Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick Volume 1 by Adam Sedgwick Adam Sedgwick. See J. W. Clark and T. M. Hughes, The Life and Letters of the Rev. Adam Sedgwick (2 vol., 1890). Sedgwick, Adam. Born Mar. 22, 1785, in Dent, Yorkshire; died Jan. 27, 1873, in Cambridge. British geologist. Professor at Cambridge University (1818–72). Sedgwick’s principal works dealt with the Paleozoic deposits of Great Britain, Belgium, and Germany. In 1835 Sedgwick identified the Cambrian system. In 1839, together with R. Murchison, he identified the Devonian system. In 1903 a museum in memory of Sedgwick was opened at Cambridge. Adam Sedgwick. See J. W. Clark and T. M. Hughes, The Life and Letters of the Rev. Adam Sedgwick (2 vol., 1890). Sedgwick, Adam. Born Mar. 22, 1785, in Dent, Yorkshire; died Jan. 27, 1873, in Cambridge. British geologist. Professor at Cambridge University (1818–72). Sedgwick’s principal works dealt with the Paleozoic deposits of Great Britain, Belgium, and Germany. In 1835 Sedgwick identified the Cambrian system. In 1839, together with R. Murchison, he identified the Devonian system. In 1903 a museum in memory of Sedgwick was opened at Cambridge. The Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick: Volume 1 by Adam Sedgwick. As a footnote on p. 184-186 of vol. 1, there is the following: [introduction by Hollister and letter from Adam Sedgwick] The following letter from the renowned geologist, Professor Adam Sedgwick, of Cambridge University, England, addressed to General Charles F. Sedgwick, of Sharon, Connecticut, contains much valuable information relative to the family of Major General Robert Sedgwick, who is the ancestor of all the Sedgwicks in New England. This letter cannot fail to interest the public. It is intrinsically a gem, aside from the great name of its author. Cambridge, Feb. 26, 1837. After an absence from the University of several months I returned to my chambers yesterday, and found your letter on my study table. I first supposed that it might have been there some time, but on looking at the date, I was greatly surprised that it had reached me in little more than three weeks after it had been committed to the post on the other side of the Atlantic. Of your patriarch, Robert Sedgwick, I have often heard, as the active part he took during the protectorate, made him, in some measure, an historic character; and about the same time there were one or two Puritan divines of considerable note and of the same name; but whether or no they were relations of his, I am not able to inform you. The clan was settled from very early times, among the mountains which form the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Westmoreland, and I believe every family in this island of the name of Sedgwick can trace its descent from ancestors who were settled among those mountains. The name among the country people in the valleys in the north of England, is pronounced _Sigswick_, and the oldest spelling of it that I can find is _Siggeswick_; at least it is so written in many of our old parish records that go back to the reign of Henry VIII. It is good German, and means the _village of victory_, probably designating some place of successful broil, where our rude Saxon or Danish ancestors first settled in the country and drove the old Celtic tribes out of it, or into the remoter recesses of the Cambrian mountains, where we meet with many Celtic names at this day. But in the valleys where the Sedgwicks are chiefly found, the names are almost exclusively Saxon or Danish. Ours, therefore, in very early days was a true border clan. The name of Sedgwick was, I believe, a corruption given like many others through a wish to explain the meaning of a name (Siggeswick,) the real import of which was quite forgotten. The word _Sedge_ is not known in the northern dialects of our island, and the plant itself does not exist among our valley, but a branch of our clan settled in the low, marshy regions of Lincolnshire, and seems to have first adopted the more modern spelling, and at the same time began to use a bundle of sedge (with the leaves drooping like the ears of a corn sheaf,) as the family crest. This branch was never numerous, and is, I believe, now almost extinct. Indeed the Sedgwicks never seem (at least in England,) to flourish away from their native mountains. If you remove them to the low country, they droop and die away in a few generations. A still older crest, and one which suits the history of the race, is an eagle with spread wings. Within my memory, eagles existed among the higher mountains, visible from my native valley. The arms most commonly borne by the Sedgwicks, are composed of a red Greek cross, with five bells attached to the bars. I am too ignorant of heraldic terms to describe the shield correctly -- I believe, however, that this is the shield of the historic branch, and that there is another shield belonging to the _Siggeswicks_ of the mountains, with a different quartering, but I have it not before me and do not remember it sufficiently well to give any account of it. All the border clans, and ours among the rest, suffered greatly during the wars of York and Lancaster. After