Titus Smith, Junior, and the Geography of Nova Scotia in 1801 and 1802

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. rightly emphasize the importance of direct observation in geographical investigation and interpretation. This emphasis does not imply a conflict between the library and the field as locales for geographical study; each problem has its own most appropriate methodology of solution. Yet there remain few kinds of such study in which sound description and reasoned conclusion are not dependent on first hand visits to the areas concerned. That this circumstance poses a particularly difficult problem for the historical geographer is obvious enough, and has given rise to an emphasis on the importance of contemporary field work in his investigations." Yet, no matter how assiduously he checks the documents and maps of another day in the field or searches for evidence of the past in the present landscape, he has found thereby no really satisfactory substitute for actually seeing the land as it was. Indeed he is exposed to a grave danger, which is too little recognized, to the logical basis of his work.This danger is risked in attempts to reconstruct the past almost solely by obserand interpretation of the present. If the historical geographer were, in fact, interested in reconstruction of the past only for some antiquarian purpose this danger would be less serious. It is increasingly evident, however, that historical geographers have a much deeper purpose than this; their larger aim is to understand the geography of the present by study of the changing geography of the past. But if that reconstruction depends largely on a known base of present geography it would be the grossest perversion of scientific method to follow the same reasoning in reverse to explain the present largely in terms of a past reconstructed from it, that is, essentially, in terms of itself. Such a pendulum swing back and forth along the same line of reasoning is a stimulating mental exercise, but proves little or nothing. Rather must we reconstruct past geography as largely as possible from independent

Into the Wilderness: Rediscovering Titus Smith Jr’s philosophy of nature

“…Smith used this system throughout his Nova Scotia journeys when identifying plants, using both the common and Linnaean names for 33 species of trees, 50 species of shrubs, and 20 species of grasses, sedges, and rushes. Smith also documented over 100 medicinal plants (Clark 1954). Consequently, Smith's botanical research not only represented the first systematic description of the natural history of Nova Scotia, but also contributed to the origins of a provincial scientific community that eventually reported their findings before newly created learned societies including the Halifax Mechanics' Institute (1831) and the Halifax Literary and Scientific Society (1839).…”