Sxcrion IV., 1901 [8] Trans. R. 8S. C. 
I.—In Memoriam—Sir John William Dawson. 
By Frank Dawson Apams, M.Sc., Ph.D. 
(Read May 21, 1901.) 
It is with deep regret that we record the death of Sir William 
Dawson, which took place at Montreal on the morning of November 
18th, 1899, in the eightieth year of his age. In him the Royal Society 
of Canada loses its first President and one of its most distinguished 
members, and Canada loses an eminent geologist and naturalist, as well 
as one who was intimately identified with educational work of all kinds, 
but more especially with the higher education in the province of Quebec. 
Sir John William Dawson was born at Pictou on October 13th, 
1820, and was therefore a native of Nova Scotia, a province which has 
produced more than its share of the Canadians who have risen to emin- 
ence in the various walks of life. His father, James Dawson, was from 
near Aberdeen, Scotland, and came to Nova Scotia to fill a position in 
a leading business house in Pictou. On the termination of his engage- 
ment he began business on his own account, becoming in the course of 
time one of the chief ship-builders in that part of Nova Scotia. James 
Dawson had but two children, of whom Sir William was the elder. 
The younger died at an early age, thus leaving Sir William the sole 
survivor of the family. 
While still at school in Pictou, he developed a love for natural 
science, inherited from his father, and made large collections of fossil 
plants from the Nova Scotian coal measures, so well exposed about his 
native place. He speaks of himself at that time as being a “moderately 
diligent but not a specially brilliant pupil.” On leaving school he 
studied at the Pictou Academy and subsequently at the University of 
Edinburgh. While at the former seat of learning, at the age of 
sixteen, he read before the local Natural History Society his first paper, 
having the somewhat ambitious title, “On the Structure and History of 
the Earth.” 
At Edinburgh he studied under Jamieson, Forbes and Balfour, as 
well as with Alexander Rose, whom he refers to in some notes and remin- 
iscences as a single-hearted mineralogist and the greatest authority on 
the mineralogy of Scotland. He records his impression of the Univer- 
sity of Edinburgh at that time as being “a very imperfect school of 
natural science in comparison with our modern institutions,” and adds: 
“Jamieson, who was my principal teacher, devoted a large portion of 
the earlier lectures of his course to physiography, and the rest to 
minerals and rocks, but I was surprised to find how little even some 