the Reformation they seem generally to have leaned to the Puritanical side, and many of them, your ancestor among the rest, served in Cromwell's army. From the Reformation to the latter half of the last century, our border country enjoyed great prosperity. The valleys were subdivided into small properties; each head of a family lived on his own estate, and such a thing as a rented farm hardly existed in the whole country, which was filled with a race of happy, independent yeomanry. This was the exact condition of your clansmen in this part of England. They were kept in a kind of humble affluence, by the manufactory of their wool, which was produced in great abundance by the vast flocks of sheep which were fed on the neighboring mountains. I myself, remember two or three old men of the last century, who in their younger days had been in the yearly habit of riding up to London to negotiate the sale of stockings, knit by the hands of the lasses of our own smiling valleys. The changes of manners, and the progress of machinery, destroyed, root and branch, this source of rural wealth; and a dismal change has now taken place in the social and moral aspect of the land of your fathers. It is now a very poor country, a great portion of the old yeomanry, (provincially called _statesmen_,) has been swept away. Most of the family estates (some of which had descended from father to son for three hundred years,) have been sold to strangers. The evil has, I hope, reached its crisis, and the country may improve, but it seems morally impossible that it should ever again assume the happy Arcadian character which it had before the changes that undermined its whole social system. I have now told you all I can compress into one sheet, of the land of your fathers' fathers, of the ancestors of that pilgrim from whom my transatlantic cousins are descended. A few families have survived the shock; mine among the rest. And I have a brother in the valley of Dent, who now enjoys a property which our family has had ever since the Reformation. I fear you will think this information very trifling -- such as it is, it is very much at your service. Believe me, Sir, your very faithful servant, Adam Sedgwick. Adam Sedgwick (22 March 1785 – 27 January 1873) was one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale and later the Cambrian period. The latter proposal was based on work which he did on Welsh rock strata. Though he had guided the young Charles Darwin in his early study of geology, Sedgwick was an outspoken opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Contents. Life and career. Sedgwick was born in Dent, Yorkshire, the third child of an Anglican vicar. He was educated at Sedbergh School and Trinity College, Cambridge. [ 1 ] He studied mathematics and theology, and obtained his BA (5th Wrangler) from the University of Cambridge in 1808 and his MA in 1811. His academic mentors at Cambridge were Thomas Jones and John Dawson. He became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge from 1818 until his death in 1873. Sedgwick studied the geology of the British Isles and Europe. He founded the system for the classification of Cambrian rocks and with Roderick Murchison worked out the order of the Carboniferous and underlying Devonian strata. These studies were mostly carried out in the 1830s. [ 2 ] The investigations into the Devonian meant that Sedgwick was involved with Murchison in a vigorous debate with Henry De la Beche, in what became known as the great Devonian controversy. [ 3 ] Sedgwick investigated the phenomena of metamorphism and concretion, and was the first to distinguish clearly between stratification, jointing, and slaty cleavage. He was elected to Fellow of the Royal Society on 1 February 1821. Opposition to evolution. The Church of England, though by no means a fundamentalist or evangelical church, encloses a wide range of beliefs. During Sedgwick's life there developed something of a chasm between the conservative high church believers and the liberal wing. After simmering for some years, the publication of Essays and Reviews by liberal churchmen in 1860 pinpointed the differences. In all this, Sedgwick, whose science and faith were intertwined in a natural theology, was definitely on the conservative side, and extremely outspoken about it. He told an 1831 meeting of the Geological Society of London: "No opinion can be heretical, but that which is not true. Conflicting falsehoods we can comprehend; but truths can never war against each other. I affirm, therefore, that we have nothing to fear from the results of our enquiries, provided they be followed in the laborious but secure road of honest induction. In this way we may rest assured that we shall never arrive at conclusions opposed to any truth, either physical or moral, from whatever source that truth may be derived. [ 4 ] This may seem even-handed; Sedgwick is saying that he does not expect to find contradiction between the bible and science. But contradictions did occur, both in geology (where he had genuine expertise) and in biology (where he did not). His geological position was catastrophist in the mid 1820s, but following Charles Lyell's 