William Dawson – Exploring Metis with a Scientific Eye

William Dawson was Canada’s foremost scientist of the 19^th century. His work as a geologist put him at the forefront of science in the English-speaking world, earned him a mention in Darwin’s The Origin of Species and a knighthood for his services to education.

Principal of McGill from 1855, Dawson’s administrative and teaching duties left him little time for scientific work. So his summer vacations became field camps. He planned his holidays in Tadoussac and Cacouna where proximity to the shoreline offered a playground for his children and gave him opportunities to study the folds of the cliffs and shoreline species.

Dawson built a cottage in Metis in 1876. Metis gave him a vast campus to explore. “It is near to both Pleistocene and Paleozoic deposits, and has good dredging ground in this vicinity, which affords interesting examples of varieties of molluscs,” he wrote. He enlisted the help of his daughter Anna Lois and son-in-law, Dr. Bernard Harrington.

Harrington and Dawson embarked on daily excursions, rock hammer in hand and specimen bag over their shoulders. They dragged the beach for estuarine species. Dawson waited for the tide to subside before venturing into the grey ooze to retrieve large sheets of shale for analysis. His discovery of sponge trails in the shale led him to write “New Species of Fossil Sponges from Little Metis, Quebec”, just one of more than 350 papers that Dawson published in his life of science.