), 215–29; Trevor H. Levere, “Dr. Thomas Beddoes (1750–1808): Science and Medicine in Politics and Society,” The British Journal for the History of Science 17 (July, 1984), 187–204; Trevor H. Levere, “Dr. Thomas Beddoes and the Establishment of His Pneumatic Institution: A Tale of Three Presidents,” Notes and records of the Royal Society of London 32 (July, 1977), 41–49; Curtis, Politics of Population, 20–21.

  28. 28.

    Heilbron, “History of Science,” 373–74; Levere and Jarrell, “General Introduction,” 2; Donald Creighton quoted in Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing Since 1900, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988; f.p. 1976) 210–11; Serge Gagnon, Quebec and Its Historians, trans. Yves Brunelle and Jane Brierley, 2 vols. (Montreal: Harvest House, 1982, 1985); M. Brook Taylor, Promoters, Patriots, and Partisans: Historiography in Nineteenth-Century English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); by far the most controversial is Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec: Historians and Their Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997): see also Ramsay Cook, review of Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec, Histoire sociale/ Social History 32 (1999), 120–22; Michael Behiels, “‘Normalizing’ the Writing of Quebec History,” Left History 6 (1999), 91–99; Yves Gingras, “Making Up History,” Literary Review of Canada (Summer, 1999), 19–22.

  29. 29.

    Levere and Jarrell, “General Introduction”; the section “What is Canadian About the History of Canadian Science and Technology” in Jarrell and Ball, eds., Science and Technology in Canadian History consists of Levere, “What is Canadian,” which restricts itself to nineteenth-century Upper Canada, and Raymond Duchesne, “Problèmes d’histoire des sciences au Canada français,” 23–32; Yves Gingras, “Le développement du marché de la physique au Canada: 1879–1928,” in Jarrell and Roos, eds., Critical Issues, 16–30; Richard A. Jarrell, “The Social Functions of the Scientific Society in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” in Jarrell and Roos, eds., Critical Issues, 31–44; Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); Luc Chartrand, Raymond Duchesne, and Yves Gingras, Histoire des sciences au Québec, rev. ed. (Montreal: Les Editions du Boréal, 2008; f.p. 1987); Yves Gingras, “La réception des rayons X au Québec: radiographie des pratiques scientifiques,” in Marcel Fournier, Yves Gingras, and Othmar Keel, eds., Sciences et médécine au Québec: perspectives sociohistoriques (Québec: Institute québecois de recherche sur la culture, 1987) 41–68.

  30. 30.

    The phrase gained common usage with the publication of Hugh MacLennan’s classic novel, Two Solitudes (Toronto: Collins, 1945); Trevor Levere, Research and Influence: A Century of Science in the Royal Society of Canada (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1998), 1–13, 33, chapters 11–12, reprinted from “The Most Select and the Most Democratic: A Century of Science in the Royal Society of Canada,” Scientia Canadensis 20 (1996), 3–99; Robert Daley and Paul Dufour, “Creating a ‘Northern Minerva’: John William Dawson and the Royal Society of Canada,” Scientia Canadensis 5 (January, 1981), 3–14; the writing of the RSC’s history was itself partitioned: see Andrée Desilets, L’Académie des lettres et des sciences de la Société du Canada: un siècle d’histoire (Ottawa: la Société Royale du Canada, 1997) and Carl Berger, Honour and the Search for Influence: A History of the Royal Society of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), esp. chapters 6–9; Yves Gingras, Pour l’avancement des sciences: histoire de l’ACFAS, 1923–1993 (Montreal: Les editions de Boréal, 1994).

  31. 31.

    Léon Lortie, “La trame scientifique de l’histoire du Canada,” in G.F.G. Stanley, ed., Pioneers of Canadian Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 3–35; Chartrand, Duchesne, and Gingras, Histoire des Sciences au Québec, 463; see also Fournier, Gingras, and Keel, “Introduction,” in Fournier, Gingras, and Keel, eds., Sciences et médecine, 10–11; Léon Lortie, “Les sciences à Montréal et à Québec au XIXième siècle,” L’action universitaire (February, 1936), 46–47, IX; Jacques Rousseau, “La Botanique canadienne á l’époque de Jacques Cartier,” Annales de l’ACFAS 3 (1937), 151–236; Léon Lortie and Adrien Plouffe, eds., Aux Sources du Présent (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960); Jacques Rousseau, “Des naturalistes à la découverte du Canada au XIXe siècle,” Cahiers des dix 28 (1963), 179–208; Jacques Rousseau, “Pierre Boucher, naturaliste et géographe,” in Pierre Boucher, Histoire véritable et naturelle (1664) reprint ed. (Boucherville: Societé Historique de Boucherville, 1964), 264, 277–78; Cyrias Ouellet, The Sciences in French Canada (Quebec: Department of Cultural Affairs, 1967).

