| THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1873 | | 
SEDGWICK 
EOLOGY has lost her veteran leader! While yet 
firm in intellect, full of kind and generous feeling, 
and occupied on the last pages of the latest record of his 
labours, in the ninth decad of a noble life, Sedgwick has 
gone to his rest. Under the shadow of this great loss we 
look back through more than half a century, and behold 
no more conspicuous figure in the front ranks of advancing 
geology than the strenuous master workman, the eloquent 
teacher, the chivalrous advocate of science, who has now 
finished his task. Severe illness, borne with fortitude, 
had gradually withdrawn him from scenes once brightened 
by his ever-welcome presence, but could not tame the 
high spirit, or cloud the genial sympathies which had won 
for him, more than for other men, the loving admiration 
‘of his fellows in age and followers in study. Rarely has 
a patriarchal life been crowned with such enduring and 
affectionate respect. 
Born in 1785, of a family long resident in a secluded 
Yorkshire Valley under the shadow of Wharnside, the boy 
early acquired the hardy habits and imbibed the free spirit 
of the north, and the man retained till his latest hour, a 
romantic love of the bold hills and rushing streams. 
amidst which he first became an observer of nature. 
Every homestead and every family in his native dale of 
Dent were treasured in his memory, and one of the latest 
of his minor literary essays was to plead against the 
change of the ancient name of a little hamlet situated not 
far from his birth-place. 
Educated under Dawson, at the weil-known school of 
Sedbergh, while Gough and Dalton were residing at 
Kendal, he proceeded to the great college in Cambridge, to 
which Whewell, Peacock, and Airy afterwards contributed 
so much renown. Devoted to the Newtonian philosophy, 
and especially attracted by discoveries then opening in 
all directions in physical science, he stood in the list as 
fifth wrangler, a point from which many eminent men 
have taken a successful spring. He took his degree in 
1808, became a fellow in 1809, was ordained in 1817, and 
for some years occupied himself in the studies and duties 
of academic life. His attention to geology was speedily 
awakened, and became by degrees a ruling motive for the 
long excursions, mostly on horseback, which the state of 
his health rendered necessary in the vacations. 
It was not, however, so much his actual acquirements 
in geology as the rare energy of his mind, and the habit 
of large thought and expanding views on natural phzeno- 
mena, that marked him out as the fittest man in Cam- 
bridge to occupy the Woodwardian chair vacated by 
ailstone, Special knowledge of rocks and fossils was 
mot so much required as a well-trained and courageous 
antellect, equal to encounter theoretical difficulties and 
theological obstacles which then impeded the advance of 
geology. 
The writer well remembers, at an evening conversazione 
at Sir Joseph Banks’s, to which, as a satellite of Smith, he 
was admitted at eighteen years of age, hearing the remark 
that the new professor of geology at Cambridge promised 
No, 171—Vot. Vil. 
G5 tamales 
“NATURE 
257 
to master what he was appointed to teach, and was 
esteemed likely to do so effectually. In the same year 
Buckland, his friendly rival for forty years, received his 
appointment at Oxford, where he had previously begun to 
signalise himself by original researches in palzontology. 
At this time the importance of organic remains in geo- 
logical reasoning, as taught by Smith, was not much felt 
in Cambridge, where a new-born mathematical power 
opened out into various lines of physical research, and 
encouraged a more scientific aspect of mineralogy, and a 
tendency to consider the pheenomena of earth-structure in 
the light of mechanical philosophy. This is very apparent 
in the early volumes of the Cambridge Philosophical So- 
ciety, established in 1819, with Sedgwick and Lee for 
secretaries. Accordingly, the earliest memoirs of Sedg- 
wick, which appear in the Cambridge Transactions for 
1820-21, are devoted to unravel the complicated phzeno- 
mena of the granite, killas, and serpentine in Cornwall 
and Devon ; and to these followed notices of the trap- 
dykes of Yorkshire and Durham, 1822, and the stratified 
gual irruptive greenstones of High Teesdale, 1823-24. Inhis 
frequent excursions to the north he was much interested in 
the varying mineral characters and fossils of the magnesian 
limestone, and the remarkable nonconformity of this rock 
to the subjacent coal, millstone grit, and mountain lime- 
stone ; and at length his observations became the basis 
of that large systematic memoir which is one of the most 
valuable of the early contributions to the Transactions of 
the Geological Society. Begun in 1822 and finished in 
1828, this essay not only cleared the way to a more exact 
study of the coal formation and New Red sandstones of 
England, but connected them by just inference with the 
corresponding deposits in North Germany, which he 
visited for the purpose of comparison in 1829. 
To one of these equestrian excursions the writer was 
indebted for his first introduction to Sedgwick. In the 
year 1822 I was walking across Durham and North 
Yorkshire into Westmoreland. It was hot summer-time, 
and after sketching the High Force, in Teesdale, was re- 
clining in the shade, reading some easily carried book. 
Came riding up, from Middleton, a dark-visaged, con- 
spictious man, with a miner’s boy behind. Opposite me 
he stopped, and courteously asked if I had looked at the 
celebrated waterfall which was near ; adding that though 
he had previously visited Teesdale, he had not found an 
occasion .for viewing it ; that he would like to stop then 
and there todo so, but for the boy behind him, “ who had 
him in tow to take him to Cronkley Scar,” a high dark 
hill right ahead, where, he said, “the limestone was 
turned into lump-sugar.” 
A few days afterwards, on his way to the lakes, he 
rested for a few hours at Kirkby Lonsdale to converse 
with Smith, who was engaged on his geological map of 
the district, and had just discovered some interesting 
fossils in the laminated strata below Old Red sandstone, 
on Kirkby Moor, perhaps the earliest observation of shells 
in what were afterwards called the upper Ludlow beds. 
The two men thus brought together were much different, 
yet in one respect alike : alike in a certain manly simpli- 
city, and unselfish communication of thought. Eight 
years after this Adam Sedgwick was President of the 
Geological Society, and in that capacity presented to 
William Smith the first Wollaston medal. The writer 
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