Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/714

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
696
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

country nor science lost anything by the delay; for the volume was not a mere summary of the earlier reports of the survey, but a new book containing all the earliest facts concerning the geology of the country. The work is too well known to require any comment here, but it may be stated that, although published nearly twenty years ago, it remains to-day the most valuable book of reference on the geology and mineralogy of the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec." In 1864 Sir William went to England to attend to the final work on the large geological map of Canada and the neighboring States, which was to accompany his "Geology." He attended the meeting of the British Association in September, and read papers on the fossils of the Laurentian rocks—Eozoön Canadense—which he and Drs. Hunt and Dawson had been mainly instrumental in bringing to notice. The significance of this discovery may be indicated by a sentence from the presidential address of Sir Charles Lyell for that year: "We have every reason to suppose that the rocks in which these animal remains are included are of as old a date as any of the formations named azoic in Europe, if not older, so that they preceded in date rocks once supposed to have been formed before any organic beings had been created."

At the Paris Exhibition of 1867, the geology of Canada was well represented under charge of Dr. Hunt. Sir William was promoted by the Emperor of France to an officer of the Legion of Honor, and a few months later the Council of the Royal Society awarded him one of the two Royal Gold Medals of the year for his "geological researches in Canada, and the construction of a geological map of that colony."

In 1869 Sir William, finding that his private work demanded all his somewhat declining energies—he was then seventy-one years old—resigned his position as director of the Canadian survey. He continued geological work, however, in Canada and adjoining parts of New England for several seasons, his last investigations being made in the Eastern Townships in the summer of 1874. In August he sailed for England, intending to return in the spring, but during the winter, while he was staying in Wales with a sister, the disease which had been gradually coming upon him grew rapidly more serious; he rallied somewhat in the spring, but never got really strong again, and died June 22, 1875.

"Those who had the good fortune to know Sir William Logan" (we quote from Professor Harrington's biography) "will remember him not merely as an enthusiastic geologist, but as a frank, true, and genial friend. Many a fellow-creature was cheered by his cheerfulness, helped by his kindly advice and sympathy, or in the more substantial way which ample private means rendered possible. In many respects his was a solitary life. Unlike his great contemporaries, Murchison and Lyell, he never enjoyed the sympathy and assistance of a wife. His over-active mind, no doubt, needed to be drawn from the geologi-