Background
Adam Sedgwick was born on March 22, 1785, at Dent in his ancestral region of the Yorkshire Dales. He was the third child of an Anglican vicar.
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Adam Sedgwick was born on March 22, 1785, at Dent in his ancestral region of the Yorkshire Dales. He was the third child of an Anglican vicar.
He was educated at Sedbergh School and Trinity College, Cambridge.
He studied mathematics and theology, and obtained his BA (5th Wrangler) from the University of Cambridge in 1808 and his MA in 1811. On July 20, 1817 he was ordained a deacon, then a year later he was ordained as a priest. His academic mentors at Cambridge were Thomas Jones and John Dawson.
In 1818 he was elected to the professorship of geology, not because he knew anything about geology but on his general merits. However, he began enthusiastically to study the subject, giving lectures and making geological tours, but he constantly allowed himself to be diverted by business irrelevant to his geological work.
During 1821-1824 Sedgwick carried out researches in the north of England—on the Magnesian Limestone and New Red Sandstone and in the Lake District—but he delayed in the announcement and publication of his findings. Nevertheless, his standing in the world of science at that time and his general popularity were recognized by his being elected president of the Geological Society of London in 1829 and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1833.
In 1831 Sedgwick began the work which will always be associated with his name: the establishing of a rock-succession, the revealing of a grand structure among the mountains of North Wales, and the consequent founding of the Cambrian system. He did not put his researches into writing, and this was the chief cause of the regrettable controversy which eventually developed with Roderick Murchison over priorities of discovery and nomenclature among these Lower Paleozoic rocks (as they soon came to be called). However, Sedgwick did compose a few important treatises on the structure of rock-masses. In 1839 he and Murchison reported the results of their joint work which founded the Devonian system.
Thereafter Sedgwick's duties at his college and university caused his geological work, other than his lectures and the augmentation of his collections, to be almost entirely laid aside.
He died at Cambridge on January 27, 1873.
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During Sedgwick's life there developed something of a chasm between the conservative high church believers and the liberal wing. After simmering for some years, the publication of Essays and Reviews by liberal churchmen in 1860 pinpointed the differences. In all this, Sedgwick, whose science and faith were intertwined in a natural theology, was definitely on the conservative side, and extremely outspoken about it.
He strongly believed that species of organisms originated in a succession of Divine creative acts throughout the long expanse of history. Any form of development that denied a direct creative action smacked as materialistic and amoral.
Quotations:
He told the February 1830 meeting of the Geological Society of London:
"No opinion can be heretical, but that which is not true. .. . Conflicting falsehoods we can comprehend; but truths can never war against each other. I affirm, therefore, that we have nothing to fear from the results of our enquiries, provided they be followed in the laborious but secure road of honest induction. In this way we may rest assured that we shall never arrive at conclusions opposed to any truth, either physical or moral, from whatever source that truth may be derived".
He became a Fellow of Trinity College.
He was elected to Fellow of the Royal Society on 1 February 1821. In 1844, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sedgwick's reputation as a geologist and as a man rests almost entirely on his personality, which was conspicuous for its integrity, vigor, and charm, though he could be bitter in controversy. The influence of his presence and the power of his spoken word are not to be gathered from contemporary written records.
Sedgwick was an owner of slaves in plantations in Jamaica and was awarded £3783 in compensation for 174 slaves, following the abolition of slavery by the British government.
Sedgwick never married.