Daniel Wilson

Daniel Wilson Poems

Daniel Wilson Biography

Sir Daniel Wilson (January 5, 1816 – August 6, 1892) was a British-born Canadian archaeologist, ethnologist and author. Wilson was born in Edinburgh and educated at the Royal High School. As a young man, he went to London and worked in the studio of J. M. W. Turner. His skills as a water-colour painter came back into play much later in his career. Back in Edinburgh, he served as Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. He corresponded with Christian Thomsen and Jens Worsaae, who had established the exhibition of the prehistoric material in the Danish national museum in Copenhagen in terms of the Three Age_system – the succession of a Stone Age by a Bronze Age and an Iron Age. He organized the display of the Society's museum after the same chronological scheme, the first to emulate the Copenhagen museum. He published The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland (1851), which introduced the word prehistoric into the archaeological vocabulary. He had already written Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time, an important record of the many historic buildings that were at risk or were being lost in the rapid development of central Edinburgh. He left Scotland to take up the post of Professor of History and English Literature in Toronto. In addition to his teaching duties, he kept up his interests in natural history, geology, and was very interested in the ethnography of the indigenous groups that he encountered on his vacation treks. Many of his watercolour sketches of landscapes and encampments of hunter-gatherer groups are now in the Canadian national archives in Ottawa. His brother George Wilson had become the first director of a new national museum in Edinburgh (now the National Museums of Scotland), and Daniel Wilson actively collected ethnographic material for the museum by means of an extensive network of contacts. He was the author of Civilisation in the Old and the New World, and a number of other books, for example, a study on Thomas Chatterton, and Caliban, the Missing Link. Daniel Wilson served as president of University College, Toronto from 1880 to 1892 and as the first president of the federated University of Toronto from 1890–1892. He asserted their claims against the sectarian universities of the province which denounced the provincial university as godless, and against the private medical schools in Toronto. He advocated what he called “the maintenance of a national system of university education in opposition to sectarian or denominational colleges.” He opposed the federation of colleges, particularly that of Victoria College, as a "Methodist plot". He was knighted for his services to education in Canada, and the Sir Daniel J. Wilson Residence at the University College in University of Toronto is named in his honor.)

The Best Poem Of Daniel Wilson

True Love

True love is lowly as the wayside flower,
That springeth up beneath the traveller's tread,
And lifteth trustfully its lovely head,
Content to bless therewith the passing hour;
Unheedful of the wealth of heavenly dower
It lavisheth upon a path bestead
With the coarse trafficking of sordid meed,
So it lie open but to sun and shower.
And love no less deals with unstinted hand:
Lavish to others, heedless of reward:
Deeming no sacrifice of self too hard,
So that, with fruitful arms outspread, she stand
Sowing around home's hearth her harvest treasure:
Heart's hoards of golden grain, showered down in affluent measure.

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