The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

Canadian paleontologist, who conducted extensive researches in Nova Scotia and eventually came to play a leading role in the foundation of McGill University.He was a fundamentalist Presbyterian and opposed the Darwinian vision of a universe based on chance.The striking feature of the work is the evidence it gives for the migration of the organized resistance to materialist evolutionism from Scotland to Canada.In his defence of "sudden outbursts" of new life forms of various geological stages, and his particular interest in Eozoon Canadense (a giant foraminer), Dawson occupies a recognizable position in the wider evolutionary debate.For a ghost stalks these pages, that of Hugh Miller, and no student of evolutionary ideas can fail to respond to the echoes that this reprint brings of a time when science and belief were so deeply intermingled.