Reading the Rocks

by Brenda Maddox

  When Adam Sedgwick – a fellow of Trinity College and lecturer in theology and mathematics – applied for the Woodwardian post in 1818, he had no intention of mastering the science of geology. All he promised was to deliver public lectures ‘on some subjects connected with the Theory of the Earth’. Like many others, Sedgwick was drawn to geology by poor general health. In 1812 he had broken a blood vessel while on a river excursion. Then, when one of his usual colds tended to a violent cough followed by inflammation of the lungs, his family and friends feared he would become consumptive. Indeed, he felt the effects of this chest illness throughout his life and pronounced himself ‘unfit for sedentary labour after 1812’.2

  The conviction that fresh air and regular exercise were indispensable determined him to become a candidate for the Woodwardian professorship. Looking back, he recalled to a friend how much he had enjoyed hunting as a young man: ‘I was a keen sportsman till I became a professed Geologist. So soon as I was seated in the Woodwardian Chair I gave away my dogs and my gun, and my hammer broke my trigger.’3

  In the contest for the chair, Sedgwick had one rival – G. C. Gorman of Queens’ College – but, as Sedgwick later recalled, ‘he had not the slightest chance against me, for I knew absolutely nothing of geology, whereas he knew a good deal – but it was all wrong!’ (The editors of Sedgwick’s collected letters assert that ‘precedents were not wanting at Cambridge for the election of a man of ability to a Professorship in a subject of which he knew nothing’.4) While the contest for the post was under way, Sedgwick declared: ‘Hitherto I have never turned a stone; henceforth I will leave no stone unturned.’5 If William Buckland was a humorist, Adam Sedgwick was a wit. Among a geological generation of prose stylists, as a writer he was supreme. His letters are brilliant, narrative and descriptive. Sedgwick would become one of the great geologists of his era by inadvertence.

  In 1818, at the age of thirty-three, Sedgwick became Woodwardian Professor of Geology. He would hold the post for the next fifty-five years.

  As a poor Yorkshire vicar’s son, Sedgwick had entered Cambridge in 1801 as a sizar – a term used for students at Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin who received some form of assistance, such as lower fees or lodging, and were thereby marked as persons of limited means. The study of divinity formed part of Sedgwick’s programme, along with mathematics. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1808, having come fifth in the top rank of mathematicians, known in Cambridge as ‘Wranglers’. He then prepared for his fellowship examination. He accepted that he was entering a life of celibacy. Trinity College’s stern ecclesiastical statutes proclaimed that all the fellows, save two, should be in priests’ orders within seven years from the full completion of the degree of Master of Arts under threat of forfeiting their fellowship.

  After his studies Sedgwick had wanted to see the Continent, which had been so long cut off by the Napoleonic Wars. But in the summer of 1816 he was able to spend four months in France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. Sedgwick found the travel fiercely uncomfortable, with six people often crammed into a coach. His enjoyment, moreover, was hampered by his violent anti-Catholicism and dislike of the French. While he thought Paris ‘a noble capital’, he found the people ‘so abominable and detestable that there can be no peace for Europe if they are not chained down as slaves, or exterminated as wild beasts’.6

  Sedgwick met his clerical obligations in 1817 when he was ordained deacon by Bishop Bathurst of Norwich. Formally installed, he was pleased that ‘on Monday the first, [I]‌ commenced Resident in my own house . . . Our Residence is severe while it lasts. We are not permitted to be away from our houses for a single night.’7 Attending service regularly, and preaching generally once each Sunday, he was sure, would wear him out. But by 1834 he had risen to higher clerical status, as prebendary of Norwich Cathedral.8

  His clerical duties, sixty miles northeast of Cambridge, did not prevent him from continuing to lecture at the university. (He also became university proctor and headed the vice squad on Cambridge’s streets, arresting fifteen women in one month alone for prostitution.) In 1819 Sedgwick delivered the first of his course of talks that made him the most popular lecturer at Cambridge. He continued these until 1872 when he was compelled by age and poor health to appoint a deputy. A witty and riveting speaker, he could hold an audience rapt for over an hour. His lectures were open to women, and when speaking he was often guarded. He told a patron: ‘Geology introduces some tender topics which require delicate handling. I must speak truth, but by all means avoid offence if I can.’9 (He did not say what these topics were.)

