142 
ADAM SEDGWICK AND WILLIAM BUCKLAND. 
ments of the science it was my duty to study and to teach ; 2nd, 
that a geological museum might be built by the University amply 
capable of containing its future collections ; and lastly, that I might 
bring together a class of students who would listen to my teachings, 
support me by their sympathy, and help me by the labour of their 
hands. It now makes me happy to say that all these hopes have 
for many years been amply realised." 
The following letter, written to Professor Louis Agassiz, exhibits 
Sedgwick's views as to the new theory of evolution which a few years 
later found so able an advocate in Charles Darwin. 
Sedgivick to Agassiz* 
Trinity College, Cambridge, 
April lOfh, 18J^5, 
My Dear Professor, 
The British Association is to meet here about the middle of 
June, and I trust that the occurrence will again bring you to Eng- 
land, and give me the great happiness of entertaining you in Trinity 
College. Indeed, I wish very much to see you, for many years have 
now elapsed since I last had that pleasure. May God preserve your 
life, which has been spent in promoting the great ends of truth and 
knowledge. 
Your great work on fossil fishes is now before me, and 1 
also possess the first number of your monograph upon the Fossils 
of the Old Red Sandstone. I trust the new numbers will follow the 
first in rapid succession. I love now and then to find a resting-place, 
and your works always give me one. The opinions of Geoffroy St. 
Hilaire and his dark school seem to be gaining some ground in Eng- 
land. I detest them, because I think them untrue. They shut out 
all argument from design and all notion of a creative Providence, and 
in so doing they appear to me to deprive all physiology of its life and 
strength, and language of its beauty and meaning. I am as much 
offended in taste by the turgid mystical bombast of Geoffroy as I am 
disgusted by his cold and irrational materialism. When men of his 
school talk of the elective affinity of organic types, I hear a jargon I 
cannot comprehend, and I turn from it in disgust ; and when they 
* Louis Agassiz, his life and correspondence by E. C. Agassiz, London, 1885, p. 383. 
