SEDGWICK, ADAM (1785-1873), English geologist, was born on March 22, 1785 at Dent, Yorkshire, son of Richard Sedg wick, vicar of the parish. He was educated at the grammar schools of Dent and Sedbergh, and at Trinity college, Cambridge, where in 1810 he was elected a Fellow. In 1818 he was admitted to priests' orders, and in the same year he succeeded John Hail stone as Woodwardian professor of geology.
In papers read (182o-21) before the Cambridge Philosophical Society (of which he was a founder) on the structure of parts of Devonshire and Cornwall, he made observations of exceptional interest and value. Sedgwick dealt with the geology of the Isle of Wight, and with the strata of the Yorkshire coast (in papers published in the Annals of Philosophy, 1822, 1826) ; and ex amined the rocks of the north of Scotland with Murchison in 1827. He was elected president of the Geological Society in 1829-30, and in 1831 he commenced field-work in North Wales. Eventually Sedgwick applied the name Cambrian to the oldest group of fossiliferous strata. In 1833 Sedgwick was president of the British Association at the first Cambridge meeting, and in 1834 he was appointed a canon of Norwich. In 1836 with Murchison he made a special study of the culm-measures of Devonshire, and together they demonstrated that the main mass of the strata belonged to the age of the true Coal Measures. Con
tinuing their researches into the bordering strata they were able to show in 1839, from the determinations of William Lonsdale, that the fossils of the South Devon limestones and those of Ilfra combe and other parts of North Devon were of an intermediate type between those of the Silurian and Carboniferous systems. They therefore introduced the term Devonian for the great group of slates, grits and limestones, now known under that name in West Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. These results were pub lished in the great memoir by Sedgwick and Murchison, "On the Physical Structure of Devonshire" (Trans. Geol. Soc., 1839). Among other works A Synopsis of the Classification of the British Palaeozoic Rocks (1855) may be mentioned. Sedgwick con tinued to lecture until 1872, and died at Cambridge on Jan. 27, 1873. The Sedgwick Museum built as a memorial to him was opened in 1903.
See the Life and Letters, by John Willis Clark and Thomas McKenny Hughes (189o).