Sedgwick 257 



scientific proclivities, and he at once threw himself with 

 all his energy and enthusiasm into the duties of his new 

 vocation. Gifted with mental power of no common order, 

 which had been sedulously trained in a wide range of 

 studies, with a keen eye for the geological structure of a 

 region, and with abundant bodily prowess to sustain him in 

 the most arduous exertions in the field, eloquent, witty, 

 vivacious, he took at once the place of prominence in the 

 University which he retained to the last, and he came 

 with rapid strides to the front of all who in that day 

 cultivated the infant science of geology in England. 



What little geology Sedgwick knew, when he became a 

 professor of the science, seems to have been of a decidedly 

 Wernerian kind. He began his geological writings with 

 an account of the primitive ridge and its associated rocks in 

 Devon and Cornwall. His earliest paper might have been 

 appropriately printed in the first volume of the Memoirs of 

 the Wernerian Society. In later years, referring to his 

 Neptunist beginnings, he confessed that " for a long while 

 I was troubled with water on the brain, but light and heat 

 have completely dissipated it," and he spoke of " the Wer- 

 nerian nonsense I learnt in my youth." l It was by his 

 own diligent work in the field that he came to a true per- 

 ception of geological principles. His excursions carried 

 him all over England, and enabled him to bring back each 

 season a quantity of specimens for his museum, and a 

 multitude of notes from which he regaled the Cambridge 

 Philosophical Society with an account of his doings. 

 Eventually he joined the Geological Society of London, 



1 Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick, by J. W. Clark and T. M'K. 

 Hughes, vol. i. p. 284. 



S 



