Abstract

Canada as a Neo-Europe is a relatively recent construct, although the people of its first nations, the Indians and Inuit, have been here for some twelve thousand years, since the beginning of the retreat of the last ice sheets. Western science came in a limited way with the first European explorers; Samuel de Champlain left a mariner's astrolabe behind him. The Jesuits followed with their organization and educational institutions, and from the eighteenth century science was established within European Canadian culture