Sedgwick and his trilobite

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© John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Geologists’ Association & The Geological Society of London, Geology Today, Vol. 30, No. 4, July–August 2014

FeatureSedgwick and his trilobite

Ken McNamaraDepartment of Earth

Sciences, University of

Cambridge, Downing

Street, Cambridge, CB2

3EQ, UK

[email protected]

Standing on guard at the entrance to the Palaeozoic section of the University of Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum is a bronze statue of the man after whom the museum was named—the 7th Woodwardian Professor, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick. In one hand he holds his trusty geological hammer, in the other is a rock. Sedgwick, the man who unraveled many of the mysteries of the early Palaeozoic rocks of Wales, looks as if he has just cracked a piece of rock off an outcrop. Yet, rather incongruously, he is swathed in his academic gown—our man is clearly both the consummate field geologist and the academic.

Most Victorian statues of the great and the good of-ten seem to me to be rather remote objects, designed to make us feel more a sense of awe for the subject than any degree of empathy. But not Sedgwick’s. His is a welcoming statue (Fig. 1). He leans very slightly forward, seeming to offer you a closer view of the rock he has just collected. He wants you to inspect it, because on his rock is a fossil. ‘Here! Come and look’, he appears to be saying, beckoning you closer. When you do, you see that the rock he holds is smeared with the remains of a trilobite. The original fossil upon which this bronze is based is nearly half a bil-lion years old and was found in rocks in Wales that Sedgwick believed to form part of his great Cambrian Series. Sedgwick would, I’m sure, be proud to know that the name Cambrian, which he gave to these rocks in Wales, is still very much in use today. He would be equally proud of the trilobite in his hand, because it is Sedgwick’s trilobite—named Angelina sedgwickii by John Salter in 1859.

Adam Sedgwick

The real Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) was born in the vicarage at Dent, Yorkshire. After an early edu-cation in his local school, then at Sedbergh Gram-mar School, Sedgwick matriculated at Trinity Col-lege, Cambridge in 1804. Despite being regarded by some as ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘somewhat uncouth’, Sedgwick prospered in Cambridge, obtaining a college scholarship in 1807, and subsequently a fellowship in 1810.

In 1818, two years after being ordained, he be-

came Woodwardian Professor of Geology, a position he was to retain for fifty-five years. This was quite some achievement, especially given that when he took up the position his knowledge of things geologi-cal was just about zero. He rapidly set about rectify-ing this by going on many field trips, his first being to the Isle of Wight with the botanist John Stevens Henslow (like Sedgwick, one of Charles Darwin’s mentors). They were guided by Thomas Webster’s beautiful 1815 geological map of the Isle of Wight, Henslow’s copy of which remains in the Sedgwick Museum archives. This geological excursion yielded more than just a healthy collection of fossils for the museum. A fertile meeting of minds resulted in the foundation of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, which still thrives today.

Sedgwick’s field trips were made at a time when many areas of the country had not been seriously examined from a geological perspective. Not only did these bucolic geologic jaunts enable him to enhance the geological collections of the university, but they resulted in Sedgwick rapidly developing a deep under-standing of geology. He also soon came into contact with a number of dedicated ‘fossil hunters’. Over the succeeding decades, these generous individuals not only helped to swell the university’s fledgling fossil collection, but also—crucially—assisted Sedgwick in decoding the mysteries of the strata.

The fossil collection for which Sedgwick was re-sponsible, and which he set about trying to turn into one of the biggest and best in the country, had been obtained by the University of Cambridge in 1728 and established as the Woodwardian Museum. Two cabi-

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nets of English fossils had been left to the university under the terms of the will of the somewhat eccentric Dr John Woodward. The remaining cabinets of ‘for-eign fossils’, described as ‘…a precious stock of items, dug from the innermost vitals of the earth…’ (Univer-sity of Cambridge Formal Grace, 26 February 1728), were purchased subsequently for £500, although the university had been prepared to pay up to £1000 (equivalent to almost £200 000 today), such was the importance of the collection. Interestingly, this was two months before Woodward’s death, when the other cabinets came into the university’s possession. By collecting and purchasing specimens himself, and by cajoling his friends to donate, or come up with funds to enable him to purchase choice items, Sedg-wick was able, by the 1840s, to turn the collection into one with a world class reputation.

Sedgwick’s field notebooks, held in the archives of the Sedgwick Museum, show him to have been a meticulous field geologist (Fig. 2). He had a par-ticular flair for interpreting the local geology of the older, Palaeozoic rocks of Wales in a wider geologi-cal context. On his geological excursions through Wales, Sedgwick sometimes shared the company of the young geologist John Salter, who was to become a leading expert on trilobites. But, as Sedgwick wrote in the introduction to Salter’s catalogue of the Pal-aeozoic fossils in the Woodwardian Museum, ‘Nearly all my best work in Wales was done in solitude…’.

His fieldwork also ranged from the Palaeozoic rocks of Devon and Cornwall to the Lake District. Sedgwick was one of the first geologists to unravel the earliest evidence of life on Earth, leading him to define the Cambrian geological period.

