In Weston, the Tyrrell family lived in an immense 24-room stone house. As a child, Tyrrell suffered a bout with scarlet fever that left him partially deaf; his vision was impaired as well, but he wore glasses to correct it. He studied at Upper Canada College as a teen and went on to an arts course at the University of Toronto.
The senior Tyrrell steered his son into a career in law, but Tyrrell was fascinated by the natural world and studied biology, botany, and other branches of science in his spare time. He even conducted research on his own with a microscope and published a paper in the Ottawa Field Naturalist on mites that cause feline ailments. Professors introduced him to associates of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), the government agency formed in the 1840s with a mandate to search out coal fields and other potential sources of revenue for what was then the province of Quebec and Ontario. The agency and its staff expanded considerably over the next few decades as Canada became a full-fledged confederacy.
This is a free page. This page contains 178 words. This
biography contains 1,771 words (approx. 6 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Joseph Burr Tyrrell Access Pass.
