82 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE, 



impossible in the short time at my disposal and I must content myself with such 

 comparisons as will show how liberal and intelligent almost all other governments 

 in North America have been relatively to our own. 



Let us now turn to the establishment of our own regular survey.* In 1842, 

 following the example of about twenty of the States of the American Union, the 

 old Province of Canada instructed Sir William Logan to undertake a geological 

 survey of the Province, work in connection with which began in 1843, Sir William 

 having one assistant, Mr. Alexander Murray. For the ensuing ten years these two 

 devoted men worked in the field, and after a few years Dr. T. Sterry Hunt became 

 their able co-worker in the laboratory as chemist and mineralogist to the survey, 

 for all practical purposes the first officer of that character, although not literally 

 the first. No matter how devoted, two men could not do much judged by quantity, 

 and the ten annual reports fi'om 1843 to 1853 with two separate pamphlets on the 

 mining regions of Lake Superior and the north shore of Lake Huron, make alto- 

 gether less than 1,250 pages of small octavo, about as much matter as one annual 

 report of the survey now. Two maps of a mine accompany one of the pamphlets, 

 and here and there there is a badly executed illustration, but of fossils there are 

 neither descriptions nor illustrations. It is true that in 1851 and 1852, Sir William 

 Logan contributed important papers on the ' ' Foot-prints in the Potsdam Sand- 

 stones of Canada" to the quarterly journal of the Geological Society in London, 

 which were most adequately illustrated by the Society, but in these papers he 

 thanks a member of the Geological Sui'vey of Great Britain for naming the fossils 

 he has occasion to refer to. If I could lay before you these twelve slender 

 pamphlets and the still more slender reports of Dr. Gesner made in the Maritime 

 Provinces, hereafter referred to, and put beside them the reports made by the 

 various public surveys in the United States down to 1853, you would realize more 

 forcibly than I can express in words how completely the Canadians failed to take 

 that ' ' liberal view of their own interests ' ' which characterized the people of the 

 United States. But somewhat better days were in store for the survey. Mr. 

 James Richardson had been added to the workers in the field, and in 1856 Mr. E. 

 Billings entered the survey as palseontologist. In 1857, Prof. Robert Bell, still a 

 member of the stafi^, also joined the survey. The survey was now fairly equipped 

 and its publications gave evidence of the larger scope of its operations. , The report 

 for 1853-56, published in one volume, was accompanied by the first series of maps, 

 illustrating reports on the geology and topography of the Muskoka, Petewawa, 

 Bonnechere, Madawaska, Maganetawan, French, Sturgeon, and Wahnapitae Rivers 

 and Lake Nipissing and its tributaries, also of the Island of Anticosti, altogether 

 about 25 maps. In this volume appeared the first report of the palaeontologist, the 

 beginning of a series which established Mr. Billings' repiftation throughout the 

 scientific world. It is not accompanied by illustrations, which fate also befel some 

 of his later reports. This is not so strange as the fact that to this day some of his 

 species have been allowed to remain unillustrated. It is characteristic of our 

 interest in science that his name is doubtless much better known to-day in Europe 

 than it is in Canada. In 1863 the results of the work of the survey from the 

 beginning appeared in the well-known volume of about 1,000 pages, published 

 without a single plate but with about 500 good wood-engravings and an excellent 

 atlas of maps and sections. This atlas contained the first geological map of 

 "Canada and the Adjacent Regions," printed in colours, 125 miles to an inch, and 

 it was followed in 1866 by the large map on the scale of twenty-five miles to an 

 inch, coloured by hand. I wish that every Canadian might read the prefatory note 

 accompanying this atlas, and learn what goes to the making of a reasonablj^ 

 accurate map of a new territory. The ordinary report of progress for the years 

 1863-66 containing papers by two new contribu^tors, Mr. A. Michel and Mr. Thomas 

 Macfarlane, was the last made to the old Province of Canada. In addition to these 

 reports of progress, seven pamphlets appeared and six important contributions to 

 palaeontology. Four of these latter, called respectively Decades 1, 2, 3 and 4, 



* " The first effort made toward the establishment of a geological survey in Canada, appears in a petition 

 addressed to the House of Assembly of Upper Canada in 1832, by Dr. Rae. Nothing-, however, came of this or 

 of several other attempts of the same kind, till in the first united Parliament of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841, 

 the Natural History Society of Montreal and the Historical Society of Quebec joined in urging the matter ujjon 

 the government, with the result that the modest s im of £1,500 sterling was granted for the purpose of beginning 

 such a survey." Presidential Address, R. S. C, 1894. G. M. Dawson. 