Perhaps the most significant association in Sedg-wick’s early career was with the dashing Roderick Murchison, baronet and future Director-General of the Geological Survey. Younger and far wealthier than Sedgwick, the two initially hit it off and spent time together on geological field trips, ranging from the north-west highlands of Scotland to the Alps. Their early collaboration led to them solving many of the mysteries of Britain’s older fossil-bearing rocks including jointly proposing the Devonian System, fol-lowing an, at times, rancorous debate, with Henry de la Beche and George Greenough.

However, Sedgwick and Murchison famously fell out over their alternative interpretations of the rocks that predated the Devonian. Sedgwick considered that many of the rocks they studied belonged within his Cambrian System, whereas Murchison subsumed all of Sedgwick’s Cambrian strata in his younger Silurian System. When Sedgwick read Murchison’s book The Silurian System he was mortified. As he saw it, his life’s work had been destroyed: ‘As a general rule, honest truth and good taste go hand-in-hand; and what can be more incongruous and tasteless than to erase the Classical name of Cambrian… and to substi-tute the word Silurian as their designation’, he wrote in the preface to Salter’s catalogue, a few months before he died.

The acrimonious nature of this disagreement culminated in 1854 when the Geological Society of

Fig. 1. Bronze statue of Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) by Onslow Ford, 1901, in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.

Fig. 2. Painting of Adam Sedgwick by Thomas Phillips, 1832, in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.

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London (of which Murchison was at the time Presi-dent, and Sedgwick, a long-standing member) passed a resolution forbidding Sedgwick from presenting any paper before the society concerning early Palaeozoic rocks. Sedgwick was, not surprisingly, livid, as his vituperative account of the events in the preface to Salter’s catalogue, written nearly 20 years later, at-tests. ‘The attempt to suppress my Paper… was a personal stigma unexampled, I believe, in the his-tory of any other Philosophical Society in London’, he wrote.

Murchison produced two major books on his stud-ies of the Silurian: one, The Silurian System, the other, Siluria. In his third edition of Siluria, published in 1859, Murchison employed John Salter to help him with producing lists of characteristic fossils. Salter was responsible for collecting many of the fossils from the Early Palaeozoic rocks of Wales and by the time he worked for Murchison he had become the leading trilobite expert in the country. And it was Salter who named Sedgwick’s trilobite.

This third edition of Siluria was published short-ly after the final breakdown in the relationship be-tween the two great geologists. Yet a trilobite from North Wales, that Sedgwick was certain came from his Cambrian rocks was, rather ironically, illustrated and first named by Salter in Murchison’s book on the Silurian System. Salter chose to name it Angelina sedg-wickii, after the man whose company he had greatly enjoyed in two geological field seasons in Wales, and for whom he had enormous respect. It is hard not to believe that Murchison was unaware of what Salter had done. Did he approve it? Did he want to repair their wrecked relationship? Or was it the final twist of the knife, considering what Sedgwick would have seen as an archetypal Cambrian fossil as no more than just another Silurian fossil?

I would like to give Murchison the benefit of the doubt, and this belief comes in part from the copy of Siluria that I used to check Salter’s description. The book lives in the library of the Department of Earth Sciences (of which the Sedgwick Museum forms an integral part). On its cover, resplendent in gold, is the spiny trilobite Ampyx, garlanded, slightly incon-gruously, by a bouquet of graptolites. I opened the book. On the inside cover it had been signed ‘Thomas McKenny Hughes 1873’, the year Sedgwick died. I was impressed. McKenny Hughes succeeded Sedgwick as Woodwardian Professor that year and had been responsible for creating the Sedgwick Museum out of the Woodwardian Museum. Interestingly, before this he had worked for Murchison at the Geological Sur-vey. However, he sided with Sedgwick, rather than Murchison, over the question of the relative extents of the Cambrian and Silurian Systems.

I turned over the page. It had been Sedgwick’s

own copy. Not only that, but Murchison had given it to him. Murchison’s inscription reads: ‘To Profes-sor Sedgwick from his old fellow labourer Roderick Murchison’ (Fig. 3). Was this, perhaps, a tentative attempt by Murchison to mend some rather broken fences?

Sedgwick’s fossil

But what of the fossil so meticulously reproduced in bronze for the statuesque Sedgwick to hold? It is not just an artistic representation of the fossil. Rather, it is the work of a master craftsman who painstak-ingly copied one of the fossils in the museum’s col-lections. The specimen is still on display in the mu-seum, and is clearly recognizable as the one crafted in bronze (Fig. 4). At first I thought it might have been a specimen that Sedgwick himself had collected. No indication on the specimen label, though, nor in the catalogue. One of the nameless ‘fossil hunters’, I de-cided. The trilobite needed photographing. Best done, I thought, with a low angle light. And that’s when I

Fig. 3. Dedication in Adam Sedgwick’s copy of Murchison’s Siluria, held in the library of the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge.