  32. 32.

    Levere, Research and Influence, 11, 32–33, 73 n. 18; Marcel Fournier, L’entrée dans la modernité: science, culture et société au Québec (Montreal: Les éditions Saint-Martin, 1986); Fournier, Gingras, and Keel, “Introduction,” in Fournier, Gingras, and Keel, eds., Sciences et médecine, 9–18; Levere and Jarrell, “General Introduction,” 24; V.-A. Huard, “Les sections scientifiques de la Société Royale du Canada et les canadiens-français,” Le naturaliste canadien, 39 (August, 1912), 17–27; Mélanie Desmeules, “Huard, Victor-Alphonse,” DCB, Vol. 15, accessed February 7, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/huard_victor_alphonse_15E.html; see also Suzanne Zeller, “Reflections on Time and Place.”

  33. 33.

    Levere, Research and Influence, 33–34. Archive du Séminaire de Québec [ASQ]: U62 no. 52, 2 June 1883; U60 no. 38, 20 June 1883; U60 no. 47, 29 July 1887 ff. Raymond Duchesne, “Laflamme, Joseph-Clovis-Kemner,” DCB, Vol. 13, accessed February 9, 2014 http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/laflamme_joseph_clovis_kemner_13E.html; Jean-Marie Perron, “Provancher, Léon,” DCB, Vol. 12, accessed February 9, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/provancher_leon_12E.html; Royal Society of Canada Proceedings and Transactions 6 (1888), vi–viii, xxxvi.

  34. 34.

    “From the Capital: Heterodoxy in the ‘Royal Society’: A ‘Royal Society’ Rumpus,” Toronto Daily Mail (30 May, 1882); the Toronto Globe added a second explanation, about infighting within the French-Canadian delegation, 2 June. 1882; “Notes From the Capital: The Alleged Split in the ‘Royal Society’,” Toronto Daily Mail (3 June, 1882); Thomas Sterry Hunt, “The Relations of the Natural Sciences,” RSC Proceedings and Transactions 1 (1882) Section III: 1–7; ASQ: MS 33, 1 June 1882, 155; U83 No. 33, n.d. J.W. Dawson quoted in Daley and Dufour, 7.

  35. 35.

    Levere, Research and Influence, 33–34; Berger, Honour and the Search for Influence, 89; cf. Duchesne. “Problèmes,” 30; and Peter J. Bowler, “The Early Development of Scientific Societies in Canada,” in Alexandra Oleson and S.C. Brown, eds., The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 326–39; Zeller, “Reflections on Time and Place”; Frère Marie-Victorian, Science, culture et nation, ed. Yves Gingras (Montreal: Boréal, 1996); ASQ, Journal du Séminaire: IV, 18 May, 1895, 511 and V, 27 May, 1889, 153; Zeller, “Environment, Culture, and the Reception of Darwin,” 93–94. Ginette Bernatchez, “La Société Littéraire et Historique de Québec (The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec) 1824–1890,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Amérique française 35 (1981), 184–85.

  36. 36.

    Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, 167; Gingras, “La réception des rayons X”; Yves Gingras, Physics and the Rise of Scientific Research in Canada, trans. Peter Keating (Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press, 1991), 20; Zeller, “Reflections on Time and Place.”

  37. 37.

    T.-E. Hamel, “Essai sur la constitution atomique de la matière,” RSC Proceedings and Transactions 2 (1884) Section III, 91–100; E. Rutherford, “The Existence of Bodies Smaller Than Atoms,” RSC Proceedings and Transactions, ser.2, 8 (1902) Section III, 79–86; “Report of Section III,” RSC Proceedings and Transactions, ser. 2, 8 (1902), XXXVI; see also Lawrence Badash, “The Influence of New Zealand on Rutherford’s Scientific Development,” in Reingold and Rothenberg, eds., Scientific Colonialism, 379–89.

  38. 38.