  The same year he formed, with the distinguished geologist, John Henslow, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, ‘for the purpose of promoting Scientific Enquiries, and of facilitating the communication of facts connected with the advancement of Philosophy’. The society’s annual dinner was one of Sedgwick’s red-letter days.

  In November 1818, shortly after becoming Woodwardian professor, Sedgwick was elected fellow of the Geological Society. He welcomed the ‘robust, joyous and independent spirits’ he met at the GeolSoc and admired the way its members ‘toiled well in the field, and who did battle and cuffed opinions with much spirit and great good will’.10 He soon formed a close alliance with one of the society’s younger members, Roderick Murchison. Murchison later observed that he was instantly drawn to the professor by his ‘buoyant and cheerful nature, as well as from his flow of soul and eloquence’.11 As a geological novice Murchison valued Sedgwick as much for his knowledge as for his friendliness – to the extent that Murchison was teased for hero-worship. He signed his letters ‘Rodericus’; Sedgwick in turn signed his ‘Yours to the earth’s centre’.12 Their first expedition together was to Scotland, with the purpose of working out the clear relation of the red sandstones. Sedgwick found the variety of rocks astonishing. ‘Arran,’ he wrote, ‘is a geological epitome of the whole world, and is, moreover, eminently picturesque.’13

  While excavating at Robin Hood’s Bay, near Scarborough, in 1821, Sedgwick suffered an unfortunate accident. As he described it to a friend: ‘I have nearly lost the use of one eye in my combats with the rocks. A splinter struck it with such violence that it has for the last three or four days been of very little use to me.’ 14 His eyesight never recovered. Thereafter he would struggle to work by candlelight.

  In 1822 Sedgwick travelled to the northwest to explore the intricate geology of the Lake District. There he formed a close friendship with William Wordsworth – at whose house he was made welcome, yet who, as Sedgwick was well aware, had uttered ‘a poetic ban against my brethren of the hammer’.15 Sedgwick especially enjoyed their walks. ‘Some of the happiest summers of my life were passed among the Cumbrian mountains, and some of the brightest days of those summers were spent in your society and guidance,’ he told the poet many years later.16 He wrote several letters headed ‘On the Geology of the Lake District’, which were included in Wordsworth’s A Complete Guide to the Lakes, comprising Minute Directions for the Tourist, with Mr. Wordsworth’s Description of the Scenery of the Country, etc. And Three Letters on the Geology of the Lake District, by the Rev. Professor Sedgwick.

  The two men certainly did not agree on geological vocabulary. Admiring the cliffs of the coast of Somerset, Sedgwick had once written: ‘They afford fine specimens of the contortions exhibited by that rock to which geologists have given the name of greywacke. What a delightfully sounding word! It must needs make you in love with my subject.’17

  At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, however, Sedgwick had fought hard against the introduction of the general term ‘scientist’, which had been proposed by William Whewell, theologian and historian of science. When Whewell argued at the meeting that ‘we already have such words as “economist”, “artist” and “atheist”’, Sedgwick exploded: ‘better die of this want [of a term] than bestialise our tongue by such a barbarism’.18 Sedgwick lost the battle; the Oxford English Dictionary recognised the term ‘
scientist’ by 1840.

  The ‘British Ass’, otherwise more politely known as the ‘BA’, was continuing to grow. In his report for the association’s first meeting, William Conybeare had emphasised that the study of fossils rather than of minerals was the cause of the success of English geology and that England was fortunate in having a great variety of rocks of ‘the secondary series of formations: in these the zoological features of the organic remains associated in the several strata, afford characters far more interesting in themselves and important in the conclusions to which they lead than the mineral contents of the primitive series’.19 The geological historian Nicolaas Rupke has called this summary of the contributions by the English school ‘more than an exercise in the history and philosophy of science; it was an expression of chauvinism and of pride in the participation of geology in national progress, reform, and expansion of the Empire’.20 He attributed English success to the fact that the extensive middle part of the geological record, the Secondary, ‘belongs in a very considerable measure to England . . . an island blessed with a uniquely condensed and yet distinct series of most fossiliferous rocks’.21

