LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 6-17 



of an intelligent First Cause, we give that necessity a new concen- 

 tration, by making every material power, manifested since the crea- 

 tion of matter, to have emanated from God's bosom by a single act 

 of omnipotent prescience." The third annual meeting of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science took place in Cambridge 

 in 1833, and Sedgwick was chosen its president for that year. In 

 the addi'ess delivered by iiim on the occasion, he used language 

 similar to the above, declaring that " man was compelled by his 

 intellectual nature to ascend from phenomena to laws, and the 

 moment he grasped the idea of a law he was compelled, by the very 

 constitution of his inner mind, to consider that law as the annuncia- 

 tion of the will of a supreme intelligence." I preserve with care a 

 report of this memorable meeting, especially for the sake of the auto- 

 graphs which it contains in fac simile of the numerous savans from 

 all quarters who were present. There Sedgwick's own name appears, 

 the counterpart of the manuscript signatures of his which I have. 

 Like several other contemporaries of note at Cambridge, as, for 

 example, the two Roses, Hugh James and Henry John, Sedgwick 

 was fi'om the north of England. His speech, in which he was very 

 voluble and sometimes eloquent, was strongly northei-n in accent, as 

 was theirs ; and his countneance — long, bony, dark, and stern — was 

 northern, perhaps Norse, in type. The relics which I possess of 

 Professor Sedgwick are volumes, once his property, containing some 

 curious manuscript annotations from liis pen. The first book con- 

 sists of two collections, bound up together, of verses by self-taught 

 men — one named Sanderson, the other, Nieholson. The Professor, 

 besides inscribing within both his name, " A. Sedgwick," has re- 

 corded in characteristic language the manner in which he became 

 possessed of the two collections, the authors of which seem to have 

 somewhat interested him. Of Sanderson, he says : " During the 

 summer of 1824 I visited the great quarries of Chalk near Pisley, 

 Cumberland, and purchased the following poems of the author, a 

 common lime-burner, whose brains had been heated by the fumes of 

 his kiln." Of Nicholson, he writes : "I met the author on the top 

 of a coach. He was a rough son of the Muses, who was carrying 

 bundles of his poems from village to village, and especially to the 

 ale-ho\ises, where he was too well known. ' In this kind of goods, I 

 have all this side of Yorkshire to myself,' " he said. A second relic 

 which I show of Professor Sedgwick is Hichard Owen's discourse on 



