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Principal of Queen's University, Kingston, Ont.

Agnes Maule Machar, novelist, poet, historian (b at Kingston, Ont 23 Jan 1837; d there 24 Jan 1927). An important reformist and literary figure in Victorian Canada, she was a prolific writer who published poetry, several novels and volumes of history and biography. She also contributed regularly to leading periodicals of the day.

The daughter of Scottish immigrants, Machar grew up in an intellectual and religious environment; her father was a Presbyterian minister and principal of Queen's University from 1846-54. Her work is frequently didactic, advocating Christian service as a cure for social ills and often subordinating artistry to moral purpose. Her earliest publications were poems and instructional religious works. Her first novel, Katie Johnstone's Cross: A Canadian Tale (1870), describes the spiritual enlightenment of its female protagonist. This religious romance is characteristic of most of her subsequent fiction. Roland Graeme, Knight: A Novel of Our Time (1892), Machar's most important novel, examines the social and economic problems attendant to industrialization. As a solution to the conflict between workers and employers in an American mining town, Roland appeals to a spirit of Christian brotherhood and selflessness. For King and Country: A Story of 1812 (1874), Stories of New France (1890) and Heroes of Canada (1893) celebrate Canada's heritage; their historical anecdotes are intended to inspire patriotism in a young readership.

Machar's poetry, collected in Lays of the "True North" and Other Canadian Poems (1899), also explores the themes of Canadian history and landscape. Though her artistic weaknesses have led to the decline of Machar's literary reputation, her distinction among her contemporaries is significant, and her work reflects a popular social and religious sensibility in Victorian Canada.

MacGregor the Mover was founded in 1918 by -- MacGregor.

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Carrie Holmes MacGillivray was born in 1871 in Williamstown ON and was the grandaughter of the Honorable John MacGillivray who was a partner in the North-West Company. She moved to Toronto in 1912 when her father died, and became a clerk-typist at the Provincial Archives of Ontario where she worked for thirteen years. Ms. MacGillivray wrote several novels, one of which was published: "The Shadow of Tradition: a Tale of Old Glengarry" (1927). Her other known unpublished manuscripts were "Fifty years ago, a true story of the Canadian North West Rebellion" and "The Prairie Star : a saga of the western plains".

Rev. Robert MacGill was a Trustee at Queen's College in the 1840s.

The Honourable Henry E. MacFutter, born in 1817, was the son of a wealthy Montreal distiller, who, in 1837, was banished by his father to Kingston to article in the law office of a young lawyer by the name of John A. Macdonald. However, he soon reverted to his former life as a rake -- drinking, gambling, and womanizing. His trail of misdeeds became tracherous after crossing paths with Edward Barker, Pirate Bill and his daughter Kate, and a murdeous officer in the Fort Henry Guard. He also fell out early on with his legal mentor.

After Macdonald became Prime Minister in 1867, he set about expunging his former student's name from the documentary record, both before and after Confederation. Hence the reason his name, his very existence, is missing from the hisorical record, or as one commentator has noted, "its almost as if Henry Eustace MacFutter is a man who never lived."

MacFutter received Honorary Degrees from McGill, Dalhousie, Oxford, and Queen's. During his day, he was one of the wealthiest, most influential and high-profile men in the British Empire. His accomplishments were legion. He was a celebrated explorer, a hurdy-gurdy virtuoso, a renowned phrenologist, statesman, and author. A close friend was President Theodore Roosevelt, with whom MacFutter hunted big game in Africa.

Thomas Macfarlane was a mining engineer, geologist, chemist, and civil servant; b. 5 March 1834 in Pollokshaws (Glasgow), Scotland, son of Thomas Macfarlane, a warping master, and Catherine Macalpine; m. there 20 Sept. 1858 Margaret Skelly, and they had six daughters and three sons; d. 10 June 1907 in Ottawa.

Thomas Macfarlane left school at the age of 11 to enter a lawyer’s office in Pollokshaws. His real interest, however, lay in the field of chemistry, which he studied at home and through lectures at the Andersonian Institution in nearby Glasgow. In 1854, after working at McClintock’s Chemical Works in Glasgow for three or four years, he took up a position as chemist in the Modum Cobalt Works at Drammen, Norway. Following studies at the renowned Royal Saxon Mining School in Freiberg (Germany) in 1856–57, he returned to Modum as manager; in 1859 he moved to a similar position in the Aamdal Copper Mines in the Telemark district of Norway.