1830 publication of uniformitarian ideas he came to accept that a worldwide flood was untenable and talked of floods at various dates before recanting his earlier ideas in 1831. [ 5 ] He strongly believed that species of organisms originated in a succession of Divine creative acts throughout the long expanse of history. Any form of development that denied a direct creative action smacked as materialistic and amoral. For Sedgwick, moral truths (the obtainment of which separates man from beast) were to be distinguished from physical truths, and to combine these or blur them together could only lead to disastrous consequences. In fact, one's own hope for immortality may ultimately rest on it. While he became increasingly Evangelical with age, he strongly supported advances in geology against conservative churchmen. At the September 1844 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at York he achieved national celebrity for his reply defending modern geology against an attack by the Dean of York, the Reverend William Cockburn, who described it as unscriptural. The entire chapter house of the cathedral refused to sit down with Sedgwick, and he was opposed by conservative papers including The Times , but his courage was hailed by the full spectrum of the liberal press, and the confrontation was a key moment in the battle over relations between Scripture and science. [ 6 ] When Robert Chambers anonymously published his own theory of universal evolutionism as his "development hypothesis" in the book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published in October 1844 to immediate popular success, Sedgwick's many friends urged him to respond. Like other eminent scientists he initially ignored the book, but the subject kept recurring and he then read it carefully and made a withering attack on the book in the July 1845 edition of the Edinburgh Review . Vestiges "comes before [its readers] with a bright, polished, and many-coloured surface, and the serpent coils a false philosophy, and asks them to stretch out their hands and pluck the forbidden fruit", he wrote in his review. [ 7 ] Accepting the arguments in Vestiges was akin to falling from grace and away from God's favor. He lashed out at the book in a letter to Charles Lyell, bemoaning the consequences of it conclusions. ". If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!" [ 8 ] Later, Sedgwick added a long preface to the 5th edition of his Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge (1850), including a lengthy attack on Vestiges and theories of development in general. Charles Darwin was one of his geology students in 1831, and accompanied him on a field trip to Wales that summer. The two kept up a correspondence while Darwin was on the Beagle expedition, and afterwards. However, Sedgwick never accepted the case for evolution made in On the Origin of Species in 1859 any more than he did that in Vestiges in 1844. In response to receiving and reading Darwin's book, he wrote to Darwin saying: "If I did not think you a good tempered & truth loving man I should not tell you that. I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly; parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous — You have deserted—after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth—the true method of induction—& started up a machinery as wild I think as Bishop Wilkin's locomotive that was to sail with us to the Moon. Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved. Why then express them in the language & arrangements of philosophical induction?." [ 9 ] Sedgwick regarded natural selection as. "but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts. Development is a better word because more close to the cause of the fact. For you do not deny causation. I call (in the abstract) causation the will of God: & I can prove that He acts for the good of His creatures. He also acts by laws which we can study & comprehend—Acting by law, & under what is called final cause, comprehends, I think, your whole principle." He emphasized his distinction between the moral and physical aspects of life, "There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly." If humanity broke this distinction it "would suffer a damage that might brutalize it—& sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history". [ 9 ] In a letter to another correspondent, Sedgwick was even harsher on Darwin's book, calling it " utterly false " and writing that "It repudiates all reasoning from final causes; and seems to shut the door on any view (however feeble) of the God of Nature as manifested in His works. From first to last it is a dish of rank materialism cleverly cooked and served up." [ 10 ] Despite this difference of opinion, the two men remained friendly until Sedgwick's death. In contrast to Sedgwick, the liberal church members (who included highly qualified biologists such as George Rolleston, William Henry Flower and William Kitchen Parker) were usually comfortable with evolution. Sedgwick's opposition seems linked, not to his religion as such, but to the particular cast of his beliefs. Sedgwick Prize. In 1865 the University of Cambridge received from