Dansereau, Pierre

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1959
PIERRE DANSEREAU
to be Doctor of Science

Permit me to introduce, with all the courtesy that is his due, a gentleman of New France. In that head, enthroned in a Gallic entente, reign the twin queens of Science and the Humanities, on those lips sits the fairy of golden and multilingual speech, and in that heart is the intrepidity of the great adventurers of his race. Wherever he travels -- and he measures not in miles but globe-girdling leagues -- there travels in him the seigneur, the savant and the voyageur.

One finds him instructing in French at the University of Montreal, in Portuguese at Rio, in English at Michigan. He has fought his way through the rain forest of the Amazon; in New Zealand he has been canopied by the Southern Beech. He has examined the Mediterranean Cisti as searchingly as the community of our Canadian spring plants. In Baffin Land he has shot bears and the Aurora Borealis, and in Africa lions -- with his camera. This time last year he was lecturing at the Sorbonne and, in returning to what he calls his home, he contrived a d‚tour via Ghana and the Congo after a brief stop in Portugal, where he was received into membership of the Academy of Sciences. And one Christmas day longer ago he is pictured as a tiro, shovelling coal in Panama.

Mercurial in thought as in geography, the master has already outdistanced those disciples who, abandoning the past, seek breathlessly to pin him down in the present. He is the nonpareil of bio-geographers, as at home in the halls of Lisbon as the jungles of Brazil. But his sweetest lectures he has given seated on the stump of a Laurentian maple, as if from that object of his researches the sugar had mounted into his soul.

Responsive to knowledge as an archangel to God, he would in his own academic heaven accommodate the Elementary Teacher and the Schoolmaster alongside the Professor. If, each at his level, they can coax young minds to open like buds to the sun, to them he accords the highest celestial seats. Even the Professor of Mechanical Engineering may qualify for the hierarchy, provided that he educates for personality always, and trains only incidentally for the profession. As for technicians -- and they are not wanting, he knows, to the Arts any less than to the Sciences -- they may squeeze into this heaven of his, but their station is perilously near the Pearly Gates.

Vous, M. Dansereau, qui avez incarné l'essence même de la Biogéographie, dans tant les parties du monde, devant de si nombreux auditoires, et l'avez exprimée dans des langues si diverses, nous sommes heureux et fiers de vous compter parmi les grands éducateurs, à qui, en de rares occasions, cette vieille Université a conféré cet honneur.

Et vous, Madame, qui avez accompagné dans ses courses lointaines votre mari -- véritable chevalier errant de la Science -- et l'avez sans cesse aidé de vous conseils et encouragé de votre présence, soyez la bienvenue dans notre ville, dans notre Université, et dans nos coeurs.

From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.