Memorial to Freleigh Fitz Osborne 1903–2000 J.F.V

Memorial to Freleigh Fitz Osborne 1903–2000 J.F.V. RIVA Quebec Geoscience Center, P.O. Box 7500, Ste-Foy, Quebec G1V 4C7, Canada Freleigh Fitz Osborne, a major figure in Canadian Precam- brian geology from the 1930s to the 1960s, lived through nearly the complete twentieth century and into the dawn of the twenty-first. He was born on November 7, 1903, in Nogales, then Arizona territory. He was the first of two sons of Walter Fitz Osborne and Rachel May Freleigh. His parents were Canadians from Ontario, his father having stopped in Nogales at the end of 1901 to visit his sister Lydia on his return from a two-year stint as a teacher in Australia. In Nogales he found a job as an accountant for a company selling mining equipment and he sent for Rachel in Ontario. The couple was married on February 17, 1902, and went to live in an adobe house on West Crawford Street, about one-quarter of a mile from the Mexican bor- der. Freleigh was born in this house. In 1904 the Osborne family left Nogales for Vancouver, Canada, after his father developed an allergy that gave him debilitating asthma attacks. In Vancouver, he worked as an accountant and office manager. He was often in charge of liquidating bankrupt oil and mining companies and joined the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy to get a better understanding of the operations and prospects in which the companies were involved. For many years he was the sec- retary of the Vancouver branch of the Institute. Freleigh graduated from high school in 1919 at age 15, having skipped a grade. He seldom spoke of his school days, but would dwell at length on his religious upbringing. His parents were Sunday school teachers at the local Methodist church. Protestant Sunday was a dull day for a boy. Sunday school began at 7:30 a.m. and ended at 9:00 a.m. The morning service started at 11:00 a.m. and ended at 1:00 p.m. “Sermons were long and often nonspiritual,” he wrote in his family history. “I have listened to some utter nonsense.” More pleasant were his recollections of the picnics and weekend excursions with his parents in the countryside around Vancouver. He also helped his father clear and landscape the two lots around their new house on 15th Avenue. He was not quite 16 when he entered the University of British Columbia in the fall of 1919 to study mining. He took jobs painting houses to subsidize his studies, and worked as a diamond driller for coal in the summer of 1921 and as a field assistant for the Geological Survey of Canada in the summers of 1922–25. In 1924 he earned a B.S. in mining engineering and went on to graduate school, graduating in 1925 with an M.S. in geology and a minor in biology. His thesis was on the origin and time of deposition of the contact metamorphic magnetic iron ore on the west coast of Vancouver Island. In the fall of 1925 he went to work as a mining engineer for the Sally Mine, British Columbia, and soon came to feel that he had gained more practical knowledge than some of his professors. The experience, however, convinced him that life in a mine was not for him. He was equally determined not to work in a laboratory, clearly preferring the outdoors. Geological Society of America Memorials, v. 32, April 2002 13 14 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA In 1926 Freleigh entered Yale University to study toward a Ph.D. At Yale he found himself with a group of students that would leave their mark on North American geology. Among them were James “Red” Gilluly, Gustav Arthur Cooper, Aaron C. Waters, Chester R. Longwell, and Philip B. King, all future Penrose Medalists and/or presidents of the Geological Society of Amer- ica. They would remember Freleigh as a well-informed, argumentative, but rational individual. The years spent at Yale were the high point in his life, and he would never forget that he was a Yale graduate. He received the Carroll Cutler Fellowship from Yale University in 1926–27 and the S.F. Emmons Memorial Fellowship in 1927–28. He was inducted into Sigma Xi in 1927. His Ph.D. thesis was on the ore genesis of magnetite and ilmenite in anorthosite and gabbro. Freleigh demonstrated, based on fieldwork in the Adirondacks of New York, and in Quebec and Ontario, that magnetite and ilmenite bodies were not central or marginal magmatic segrega- tions, but magmatic injections that had crystallized later than the silicate minerals. He classified the titaniferous ore bodies as discordant and concordant bodies, both in anorthosites and gabbro and related rocks, and suggested filtration differentiation as the mode of origin for deposits in anorthosite. This was a radical departure from the accepted interpretation, and three extracts