Sir William Edmond Logan, a Canadian geologist, born in Montreal in 1798. His father belonged to a loyalist family who emigrated from Schenectady, N. Y., at the time of the war of independence. He was educated in the high school and university of Edinburgh, and engaged in commercial pursuits in London. In 1829 he became interested in copper-smelting and coal-mining operations in Swansea, South Wales, and during the seven years of his residence there devoted himself to the study of the coal field of that region with great success, adding much to our knowledge of the nature and mode of formation of coal deposits. He showed among other things that the stratum of under-clay, as it is called, which always underlies coal beds, was the soil in which the plants yielding the coals grew, and thereby refuted the drift theory of the origin of coal. His minute and accurate maps and sections of this coal field were afterward adopted by the ordnance geological survey and published by the government. In 1841 he visited the coal fields of Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, where he made important studies and communicated several valuable memoirs, giving his results, to the geological society of London. At this time also he began the study of the older palaeozoic rocks of Canada, and a geological survey of that country having been undertaken by the provincial government, he was placed at its head in 1842, a post which he held till his resignation in 1870. To him we owe a great part of our knowledge of the geology of the present provinces of Quebec and Ontario, from Gaspe to Lake Superior. His labors in the Laurentides first made known the importance in American geology of the ancient crystalline rocks, which have since received the name of the Laurentian and Norian series; and his studies of the Appalachian range in Canada are models of patient and laborious investigation, although his deductions with regard to the age and geological equivalence of some of the rocks are questioned.

After the accession of the maritime provinces to the Dominion of Canada he made an elaborate study of the Pictou coal field of Nova Scotia. The results of his geological labors will be found in the reports of the geological survey of Canada, and in an elaborate map of northeastern America prepared by him with the aid of Prof. James Hall. He has also communicated numerous papers to the geological society of London, and to the American "Journal of Science and Arts." He was the commissioner from Canada to the great exhibitions of London in 1851 and 18C2, and to that of Paris in 1855; and at the last he received for his geological contributions the great gold medal and the decoration of chevalier of the legion of honor, in which order he was subsequently promoted to the rank of officer. He was knighted in 1856, and in the same year received from the London geological society the Wollaston palladium medal for his eminent services in geology. He has since received the Copley medal from the royal society of London, of which and of many other learned societies he has long been a member.

Sir William Logan has for many years been a member of the corporation of the university of McGill college in Montreal, from which he holds the degree of doctor of laws, and in which he has lately endowed the chair of geology.