| Frank Dawson Adams | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 17, 1859 Montreal, Quebec |
| Died | December 26, 1942 (aged 83) Montreal, Quebec |
Frank Dawson Adams FRS[1] (September 17, 1859 – December 26, 1942) was a Canadian geologist.
He was born into a prosperous, middle-class family in Montreal, Quebec. At that time modern Canada did not exist (it was created by the British North American Act of 1867): "Canada" consisted of Canada West (modern Ontario) and Canada East (modern Quebec). By 1859, Montreal, unlike the rest of Canada East, was predominantly English-speaking and was the largest city with a population of about 90,000, rising to about one million during Adams' lifetime. There were two public school systems: French (Catholic) and English (Protestant). Adams attended the Montreal High School, a private school founded in 1843, and after 1852, closely associated with McGill University [2]. As a pupil there, Adams no doubt received a classical education, and his knowledge of Latin was valuable later in life in his historical studies. He matriculated at age 16 and entered the Applied Sciences Program at McGill University, where he studied geology with John William Dawson (Principal of McGill since 1852) and Bernard Harrington (who had set up the Applied Sciences program). In unpublished notes [3] he described Harrington as "the professor who influenced me chiefly." He graduated with first class honors in Applied Sciences in 1878, then spent a year at the Yale Scientific School, where he studied German, French, and Mineralogy. It was there that he met George Wessel Hawes (1848-1882) a pioneer American petrologist, who had worked with Rosenbusch in Germany. He also met a fellow-student, Andrew C. Lawson, and in 1888 they published a joint paper on their investigation of the mineral scapolite. Returning to Montreal, he was appointed Assistant Chemist at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), and the following year (when the GSC moved to Ottawa), Assistant Chemist and Petrographer [4]. He received a leave of absence to spend at least part of two years in Heidelberg, studying with Harry Rosenberg (1836-1914), who by that time was the acknowledged master of microscopic petrography of igneous rocks[5]. Rosenberg attracted students from many different countries: while Adams was in Heidelberg he met G.H. Williams and J.S. Diller both of whom later became leading American petrologists, and also V. Goldschmidt and A. Osann, who became famous geochemists in Europe [6]. In 1883, Adams published the first work in Canada that made full use of the petrographic microscope, as well as a paper indicating that he had already begun the field work north of Montreal, that later became the basis of his doctorate at Heidelberg. He received a Masters degree from McGill in 1884, and his Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1892. His doctoral studies on the Morin anorthosite, showed that these rocks were not metamorphosed sediments, as thought previously, but were igneous rocks that has been intruded into Grenville sediments and later metamorphosed in the Grenville orogeny.
In 1889 Adams was appointed Lecturer in Geology at McGill University, becoming the Logan Professor of Geology from 1892 to 1922. Though he was working full time at McGill, he continued to spend summers in the field, financed by the GSC. In 1891 he began working on the Grenville of eastern Ontario, and by the following year had started to work on the Halliburton area. His work there, carried out after 1896 with Alfred Barlow of the GSC, was published as a GSC Memoir in 1908, and became a classic of Canadian geology. The rocks, which included unusual alkaline rocks, were not merely mapped, but studied in detail using petrographic and chemical methods, and firm conclusions were drawn about their petrogenesis, all of which was unusual for a GSC Memoir at that time. At the same time, Adams was also studying the peculiar petrological characteristics of a group of alkaline intrusions of much later geological age (now known to be Early Cretaceous), called by him the "Monteregian Hills," and this work was continued by his students, notably by J. Austen Bancroft (1882-1957), who succeeded Adams as Logan Professor at McGill. Inspired by his observations on the flow of metamorphosed limestones in the Grenville, Adams began a series of pioneer experimental studies of the physical properties of rocks at high pressures and temperatures, carried out in collaboration with John Thomas Nicholson, Professor of Engineering at McGill [7]. This was well before comparable work was carried out in Germany or the United States. Though the experimental apparatus was primitive compared with that later developed at Harvard University and the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., Adams' work was highly regarded by the newly founded Carnegie Institution, which supported him financially, and attempted to persuade him to move to the Institution [8][9][1].
Adams remained at McGill, where he served as the Dean for the Faculty of Applied Science and then as Vice-Principal to the University. He served as President of the International Geological Congress held in Toronto in 1913 [10], and was President of the Geological Society of America in 1918. He received many honors during his career, first becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1896, a Fellow of the Royal Society (of Great Britain) in 1907[1], a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1917,[11] and awarded the Flavelle Medal, which is given for outstanding contributions to biological science, in 1937. The Frank Dawson Adams Building at McGill University is named in his honor. A plaque in his honor was erected on the Redpath Museum on the McGill campus in 1950.
He retired from McGill in 1924, and began to travel widely, collecting books on the history of geology, as well as rocks and minerals for McGill. He published several papers on the geology of Ceylon, and also on the history of geology, culminating in his book Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences (1938, it became a classic, reprinted by Dover in 1954). He left his rare book collection (1581 monographs) to McGill university.
| Professional and academic associations | ||
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| Preceded by William Dawson LeSueur |
President of the Royal Society of Canada 1913-1914 |
Succeeded by Adolphe-Basile Routhier |