from the thesis were published in 1928 in Economic Geology. Dr. Osborne graduated in 1928 with the second highest standing in geology to date and began teaching as an associate at the State University of Iowa. In the summers of 1928–29 he worked for the Ontario Department of Mines mapping nonmetallic mineral resources forty miles northwest of Sudbury. He also completed a study of a nepheline-gneiss complex in Ontario. He had hoped to find an explanation for the origin of nepheline syenite, but concluded that it was “at best uncertain.” In Iowa City, in the fall of 1928, Osborne married Agnes Alexandra Jardine, whom he had met as a student at the University of British Columbia. She was from an old ship-building and shipping family of New Brunswick, and had moved to Vancouver as a youngster. Their son, Freleigh Jardine Fitz, was born in 1929. In the summer of 1930 Osborne applied for the post of assistant professor of petrology at McGill University in Montreal to replace Frank D. Adams, the dean of Canadian geologists. His accession was not a shoo-in, but the Yale connection proved to be the determining factor. Recalling Freleigh’s coming to McGill fifty years later, T.H. Clark remarked: “We had many candidates, but Osborne was from Yale and O’Neil [the chairman] was from Yale, and he wanted Osborne.” At McGill, Osborne first worked with Adams on a nepheline syenite from Rhodesia and the laboratory deformation of galena and pyrrhotite. But Adams’s eyesight was failing and he turned all petrographic work over to Osborne. Osborne then turned his attention to the Grenville Series of Quebec and the Monteregian intrusions. It was to be his field of work for the next twenty years. The Quebec Bureau of Mines hired him to study commercial granites and super- vise field parties, thus giving him an opportunity to become familiar with the Precambrian geology in various parts of the province. Because most of the province was unmapped, he drew his field maps with the aid of a compass and was one of the first to use aerial photographs. He worked in the La Belle–L’Annonciation area north-northeast of Montreal, supervising at the same time a growing number of graduate students to whom he would assign selected parts for their thesis work. Detailed fieldwork accompanied by petrographic studies was the key of Osborne’s approach to research. He stuck to the facts and had little use for such theories as gran- itization, which he dubbed “the theory of discontented ions.” He supervised a total of 41 M.S. and Ph.D. theses in the 17 years that he was at McGill. Many of his students went on to occupy important positions in academia, the geological services, and the mining industry. In 1934 Osborne demonstrated that the granite and syenite of the Chatham-Grenville stock cutting Grenville schists and Laurentian gneisses were the youngest Precambrian rocks of the area. In 1936 he published some important papers on the Grenville near Shawinigan Falls, Quebec. MEMORIAL TO FRELEIGH FITZ OSBORNE 15 He divided the series into a lower amphibolite part, probably of metavolcanic origin, and an apparently conformable upper part, consisting of metasedimentary rocks of the sillimanite grade. He interpreted the irregular masses of red granite gneiss in the amphibolite as injections parallel to the foliation, and the gabbro intruded in the upper Grenville as related to the Morin and Saguenay anorthosite massifs. He used petrofabric analysis, just introduced in North Amer- ica by Adolph and Eleanor Knopf, to interpret the style of folding in the upper Grenville. He became intrigued with the origin of anorthosite. On the practical side, he published reports on commercial granites, the rift, grain and hardway of Precambrian granites, the Montauban miner- alized zone, the anhydrite and gypsum deposits at Calumet Island, the iron minerals of Quebec, and he discovered the first brucite deposits in Quebec. In 1937 he was promoted to associate professor. During World War II he taught map read- ing, radio mechanics, and navigation to military personnel. From 1945 to 1947 he sat in the Montreal City Council, representing McGill. In the postwar expansion of the university he was named chairman of the timetable committee. He was then carrying a heavy administrative load, besides teaching and supervising a growing number of graduate students and, as no relief was in sight, he tendered his resignation to the university. The principal, F. Cyril James, asked him to reconsider, but he refused. Jobless, Osborne considered offers from Berkeley and the University of Arizona. But he wanted to remain close to the Precambrian sites, so in October 1947 he offered his services to abbé J.-W.

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