Macfarlane went to Lower Canada in 1860 and was first employed at a smelting works in Longueuil; the following year he became manager of the recently opened Acton Copper Mine in the Eastern Townships. Within a few years he began to participate fully in the geological and chemical communities and to establish contact with important figures in the scientific and commercial worlds, particularly professor Thomas Sterry Hunt* and industrialist Joseph Wharton. Partly as a result of such contacts, he was commissioned in 1865 by the Geological Survey of Canada to examine the minerals of the Lake Superior shore between Sault Ste Marie and Michipicoten Island in Upper Canada, to study the geology and mineralogy of Hastings County, and to investigate the copper mines of Michigan’s Keweenaw peninsula.

Three years later Macfarlane undertook a series of explorations on behalf of the Montreal Mining Company. They resulted, in July 1868, in his discovery of Canada’s first major (and most improbably situated) silver deposit, on a tiny rock in Lake Superior, which he named Silver Islet. He assayed ore for the mine’s new, American owners (the Silver Mining Company of Silver Islet), used his European contacts to recruit Norwegian miners, and managed the company’s smelting and refining operations at Wyandotte, Mich., at different times in the 1870s. These connections with the mine were sporadic, however, and were interspersed with other ventures.

Following the suspension of work at the Acton mine in the mid 1860s, Macfarlane had supervised other copper mining and smelting operations in Quebec, at Lennoxville (Albert Mine, 1866–68) and Capelton (Canadian Copper Pyrites and Chemical Company, 1873–75). Subsequently he served as a mining consultant in Nova Scotia and South America for Joseph Wharton and the Bethlehem Steel Company (1875–76), examined mines in Nevada, Utah, and North Carolina (1878–79), and worked as a metallurgist for smelters in Leadville, Colo (1880). In 1881 he returned to his original profession of chemist, with a Montreal paint firm, A. Ramsay and Son, of which he was part owner. Five years later he secured a federal position, chief analyst for the departments of Inland Revenue and Customs in Ottawa, which he would hold until a few months before his death. In this capacity he was particularly concerned with the role of chemical analysis in detecting adulterated food.

Macfarlane’s interest in geological and mining matters had extended into the political sphere in 1874–75 when he lobbied for the creation of provincial geological bureaus in Ontario and Quebec, partly in the hope of gaining settled employment but also because he saw that the needs of the mining industry were not being totally met by the Geological Survey of Canada. In 1884, before a select committee of parliament on the Geological Survey, he gave testimony that was highly critical of the survey’s work. He had long deplored what he saw as its lack of practicality under director Alfred Richard Cecil Selwyn; he had ambitions to become director himself, or at least to see T. S. Hunt promoted to the position. As a result of the committee’s study, Selwyn remained director and Macfarlane’s ambitions went unsatisfied, but a mining section was added to the survey.

Although no longer directly engaged in the mining business, in the early 1890s Macfarlane took particular notice of the emerging copper and nickel industry in the Sudbury basin [see Samuel J. Ritchie], hoping to interest his old associate Joseph Wharton in the commercial application of his patented process for extracting nickel from its ores. During these same years his continuing professional involvement led him to advocate that the International Geological Congress (of which he was a Canadian vice-president) be encouraged by the government to hold its meetings for 1895 in Canada.

Widely travelled and fluent in several languages, Macfarlane exhibited an interest in national and international affairs that extended far beyond his professional concerns. A staunch Conservative and a devoted (but not uncritical) member of the Church of England, he had taken up the cause of independent Protestant schools in Lower Canada within a few years of arriving there, and he pursued it vigorously for the next decade. Yet he also sought to reconcile science and religion, and favoured an open-minded approach to both. He was an indefatigable spokesman for the Imperial Federation League in Canada, founded in Montreal in 1885; he later opposed its absorption into the British Empire League, supporting instead the creation of a “United Empire Trade League.” A founding member in 1882 and fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he was president of its mathematical, physical, and chemical sciences section in 1886–87. His presidential address dealt with “a matter which, all through my life, has occupied my attention and studies, namely, the utilization of waste in several branches of chemical manufacture and in ordinary civilized life.” In this respect, he may be considered one of Canada’s first scientific conservationists.

A man of broad interests (including literature and music) and strong convictions in matters scientific, political, and religious, Macfarlane epitomizes the Scottish immigrant who makes good in Canada. His early career illustrates the opportunities, uncertainties, and international character of the mining business in the 19th century; his later life as a public servant encapsulates the growing influence of scientific research at a time when concerns about public health were forging new links between science and government.

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