"Busy, active and strenuous all his days, he must have chafed, I fancy,
during recent years under a growing sense of uselessness--almost an
impatience at being laid aside from work, which had been to him so long
the very breath of life; yet none ever said with more simple, childlike
resignation, 'Thy way, not mine!' For such a painless passing out of
life, no vote of sorrow need be struck. There is no sting in a death
like his: the grave is not his conqueror. Rather has death been
swallowed up in victory--the victory of a full and complete life, marked
by earnest endeavour, untiring industry, continuous devotion and
self-sacrifice, together with an abiding and ever-present sense of
dependence on the will of Heaven. His work was done, to quote the
Puritan poet's noble line: 'As ever in his great taskmaster's eye'; and
never for a moment did he waver in his feeling of personal
responsibility to a personal God. Others will speak to you of his
record as a scientific man. I shall permit myself only to say that few
can have an adequate idea of the power and forcefulness revealed in the
mere fact that one who had so onerous a part to play as a college head
should have been able to keep up scientific work at all. A weaker nature
would have exhausted itself in the problems of administration.
"He, himself, has left it on record, in his paper entitled,
'Thirty-eight Years of McGill,' that these years were 'filled with
anxieties and cares, and with continuous and almost unremitting labour.'
There are on my library table at the present time three volumes, in
which three college presidents may be said to have summed up the
lifework it has been given them to do for the institutions with which
they were severally connected--Caird of Glasgow, Eliot of Harvard, and
Gilman of Johns Hopkins. The first was a massive intellect which, in the
security of a long-established university system, delighted to deal, in
a series of addresses to the Glasgow students, with such subjects as the
unity and progressiveness of the sciences, the study of history, the
study of art, and the place in human development of Erasmus and Galileo,
Bacon, Hume and Bishop Butler. The two American Presidents have lived
more in the concrete, and they have put on record their attitude to, and
their methods of dealing with, the various problems they have had to
face in the educational world in which their work has been done.
Alongside their memorial volumes I like to place a still more
unpretending collection of 'Educational Papers,' which Sir William
Dawson circulated among his friends. They mark the various stages, full
of struggle and stress at every point, of his college administration,
and they form a record of what he was able to accomplish--apart from his
work as a geologist--in the sphere of education, for the High School and
the Normal School of this city, for the schools of the province, and
above all for McGill itself, which he found in 1855 a mere college with