- John Macoun
John Macoun (
17 April ,1831 –18 June ,1920 ) was an Irish-born Canadian naturalist.Early life
Macoun was born in
Magheralin ,County Down ,Ireland in 1831, the third child of James Macoun and Anne Jane Nevin. In 1850 the worsening economic situation in Ireland led his family to emigrate to Canada, where he settled in Seymour Township,Ontario and beganfarming . Unsatisfied as a farmer, he became a school teacher in 1856. It was during this time that he developed a nearly obsessive interest inbotany . Although his formal education was slight, his knowledge and dedication to field work became sufficiently advanced that he gained the notice and respect of several professional botanists. By 1860 he was teaching school in Belleville, and had established correspondence with botanists such asAsa Gray ,Sir William Jackson Hooker ,George Lawson , andLouis-Ovide Brunet . This allowed him in 1868 to secure a faculty position as aProfessor of Botany andGeology atSt. Alberts College in Belleville. His marriage on1 Jan ,1862 to Ellen Terrill ofBrighton, Ontario was to lead to two sons and three daughters.Western explorations
In 1872 Macoun had a chance meeting with
Sanford Fleming , then chief engineer for the proposedCanadian Pacific Railway . Fleming recruited Macoun to participate in his expedition to the Pacific of 1872, and between 1872 and 1881, Macoun participated in five separatesurveying expeditions in the Northwest. Aside from determining the best route for the railway, a major purpose of these expeditions was to determine the agricultural potential of various regions of the west. Since Macoun's travels corresponded to a time of unusually highrainfall , he concluded that large regions of the Northwest were ideally suited to agriculture. Unfortunately, this mistakenly included the normally arid plains of southernSaskatchewan andAlberta in the region now known asPalliser's Triangle , which was to become adustbowl during theGreat Depression of the 1930's. In concert with the political consideration of forestalling northwards American expansion, Macoun's assessment contributed much to the final southern routing of the CPR across theprairie s.Later career
Macoun's reports from west attracted the notice of
Alfred Richard Cecil Selwyn , director of theGeological Survey of Canada , and in 1879, theGovernment of Canada took the unusual step of officially appointing him "Explorer of the Northwest territories". In 1881, after the mission of the CGS had been expanded to includenatural history , he moved his family to Ottawa and joined the CGS as "Dominion botanist". He remained with the CGS for 31 years and became an Assistant Director in 1887. In 1882 he became one of the charter members of theRoyal Society of Canada . Every summer was dedicated to fieldwork, and for the remainder of his life Macoun was a prolific collector and cataloguer of Canadian flora and fauna, even after suffering a debilitatingstroke in 1912. To this day, over 100,000 samples from his collection of plants are housed in the NationalHerbarium in Ottawa.Macoun died
18 July 1920 inSidney, British Columbia , and is interred inBeechwood Cemetery in Ottawa.Macoun marsh , on the cemetery's property, is named for him.The standard botanical author abbreviation Macoun is applied to
species he described.References
*
Further reading
* W. A. Waiser (1989). The Field Naturalist: John Macoun, the Geological Survey, and Natural Science, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
External links
* [http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=41683 Biography at the "Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online"]
* [http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=41683&query=Macoun A biography from the Library and Archives Canada]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.