A. A. Van Sittart the sum of X500 "for the purpose of encouraging the study of geology among the resident members of the university, and in honour of the Rev. Adam Sedgwick." Thus was founded the Sedgwick prize to be given every third year for the best essay on some geological subject. The first Sedgwick prize was awarded in 1873. On the death of Sedgwick it was decided that his memorial should take the form of a new and larger museum. Hitherto the geological collections had been placed in the Woodwardian Museum in Cockerell's Building. Through the energy of Professor T. McK. Hughes (successor to Sedgwick) the new building, termed the Sedgwick Museum, was completed and opened in 1903. [ 11 ] Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Sedgwick, Adam. ​ SEDGWICK , ADAM (1785–1873), geologist, was born on 22 March 1785 at Dent in the dales of western Yorkshire. He was the third child of Richard Sedgwick, perpetual curate of Dent, by his second wife, Margaret Sturgis. Till his sixteenth year he attended the grammar school at Dent, of which, during this time, his father became headmaster. Adam was next sent to the well-known school at Sedbergh. There he remained till 1804, when he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a sizar. For a few months before he read with John Dawson [q. v.], the surgeon and mathematician, who had helped to bring him into the world. An attack of typhoid fever in the autumn of 1805 nearly proved fatal. He was elected scholar in 1807, and graduated B.A. in 1808, with the place of fifth wrangler. The examiner, who settled the final order of the candidates, is said to have considered Sedgwick the one who showed most signs of inherent power. Sedgwick continued at Cambridge, taking private pupils and reading for a fellowship. The latter he obtained in 1810, but at the cost of serious and possibly permanent injury to his health. In May 1813 he broke a blood-vessel, and for months remained in a very weak state. In 1815, however, he was able to undertake the duties of assistant tutor, and he was ordained in 1816. The great opportunity of his life came in the early summer of 1818, when the Woodwardian professorship of geology became vacant [see Hailstone, John ]. Though Sedgwick was practically ignorant of the subject, and his opponent, the Rev. George Cornelius Gorham [q. v.], was known to have studied it, he seems to have so favourably impressed the members of the university that he was elected by 186 votes to 59. Hitherto the office had been almost a sinecure; Sedgwick, although the income was then only 100 l . a year, determined to make it a reality. He at once began earnest study of the subject, spending part of the summer at work in Derbyshire, and gave his first course of lectures in the Easter term of 1819. It was soon evident that a wise choice had been made. Sedgwick's lectures became each year more attractive. His repute as a geologist rapidly increased, and he took a leading part in promoting the study of natural science in the university. One instrument for this purpose was the Cambridge Philosophical Society, in the foundation of which he was one of the most active. He interested himself in the geological collection of the university, which he augmented often at his private expense, and saw transferred to a more commodious building in 1841. In 1818 Sedgwick was elected fellow of the Geological Society; he was president in 1831, and received its Wollaston medal in 1851. He was made fellow of the Royal Society in 1830, and gained the Copley medal in 1863. In 1833 he was president of the British Association, and served as president of the geological section in 1837, 1845, 1853, and 1860. He was made ​ honorary D.C.L. of Oxford in 1860 and honorary LL.D. of Cambridge in 1866. Though Sedgwick spent much time in the field during the vacations, he seldom left the British Isles, and to Ireland he went but twice. He visited the continent only four times, going as far as Chamonix in 1816, to Paris in 1827, to the Eastern Alps with Murchison in 1829, and he made, with the same companion, another long geological tour in Germany and Belgium in 1839. Meanwhile Sedgwick engaged in much university business. He was senior proctor in 1827, and in 1847 he was made Cambridge secretary to Prince Albert when the latter was elected chancellor of the university, and from 1850 to 1852 served as a member of a royal commission of inquiry into the condition of that university. He was appointed by his college to the vicarage of Shudy-Camps (tenable with his fellowship), declined the valuable living of East Farleigh offered him in 1831 by Lord-chancellor Brougham, accepted a prebendal stall at Norwich in 1834, and declined the deanery of Peterborough in 1853. At Norwich, as in Cambridge, he stimulated an interest in science, and was hardly less popular as a preacher than as a host. But this removed him from Cambridge only for two months in the year. He delivered his usual courses of lectures till the end of 1870, though in later years he not seldom had to avail himself of the services of a deputy. He died after a few days' illness very early in the morning of 27 Jan. 1873, and was buried in the