These beautifully illustrated stories of natural history in nineteenth-century Canada are about the curious men and women who crossed the oceans from Europe to explore, map, draw, puzzle about, collect and exhibit nature in Canada. Informed by French, British and Indigenous naturalists, they tried to understand what they saw. What did it all mean about the origins of the world”

Louisa Blair, an amateur naturalist in Quebec and a transatlantic species herself, tells tales on Darwin, Russell Wallace and James Cook, and lingers on the strange and colourful details of Canada's stubborn resistance to evolutionism and its first natural history museums with their penchant for deformities.

These stories feature Indigenous mapmakers, botanical artists, bug-bitten rock fanatics, arctic explorers, and a trio of Quebec women who managed to get plants named after themselves. In short, muddy boots, cold hands, a pocket full of fossils, a mind full of existential questions. To make her case, Louisa Blair has gathered a vast collection of vintage illustrations.

Blair also salutes their successors, the citizen scientists who are now frantically mapping Canada's biodiversity before it fades to bio-monotony. What does it all mean for the end of the world?

LOUISA BLAIR is a native of Quebec City who now work as a writer, editor and translator in Toronto.

Louisa Blair's profile page

"A whimsical and entertaining collection of vignettes about Canada's first naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?. A fascinating and nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century Canada emerges." Alexander Hackett, The Montreal Review of Books

FINALIST 2023 Foreword Indies Award, Category Nonfiction, Nature

"Blair is a really delightful writer and has the skiIl of maintaining the reader's interest for topics as diverse as Captain Cook's sounding of the St. Lawrence River, the Franklin expedition to the Arctic, and Logan's epic geological survey of Cana­da." Sandra Stock, Quebec Heritage News

"Wow! I'm impressed. Stop scrolling on your phones and hava a look at this." Tomson Highway (Cree playwright, author, musician.

"These stories about the passion for nature are an antidote to climate despair." Jean-François Gauvin, Professor of Museum Studies and Scientific Herigat, Université Laval

About Louisa Blair's work.

"A captivating book." Caroline Montpetit, Le Devoir, on The Anglos, The Hidden Face of Quebe

"A loving and readable history," Macleans, on Iron Bars and Bookshelves

"So good, so rich in anecdote and warm humanity, that it's hard to capture its flavour in a few lines." Morris Wolfe, Globe and Mail, on Louisa Blair's 3-part investigative piece on Indigenous land rights in the James Bay, Catholic New Times, 1992.