Date: 3:00 PM, February 12, 2010
Speaker: Dr. Eric Mills
Speaker affiliation: Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University
Venue: Room 5263, Psychology Wing, Life Sciences Centre
Before the building of a floating biological station in 1899, a move that led to the foundation of permanent biological stations at St Andrews and Nanaimo in 1908, the marine sciences were studied piecemeal in Canada throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Canada’s preeminent scientific establishment then was the Geological Survey of Canada, founded in 1842 only two years after a magnetic observatory in Toronto. GSC personnel, notably J.F. Whiteaves, G.M. Dawson, and John Macoun, contributed to Canadian marine biology, but their studies were always secondary to other work. And for at least two decades after 1908, as a case study shows, lack of money, instruments, ships, and personnel prevented Canadian marine scientists from working at a world-class level, despite the efforts of the Board’s rising star, A.G. Huntsman, to bring their science up to European standards.