chapel of Trinity College. It was determined to build a new geological museum as a memorial, and a large sum was collected for the purpose, but this scheme has not yet been carried out (1897). His name is commemorated by the ‘Sedgwick Prize’ (for an essay on a geological subject), founded by Mr. A. A. Vansittart in 1865. Sedgwick was quick in temper, but sympathetic, generous, and openhanded; a lover of children, though he never married. As a speaker and lecturer he was often discursive, sometimes colloquial, but on occasion most eloquent. He possessed a marvellous memory, and was an admirable raconteur. Thus his humour, his simplicity of manner, and his wide sympathies made him welcome among ‘all sorts and conditions of men,’ from the roadside tavern to the royal palace. A reformer in politics, he was not without prejudices against some changes. The same was also true in science. Though so eminently a pioneer, new ideas met sometimes with a hesitating reception. He was rather slowly convinced of the former great extension of glaciers advocated in this country by Louis Agassiz and William Buckland [q. v.], never quite accepted Lyell's uniformitarian teaching, and was always strongly opposed to Darwin's hypothesis as to the origin of species. But he had a marvellous power of unravelling the stratigraphy of a complicated district, of co-ordinating facts, and of grasping those which were of primary importance as the basis of induction. A certain want of concentration diminished the quantity and sometimes affected the quality of his work, but any one whose good nature is great and interests are wide, who is at once a professor in a university and a canon of a cathedral—and active in both—must be liable to many serious interruptions. Moreover, Sedgwick's health, after his election to a fellowship, was never really good. His eyes, especially in later life, gave him much trouble; one indeed had been permanently injured in 1821 by a splinter from a rock. He seems to have met with more than his share of accidents—falls, a dislocated wrist, and a broken arm. It is evident that he disliked literary composition and was somewhat given to procrastinate. But, notwithstanding these drawbacks, he left an indelible mark on his own university, and will be ever honoured as one of the great leaders in the heroic age of geology. At the outset of his career, as he stated in his last published words, ‘three prominent hopes’ possessed his heart—to form a collection worthy of the university, to secure the building of a suitable museum, and to ‘bring together a class of students who would listen to my teaching, support me by their sympathy, and help me by the labour of their hands.’ These hopes, as he says, were fully realised ( Catalogue of the Cambrian and Silurian Fossils , &c., Pref. p. xxxi). Sedgwick in his prime was a striking figure: almost six feet high, spare but strongly built, never bald, close-shaven, with dark eyes and complexion, strongly marked features, overhanging forehead, and bushy eyebrows. A portrait in oils by Thomas Phillips, R.A., dated 1832, and owned by Mr. John H. Gurney of Norwich, was reproduced for the ‘Life and Letters’ (1890), as was also a fine crayon portrait by Lowes Dickinson, dated 1867, now in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge. Busts of Sedgwick by H. Weekes and Thomas Woolner are in possession of the Geological Society, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Sedgwick never published a complete book on any geological subject, though he wrote a lengthy introduction to the description of ​ ‘British Palæozoic Fossils in the Geological Museum of the University of Cambridge’ by Professor McCoy (1854), and a preface to ‘A Catalogue of the Cambrian and Silurian Fossils,’ in the same collection, by John William Salter [q. v.] and Professor John Morris [q. v.] (1873). He appears in the ‘Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers’ as the sole author of forty papers and joint-author of sixteen, published for the most part in the ‘Transactions’ or the ‘Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,’ the ‘Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society,’ or the ‘Philosophical Magazine.’ Of these the more important can be grouped in five divisions: 1. ‘On the Geology of Cornwall and Devon,’ a subject which was dealt with in the first of his more important communications, read before the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1820 ( Trans. C. P. S . i. 89). Other papers follow, some of them written in conjunction with Murchison. In these the order of the rocks beneath the new red sandstone of the south-west of England was worked out, the stratigraphy of the Carboniferous deposits and of the underlying Devonian system was gradually established, and some valuable contributions were made to the history of the various crystalline masses in Devon and Cornwall, including those in the Lizard peninsula. 