Browse "Biologists"

André Michaux, botanist, explorer (b near Versailles, France 8 Mar 1746; d on Madagascar 11 Oct 1803?). He compiled the first North American flora which includes many plants collected in Lower Canada in 1792.

Annie Linda Jack, née Hayr, writer, horticulturist (born 1 January 1839 in Northamptonshire, England; died 15 February 1912 in Châteauguay, Quebec). Canada’s first professional woman garden writer, Annie Jack authored the popular manual The Canadian Garden: A Pocket Help for the Amateur. She was also a widely published poet, gardening columnist and social commentator.

Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman, marine biologist, administrator, editor, teacher (b at Tintern, Ont 23 Nov 1883; d at St Andrews, NB 8 Aug 1973). Huntsman was a provocative thinker and innovator who decisively influenced fisheries science in Canada.

Arthur Gilbert McCalla, cereal chemist (b at St Catharines, Ont 22 Mar 1906; d at Edmonton 30 Apr 1985).

From his early research which focussed on developing an oilseed crop for Manitoba, he became an internationally acclaimed plant breeder, best known for suggesting the elimination of erucic from rapeseed oil and producing low glucosinolate varieties.

Catharine Parr Traill, née Strickland, pioneer writer, botanist (born 9 January 1802 in London, England; died 29 August 1899 in Lakefield, ON). Catharine Parr Traill’s books are some of the earliest in the Canadian literary canon. Works such as The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer (1836) offer detailed descriptions of pioneer life in Canada, while Canadian Wildflowers (1868) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada (1885) showcase her skill as an amateur botanist.

Charles Gibb, horticulturist (b at Montréal 29 July 1845; d at Cairo, Egypt 8 Mar 1890). Poor health led Gibb to seek an outdoor occupation and in 1872 he established extensive orchards at Abbotsford, Qué, to study fruit culture and arboriculture, and to test plant material from abroad.

David Fife, farmer, wheat breeder (b at Kincardine, Scot 1805; d near Peterborough, Ont 9 Jan 1877). Fife immigrated to Otonabee, Upper Canada, with his parents in 1820. In 1842 he planted seeds of WHEAT obtained by a friend in Scotland from Danzig [Gdansk, Poland].

Donald Strathearn Rawson, limnologist (b at Claremont, Ont 19 May 1905; d at Saskatoon 16 Feb 1961). His doctoral dissertation (U of T, 1929) on the bottom fauna of Lk Simcoe was a model for ecological limnology for 20 years.

Edgar Spinney Archibald, agriculturalist (b at Yarmouth, NS 12 May 1885; d at Ottawa 23 Jan 1968). Archibald's greatest contribution to Canadian agriculture was his dedicated and active support of scientists in the Experimental Farms Service, of which he was director 1919-51.

Édouard-André Barnard, agronomist and journalist (b at Trois-Rivières, Qué 30 Sept 1835; d at Varennes, Qué 19 Aug 1898). An important Québec agronomist in the second half of the 19th century, Barnard had abandoned his studies early to go into trade.

Francis Bain, geologist, ornithologist, botanist, author, artist (b at Charlottetown 25 Feb 1842; d at York Point, PEI 23 Nov 1894). Bain, a self-educated farmer, was an authority on Prince Edward Island rocks, FOSSILS and natural history.

Francis Peabody Sharp, orchardist, horticulturalist (b at Northampton, NB 1823; d at Upper Woodstock, NB 1903). When Sharp moved to Upper Woodstock in 1844, he established the first of many family orchards that developed into the major New Brunswick fruit industry.

Frederick Pursh, botanist (b Friedrich Traugott Pursch in Grossenhain, Saxony 4 Feb 1774; d at Montréal 11 July 1820). At age 25 Pursh left Dresden to try his luck in the New World.

George Lawson, botanist (b at Logan, Scot 12 Oct 1827; d at Halifax 10 Nov 1895). Lawson studied natural and physical sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Assistant secretary and curator for the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, he also worked in Britain's first biological laboratory.