  By the time of the third meeting, in Cambridge in June 1833, the British Association for the Advancement of Science was clearly having national impact. The rising stars in early Victorian science attended, including Michael Faraday, Sir John Herschel, John Dalton, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Sedgwick, Whewell, Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Malthus and William Somerville. The association’s pattern was to rotate its meetings around the major cities, always avoiding London. Successive venues were Edinburgh, 1834; Dublin, 1835; Bristol, 1836; Liverpool, 1837; Newcastle, 1838; Birmingham, 1839; and Glasgow, 1840. By this time more than two thousand people attended the annual meeting, the press coverage was huge, and the official membership was over a thousand.

  In 1821 Sedgwick published a Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Geology for his Cambridge students. The order of the older, Palaeozoic, rocks had not been yet worked out – ten years later he would be the first to define it – but he gave a good classification of sedimentary rocks. He emphasised the connection of geology with mineralogy. In his second edition, in 1832, he emphasised their separateness. On 3 March 1827, his letter to a fellow cleric announced: ‘I was made vice-president of the London Geological Society at the last annual meeting. But this honour brings no grist. There is no manger in my stall, so that notwithstanding my V.P.G.S. at the tail of my signature, I may die of hunger.’22

  He did not die, but rose to the presidency of the society within two years. Whewell wrote him a letter endorsed ‘To be opened immediately’ – an indication of Sedgwick’s habitual carelessness with his correspondence. Sedgwick’s eloquence served the society exceedingly well. In his opening presidential address in 1830, he declared: ‘Each succeeding year places in a stronger point of view the importance of organic remains, when we attempt to trace the various periods and revolutions in the history of the globe.’23

  A year later, his presidential term finished, he launched the subsequently influential Wollaston Medal, made possible by a Dr Thomas Hyde Wollaston, who gave £1,000 to the Geological Society, ‘the income from which was to be used to promote researches concerning the mineral structures of the earth, or in rewarding those by whom such researches may hereafter be made’.24 Wollaston died two weeks later.

  This was the occasion when Sedgwick, awarding the medal to William Smith, the mapmaker, called him ‘the Father of English Geology’,25 after which he got down to his main address, in which he made some highly important declarations. Lengthily and ringingly, he praised Charles Lyell for distancing himself in his Principles of Geology from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, as well as from the doctrines of spontaneous generation and the transmutation of species ‘with all their monstrous consequences’.26

  In the next breath, Sedgwick attacked Lyell for arguing his own doctrine of uniformity as if he were a barrister with a brief. In Sedgwick’s opinion, Lyell’s ‘uniformitarianism’ implied that life had always existed on earth and that the cataclysms of the past were no different from the earthquakes, eruptions and tidal waves of their own day. That was not at all how Sedgwick saw the planet’s development. He believed in repeated catastrophes. Twisted mountain layers and giant out-of-place boulders showed him that the earth had seen episodes of ‘feverish spasmodic energy’.

  More importantly, in the same speech, Sedgwick recanted what he dubbed a ‘philosophic heresy’ – that the biblical deluge could be equated with the evidence of watery cataclysm in the rock record. He declared that the vast masses of diluvial gravel scattered over the surface of the earth could not be attributed to ‘one violent and transitory period’. He deplored the erroneous induction which had led many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge. ‘Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as philosophic heresy, I think it right,’ he ended, ‘as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.’27 James Secord describes Sedgwick’s recantation of the deluge as Lyell’s ‘greatest theological triumph’.28

  One of Sedgwick’s geology students at Cambridge was the young Charles Darwin, who entered the university in January 1828.

