Arthur Philemon Coleman, 1852 - 1939

Abstract

Arthur Philemon Coleman, the son of Francis Coleman, a Methodist minister, was born at La Chute, Quebec, in 1852, and graduated from Victoria University, Cobourg, Ontario, in 1876. After teaching for three years in the Cobourg Collegiate Institute he entered the University of Breslau, where he took his doctor’s degree in 1881 for a thesis on the geology of an area in Silesia. Returning to Canada he became Professor of Natural History and Geology at the Victoria University until it was affiliated with the University of Toronto in which he was appointed Professor of Metallurgy and Assaying. While thus engaged he wrote many reports for the newly constituted Ontario Bureau of Mines, and in 1894 was formally nominated as its Geologist and Mineralogist. In 1901 he was transferred to the Chair of Geology at Toronto and served the University in that capacity till his retirement in 1922. Coleman’s first researches in Canada were naturally on microscopic petrology, a subject then much in vogue in Germany. He combined this study with field and laboratory work not only in his papers on Anorthosite and those on Nepheline and other Syenites, but in his work on the gold-bearing rocks of the Rainy Lake Region, and on other occurrences of such ores as iron, copper, cobalt, and silver, in Northern Ontario, which he carried out for the Bureau of Mines.