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Key Events in the History of Nova Scotia: 1827.
§Feb 27th: The Thirteenth Assembly of the Nova Scotia Legislature convened.
§Moorsom estimated the population of Nova Scotia, including Cape Breton, at 143,000. He estimated that of this only 600 were Indian and 1,500 were black. A doubling, Moorsom further concludes, of the 1817 population of 72,000.
§March 9, 1827: A report was tabled in the House of Assembly. In this report (prepared at a time when Joseph Howe, apparently, was the Superintendent of Indian Affairs) suggested that greater attention should be paid to the Indian land question. It was thought that individual families should have something akin to an absolute claim to their lots. To this end surveys should be carried out.
§Benefit of Clergy: This was a legal plea which goes back many years, whereby a clerk, or a learned man may be saved from the consequences of his crime. In 1827 it was abolished by statute. (Act,7 and 8 Geo. IV. cap.28.) (Incidentally, the plea could be used only once and the benefit claimed could only be given to one who proved to the court he could read. If the plea worked then the person was branded on the hand.)
§February, Thursday, 1st: The 13th general assembly (1st session) met. Some names to be recognised: Lawrence Hartshorne for the County of Halifax; Thomas Chandler Haliburton for the County of Annapolis; John Starr for the County of Kings; John Barss for the County of Queen's; Richard John Uniacke, junr., for the County of Cape Breton; and, Charles Rufus Fairbanks and Beamish Murdoch, for the Town of Halifax. It is interesting to note that but ten counties were listed: Halifax, Annapolis, Lunenburg, Cumberland, Kings, Queens, Hants, Shelburne, Sydney, and Cape Breton. All of these had two representatives each, except the County of Halifax which had four. The towns (as opposed to the counties) each had a representative, except for Halifax which had two). These towns were: Halifax, Truro, Onslow, Londonderry, Annapolis, Granville, Digby, Lunenburg, Amherst, Horton, Cornwallis, Liverpool, Windsor, Falmouth, Newport, Shelburne, Barrington, and Yarmouth (It would seem there were no towns to be separately represented from Cape Breton.)
§February 26th, Thomas Chandler Haliburton made his speech before the house on the Catholic Petition.
§John Walker (1781-1859), a chemist, inventor, born Stockton-on-Tees, in 1827, invented the friction match; they were called "Congreves" (alluding to the Congreve rocket), later named Luicifers, and, eventually, matches. Though it was early as 1805 that a Frenchman by the name of Chancel invented an apparatus which "consisted of a bottle containing asbestos, which was saturated with strong sulphuric acid, and flame was produced by bringing this into contact with matches, coated at the ends with sulphur, and tipped with a mixture of chlorate of potash and sugar."
§On 27th March, 1827, Darwin gave a short talk to the Plinian Society, a natural history society in the University of Edinburgh, and communicated two discoveries which he had made: First, "that the ova of the Flustra posses organs of motion; and the second, that the small black globular body hitherto mistaken for the young Fucus Lorius [a seaweed], is in reality the ovum of the pontobdella muricata [a leech that infests skates]. At the request of the society he promised to draw up an account of the facts and to lay it, together with specimens, before the Society next evening."
§April, 1827: Liverpool