Sedgwick, Adam 1785-1873
English geologist

Born in Dent, Cumbria, he graduated in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge (1808) and became Woodwardian Professor of Geology there in 1818. In 1831 he began geological mapping in Wales and introduced the Cambrian system in 1835. He had carried out studies in the Lake District as early as 1822, but it was not until the Cambrian and Silurian systems had been established in Wales and the Welsh Borders that he was fully able to understand its geology. Sedgwick became embroiled in controversy with Roderick Impey Murchison; the dispute was finally resolved with the introduction of the Ordovician system by Charles Lapworth. His best work was on British Palaeozoic Fossils (1854). With Murchison he studied the Lake District, the Alps and south-west England, where they identified the Devonian system.

Bibliography: Colin Speakman, Adam Sedgwick: Geologist and Dalesman, 1785-1873 (1982)