THE 



GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 



No. LXX.— APRIL, 1870. 



oiaic3-iisr.A.Xj .a.s,tioxj:ejs. 



EMINENT LIVING GEOLOGISTS. 



I. — Eev. Adam Sedgwick, M.A., LL.D., F.E.S., Woodwardian Pro- 

 fessor of Geology in the University of Cambridge. 

 ("With a Portrait.) 



IN every branch of Natural Science there are earnest zealous 

 workers, whose life-long devotion to its cause entitles them to 

 be warmly remembered and even beloved, especially when their 

 labours have been protracted over more than half a century ; so long- 

 indeed, that to many of the scientific youth of the present day they 

 are only known by name. 



Such an one is the now venerable Adam Sedgwick, Woodwardian 

 Professor of Geology in the University of Cambridge, and certainly 

 one of the most eminent of living geologists. 



Mr. Sedgwick was born at Dent, in Yorkshire, June 1784, and 

 entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated as 5th 

 wrangler in 1808, and' was elected, in 1810, a Fellow of Trinity 

 College, of which he is now the oldest member. In 1818 he succeeded 

 Prof. Hailstone in the chair of Geology, founded at Cambridge by 

 the celebrated Dr. John Woodward. 



At this period little was known in England of geological science, 

 but a general notion prevailed— agreeing closely with old Dr. 

 Woodward's theory, who founded the chair^that all fossils were the 

 result of a universal Deluge which had once swept over the whole 

 earth, and to the agency of which all the strata owed their origin. 

 For notwithstanding the writings of Werner, Hutton, and Playfair, 

 William Smith, and others, already in existence, only the key-notes 

 of geological science had as yet been touched, and it was needful 

 that the patient labours of many such men should accumulate for 

 years before the full chord of geological harmonies could be evoked. 



Mr. Sedgwick's paper on Devon and Cornwall, read before the 

 Cambridge Philosophical Society in May, 1820, and published in 

 1822, was the result of work done by him as early as 1819. 



He saw then that the Plymouth fossil corals could not be identi- 

 fied with, and were older than those of the Mountain Limestone (pp. 

 93, 142, vol. i., Cambr. Phil. Trans.). It is interesting to note here 

 that he was one of the secretaries of the Cambridge Philosophical 



VOL. VII. — NO. LXX. 10 



