Sir Sandford Fleming

Abstract

THE death of Sir Sandford Fleming on July 22nd at eighty-eight years of age has deprived the world not only of one of its greatest engineers, whose constructive works revolutionised trade and commerce by providing increased facilities for intercouse, but also of one who in various ways proved himself a pioneer, advocating and supporting measures the importance of which had not yet penetrated the public mind. He will be longest remembered for his work on the Canadian Pacific Railway and for his successful advocacy of a cable across the Pacific, which has proved of so much value to the commercial world. But in smaller matters he exerted himself not less strenuously and usefully. In a new country where material interests are many and pressing, he early saw the necessity of upholding pure science for the encouragement it could give to arts and industry, and with this view, so far back as 1849, he promoted the foundation of the Canadian Institute, which after demonstrating its usefulness in various directions, was recently incorporated under a Royal Charter.