    Livingstone, 14–15; J.V. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 34–35, 157, and chapter 6; Marianne Ainley, Restless Energy: A Biography of William Rowan 1891–1957 (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1998); R.A. Jarrell and Yves Gingras, eds., Building Canadian Science: The Role of the National Research Council (Ottawa: CSTHA/AHSTC, 1991) and special issue of Scientia Canadensis 15 (1991), esp. Michel Girard, “The Commission of Conservation as a Forerunner to the National Research Council,” 19–40. See also Suzanne Zeller, “Warp and Weft: The National Context(s) of Science in Canada,” in David N. Livingstone, Ron Numbers, and Hugh Slotten, eds., Science in National, International, and Global Context, Cambridge History of Science Series, forthcoming.

  39. 39.

    Simon Schaffer, “What Is Science?” in John Krige and Dominique Pestre, eds., Companion to Science in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2006), 27–44; Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 319–22; Donald J.C. Philippson, “The Steacie Myth and the Institutions of Industrial Research,” HSTC Bulletin 7 (September, 1983),117–34; Berger, Honour and the Search for Influence, 128.

  40. 40.

    Huard, “Les sections scientifiques,” 19 (author’s translation); Berger, Honour and the Search for Influence, 24.

  41. 41.

    Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, chapters 3–4; Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, 167; see also Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

  42. 42.

    Curtis, Politics of Population, 239–40; Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, chapters 3–4. The term “revisionist” is Ronald Rudin’s, in Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), and the resulting discussion of his broader argument was politically charged: cf. Michael D. Behiels, “Normalizing’ the Writing of Quebec History,” Left History 6 (1999), 91–99; Ramsay Cook, review of Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec, Histoire sociale 32 (1999), 120–23; Yves Gingras, “Making Up History,” Literary Review of Canada (Summer, 1999), 19–22. Serge Courville, Rêves d’empire: le Québec et le rêve colonial (Ottawa: les presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2000); Serge Courville, Jean-Claude Robert, and Normand Séguin, Atlas historique du Québec. Le pays laurentien au XIXè siècle: les morphologies de base (Sainte-Foy: les presses de l’Université Laval, 1995); Serge Courville, Entre ville et campagne: l’essor du village dans les seigneuries du Bas-Canada (Sainte-Foy: les presses de l’Université Laval, 1990); Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, and Jean-Claude Robert, Quebec: A History 1867–1929, translated by Robert Chodos (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1979; Louis Rousseau, “Crise et réveil religieux dans le Québec du XIXe siècle, Interface 11 (1990), 24–31; Louis Rousseau, “À propos du ‘réveil religieux’ dans le Québec du XIXe siêcle: où se loge le vrai débat?” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 49 (1995), 223–45; cf. Jarrell, “L’ultramontanisme.”

  43. 43.

    Curtis, Politics of Population, 253–54; Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, chapter 6; Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, 166; Berger, Honour and the Search for Influence, chapter 6 and p. 124; Pierre Dansereau, “Science in French Canada,” Scientific Monthly 59 (September, 1944), 188–194 and 59 (October, 1944) 261–72, esp. 263–64; cf. Jarrell, “Differential National Development,” 347.

  44. 44.

    Levere and Jarrell, eds., A Curious Field Book, back cover; Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, 167; R.A. Richardson and B.H. MacDonald, Science and Technology in Canadian History: A Bibliography of Primary Sources to 1914 (Thornhill, Ontario: HSTC Publications, 1987); B.H. MacDonald, Science and Technology in Canadian History: A Bibliographic Database (http://acsweb2.ucis.dal.ca/slis/main.htm); Early Canadiana Online (http://canadiana.org); Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online (http://www.biographi.ca); Lefroy quoted in Zeller, Inventing Canada, 150. See also Suzanne Zeller, “Exploration, Empire, and the Extractive Impulse: The Case of Victorian Geology,” in Pierre Bélanger et al., eds., EXTRACTION (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming).

  45. 45.

    Davis, “Polarities, Hybridities,” p. 19–32; Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), esp. the Introduction; Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, 164–74; Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution 1750–1830 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006); Lortie, “La trame scientifique de l’histoire du Canada”; see also Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). For a “hybrid” example and the power struggles involved, see Robert Gagnon, “Les discours sur l’enseignement pratique au Canada français: 1850–1900,” in Fournier, Gingras, and Keel, eds., Sciences et médecine, 19–40; René Durocher and P.-A. Linteau, eds., Le “retard” du Québec et l’infériorité économique des canadiens français (Trois Rivières: Boréal, 1971) clarifies the context within which universal models had to be shaken off by “revisionist” historians.

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    Suzanne Zeller

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Zeller, S. (2017). Context, Connections and Culture: The History of Science in Canada as a Field of Study. In: Buchwald, J., Stewart, L. (eds) The Romance of Science: Essays in Honour of Trevor H. Levere. Archimedes, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58436-2_15

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