  In 1831 the pair went on a field trip together to North Wales to trace the juncture of limestone cliffs and Old Red Sandstone. (The Old Red, long a favourite subject of investigation for British geologists, is a thick sequence of sedimentary rocks named after the colour given by iron oxide, formed in the Devonian period, roughly 416 to 360 million years ago.) They set off from ‘The Mount’, Darwin’s family home in Shrewsbury, where Charles’s sister Susan was captivated by her brother’s witty, urbane bachelor professor friend. The first day of their expedition in Snowdonia was nearly ruined, however, by Sedgwick’s gloomy mood. ‘I know that the d----d fellow never gave her the sixpence. I’ll go back at once...,’ he suddenly cursed, referring to a tip he had left with the waiter at their hotel in Conwy to be given to their chambermaid. Darwin had to restrain the professor from walking all the way back across the mountains to check for himself.29 Sedgwick, then forty-six, tramped heavy-laden, with a big iron hammer and a heavy leather collecting bag full of rocks.

  When Darwin accepted the invitation to go on a round-the-world voyage on the HMS Beagle, Sedgwick recommended books for him to take. These included Charles Daubeny’s A Description of Active and Extinct Volcanos, J. F. D’Aubuisson’s An Account of the Basalts of Saxony, and Robert Bakewell’s An Introduction to Geology. (He may have known that Darwin had already acquired Lyell’s Principles.)

  Having been on the same side in ‘the Great Devonian controversy’ (against De la Beche’s claim to have found fossils of large plants in ancient strata that Murchison argued were too old to hold flora) did not prevent a serious break between Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison occurring in 1852; they reached an impasse in defining and naming the oldest rocks.

  Twenty years earlier, in 1832, Sedgwick had rambled about various parts of North Wales, describing himself to a friend as ‘burnt as brown as a pack-saddle, and a little thin from excessive fatigue’.30 For scenery he decided he preferred the Lake District: ‘The Welsh are a kind-hearted, but rather dull set of people; just made to be beaten by the Saxons. It is, however, wrong to judge of a people whose language one does not speak.’31 But he was to spend more time in Wales on an important task. During the summer of 1834, he and Murchison – at that time his friend, and protégé – had spent four weeks on the Welsh Borders trying to set a boundary between Sedgwick’s ancient rocks, which he named ‘Cambrian’ (after Cambria, the Latin name for Wales derived from ‘Cymru’, the Welsh word for Wales) and the somewhat younger rocks that Murchison had identified by distinctive fossils and called ‘Silurian’ (after the Silures, an ancient British tribe who lived in southeastern Wales at the time of the Romans).

  In 1835 the men presented a paper to the Geological Soc
iety called ‘On the Silurian and Cambrian Systems, Exhibiting the Order in which the Older Sedimentary Strata Succeeded Each Other in England and Wales’. But their collaboration was doomed. In 1852 Sedgwick and Murchison fell into bitter conflict over the division between the Cambrian and Silurian. The heart of their dispute was the question of where the base of the Silurian stood in relation to the Cambrian. Murchison had claimed (and De la Beche had accordingly coloured on a geological map) part of Sedgwick’s Cambrian as Silurian. On 25 February 1852, Sedgwick read a paper to the Geological Society in which he protested strongly against this insult from ‘my friend and fellow-labourer, in this instance my antagonist’.32 The ever-eloquent Sedgwick compared himself to a man who comes home to find ‘that a neighbour has turned out his furniture, taken possession, and locked the door upon him’. In short, Murchison had ‘Silurianized the map of Wales’. Their estrangement lasted for almost twenty years – only to be healed by Sedgwick’s letter of condolence to Murchison on the death of his wife.

  Sedgwick’s own unmarried state irritated him his whole life. He was painfully conscious of it. As a young man in Cambridge he wrote to the Reverend W. Ainger, curate of Hackney: ‘I wish some blooming damsel could contrive to kindle a flame in my breast, for then I might stand some chance of keeping up a proper degree of animal heat.’33 He wrote to another clerical friend, whose wife was nursing him through an illness: ‘If I had a wife I would sham ill now and then in order that she might make a pet of me.’34 While he thought himself ugly, women were often drawn to him. A portrait of Sedgwick shows a tall handsome man with bright eyes, a strong chin and sensual lips. In 1837, Lyell wrote to his sister Eleanor that in Norwich it had been said of Sedgwick that he was ‘so popular, with the ladies in particular’, yet his observer commented, ‘I hardly think he will ever marry now.’35