2. The next group of papers, small in number, deals with the ‘new red sandstone’ in the northern half of England, giving the results of field work between 1821 and 1824. One of them describes the mineral character and succession of the magnesian and other limestones, the marls, and the sandstones, which extend along the eastern flank of the Pennine range from the south of Northumberland to the north of Derbyshire, dwelling more particularly on the lower part; another deals with the corresponding rocks, breccias and conglomerates, with sandstones, marls and thin calcareous bands, on the western side of the same range, more especially in the valley of the Eden. The part of the new red sandstone more particularly worked out by Sedgwick has since been termed Permian, but his diagnosis of the relations of the strata, their marked discordancy from the underlying carboniferous and their closer affinity with the overlying red rocks, since called Trias, has proved to be correct. 3. A third group deals with a yet more difficult question—the geology of the lake district and its environs. The researches just named were carried downwards through the underlying carboniferous rocks, and then the intricacies of the great central massif were attacked. This task more especially occupied the summers from 1822 to 1824, and its results were published in papers, dating from 1831 to 1857. A more popular account was also given in five letters addressed to Wordsworth, published afterwards in Hudson's ‘Complete Guide to the Lakes’ (1853). 4. A fourth group includes a large number of miscellaneous papers, published at various dates and on different geological topics. Among the more important of these may be noted ‘On Trap Dykes in Yorkshire and Durham’ (1822); ‘On the Association of Trap Rocks with the Mountain Limestone Formation in High Teesdale’ (1823–4); two in 1828, written in conjunction with Murchison—one on the Isle of Arran, another on the secondary rocks in the north of Scotland; one (with the same coadjutor) on the Eastern Alps (1829–30); and last, but not least, the classic paper ‘On the Structure of Large Mineral Masses, &c.,’ read before the Geological Society of London, and published in their ‘Transactions’ (iii. 461). 5. The fifth and largest group deals with the geology of Wales. Sedgwick first took this in hand in the summer of 1831, when he was working for part of his time with Charles Robert Darwin [q. v.] Commencing with the rocks of Anglesey for a base, he worked over Carnarvonshire, and in 1832 carried on his researches into Merionethshire and Cardiganshire. In 1834 he accompanied Murchison over the district on the eastern border of the principality, on which the latter had been engaged. The results of these and of later visits, more especially in 1842 and 1843, were described from time to time in verbal communications to the Cambridge Philosophical Society and to the British Association, but the first systematic papers were read to the Geological Society in 1843 ( Proc. Geol. Soc . vol. iv. pt. i. pp. 212; Quart. Journal Geol. Soc . i. 5). Others followed in 1844 and 1846. Soon after Murchison had published his ‘Silurian System,’ in 1839, it became evident that difficulties existed in correlating the work done by the two geologists in their several districts, and a controversy gradually arose concerning the limits of the Cambrian system as established by Sedgwick and of the Silurian system of Murchison (names which were first used about 1835). The general structure of north Wales had been determined by Sedgwick as early as 1832, and subsequent investigation in this region has confirmed the general accuracy of the order in which he placed the beds and of the main divisions which he established; while it has been proved that Murchison had confused together two distinct formations, ​ the Caradoc (Bala of Sedgwick) and that now called Upper Llandovery (the May Hill sandstone of Sedgwick), and had also fallen into serious error as to the stratigraphy of his own Llandeilo beds. The dispute reached an acute stage in 1852, when Sedgwick read two papers to the Geological Society of London. He considered that in regard to these, especially the former, the council of this society had dealt unfairly with him; and from 1854, after another dispute over a paper ‘On the May Hill Sandstone,’ &c., he ceased to be on terms of friendship with Murchison and was estranged from the society. By these papers, which embodied the results of investigations in 1852–3, the distinction of the true Caradoc and of the May Hill sandstone was established. Sedgwick was also author of a ‘Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge.’ This book originated in a sermon, preached in the chapel of Trinity College at the commemoration of benefactors on 17 Dec. 1832. Next year it was published, by request, after several months' delay. It ran through four editions in two years, and in 1850 was republished as a bulky volume, with a very long preface (cf. Notes and Queries , 8th ser. xii. 344). [There are frequent references to Sedgwick in the lives of Buckland, C. Darwin, Lyell, and Murchison, and obituary notices appeared during 1873 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, and other scientific periodicals; but these have been superseded by the above-named Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, by J. W. Clark and T. McK. Hughes (2 vols. Cambridge, 1890).]