242 Eminent Living Geologists— 
men of London, ever anxious to help a thoughtful student, tended to 
develop a broad concrete practical knowledge. 
After three years of study in the galleries of the British Museum 
literary work took Seeley to Cambridge. Here Adam Sedgwick visited 
him, and invited him to become his assistant. In later years Sedgwick 
wrote in a printed letter—“ In youth you had a reputation for genius 
and skill in some departments of Natural History. It was that 
reputution which made me seek you out and secure your co-operation 
as my assistant and fellow-labourer.”’ 
Seeley at once turned his attention to the local geology of the 
Cambridge district, and had the advantage of finding the coprolite 
diggings for the manufacture of superphosphate of lime, opening up 
an astonishing fauna in beds at the base of the Chalk, which became 
known as the Cambridge Greensand. He had attended Sir Richard 
Owen’s lectures on Paleontology in London, and found this knowledge 
the means of dealing with the vast accumulations of vertebrate fossils 
which occurred in association with shells, corals, and crabs in that 
deposit. 
His work with Sedgwick was of a kind that took the old master 
and the young naturalist together on many geological excursions, 
not only to verify new work in the local ecology, but to examine 
the sections over again in the Isle of Wight, Isle of Sheppey, and 
other localities. The practical field teaching at Cambridge was 
soon placed in Seeley’s hands, and owing to Sedgwick’s illness 
he was called upon to lecture, often at a moment’s notice, upon the 
subject for the day in the Professor’s course. ‘This led Mr. Seeley 
to prepare himself for emergencies, and to visit the important 
geological localities in Wales and Devon and the east and west of 
England, where he commonly travelled, compass in hand, sketching 
the physical features of the country in notebooks when the hammer 
was not in use. 
In these days the volumes of catalogues of the Woodwardian Museuin 
which deal with the fossil Reptilia and Ornithosauria were prepared, 
and printed by the University Press. For ten years his work as 
assistant naturalist in the Woodwardian Museum led to a series of 
publications in 1864 on the affinities between reptiles and birds, and to 
the recognition in 1869 of a bone in the British Museum which had been 
regarded as the tympanic bone of /guanodon, as the vertebra of a new 
type of animal named Ornithopsis, the forerunner of a large order 
which includes the Diplodocus as its most conspicuous member. 
About the time when the Cambridge catalogues were published in 
1870, his old friend John Edward Gray invited him to enter the 
Zoological Department of the British Museum, and Prof. Huxley offered 
a recommendation for the Geological Survey. But Seeley was anxious 
to settle in London and avail himself of the opportunities for work in 
the Museums and Libraries. Some two or three years were spent in 
lectures and literary work. In 1876 Seeley was appointed to the 
Chair of Geography in King’s College. His travels had enabled him to 
become practically acquainted with both the processes and materials 
used in a large number of industries, and his lectures on Economic 
Geography were for many years a systematic discussion of the use of 