Fig. 4. ‘Bronze rock’ held by the Adam Sedgwick statue, upon which lies Sedgwick’s trilobite, Angelina sedgwickii.

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saw the clue to the collector. Carefully scratched on the rock, like some mid-nineteenth century graffiti, were the initials ‘DH’ (Fig. 5). I looked at other speci-mens from the same locality in the display case—‘DH’ too. The mysterious DH could only have been David Homfray, immortalized in arguably the most famous fossil in Wales, the huge trilobite Paradoxides davidis, named by Salter after his friend and fellow collector. Homfray is one of the many unsung heroes of nineteenth-century palaeontology, those collectors whose efforts laid the foundation of palaeontology as a robust science. A clerk to the Justices of the Peace for North Wales, Homfray collected many of the fos-sils that Sedgwick was to use in his establishment of his Cambrian Series. Salter said of him: ‘He can find anything he likes in his territory.’

His obituary records that he ‘…amassed… a store of valuable information, but… never published an ar-ticle on his favourite subject. He was content with supplying information to others, which he always did most readily. The same generosity characterized him in giving away his specimens [many to the Sedgwick Museum], for he not only gave away his duplicates, but often the only specimen he possessed of a rare species.’ When he made a gift of fossils to the Wood-wardian Museum in 1869 (probably including Sedg-wick’s fossil), Salter wrote: ‘Sedgwick is so pleased, his face quite glowed.’

Sedgwick’s statue

But what of the statue itself? It took me a while to find out who made it. I asked many people whom I thought might know, but none had any idea. Then I realised that one person might—Adam Sedgwick. Per-haps, like two-dimensional artists, three-dimensional artists signed their work. And there it was, by Sedg-wick’s left foot, as clear as day—‘Onslow Ford, 1901’ (the year he died). So, who was Onslow Ford?

This slightly larger-than-life statue of Sedgwick was commissioned by McKenny Hughes for the open-ing of the Sedgwick Museum’s new building in 1904. Originally intended to be just a bust, William Selwyn, astronomer and Professor of Divinity, pleaded for a full statue: ‘Let us have the whole man, as we have been wont to see him. For what is a geologist without the hand to wield the hammer? Without the feet to carry him over the mountains?’, he argued. Well known for his benevolence, Selwyn provided the £500 necessary for its creation. To commemorate one of the leading geologists of the nineteenth-century, a man who was such a prominent figure in the university and who did so much to build up the museum’s collection, only one of the finest sculptors in Britain could be trusted. The man who was chosen was one of the leading sculptors of his day, Onslow Ford (Fig. 6).

Born in 1852, Ford has been a somewhat neglect-

ed figure in recent years, but is now acknowledged as ‘one of the pillars of the sculptural renaissance in the 1880s and 1890s’. As a member of the Royal Acad-emy he achieved high artistic status, having learnt his skills as a sculptor in Munich in the early 1870s. He was regarded by his peers as ‘the gentlest and kindest of human beings’ and in appearance he was something of ‘a dandy [and] proud of his beautiful moustache’. Ford is best known for his masterpiece, the memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley, acknowledged as the most ambitious Victorian figure sculpture in Oxford and the centrepiece to the Shelley Memorial Building at University College. He was a prolific crea-tor of statues, bronzes and busts, and following his first major achievement, a statue of Rowland Hill, created statues of, amongst others, Gladstone, Huxley (in the Natural History Museum), Queen Victoria and even Gordon of Khartoum resplendent on a camel.

Sadly, Ford’s statue of Sedgwick was to be his last

Fig. 5. Specimen of the trilobite Angelina sedgwickii upon which Onslow Ford based his bronze version. Original specimen collected by Mr David Homfray. Note the ‘DH’ scratched on the rock.

Fig. 6. Bronze bust of Onslow Ford, by his assistant Andrea Lacchesi, on Ford’s memorial in Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, London.

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Fig. 7. Painting of Adam Sedgwick by Robert Farren, 1870, in Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.

work, and one of his major pieces that has been long forgotten. This was certainly not the case in 1904, at the opening of the Sedgwick Museum (Fig. 7). The highlight of the opening was the unveiling of Ford’s statue by King Edward VII. Looking at Ford’s master-ful last creation it is sobering to think of the rumour that his sudden death at 49 may have been by his own hand—brought on by a combination of debt and chronic overwork. Ford wasn’t the only figure associ-ated with Sedgwick to come to an untimely demise. John Salter, the man who described Sedgwick’s fossil, undoubtedly committed suicide. After suffering from bouts of depression, also brought on by financial in-security, Salter threw himself into the Thames and drowned.

Without the skill and dedication of these two men, Sedgwick’s sculpture would be empty handed. Instead he stands proudly in the museum that bears his name, grasping the testament to his beloved Cam-brian System, assisted even in death by the friend who named the trilobite and the master sculptor who transformed it into art.

Suggestions for further reading

Clark, J.W. & McKenny Hughes, T. 1890. The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, 2 volumes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Getsy, D.J. 2004. Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Murchison, R.I. 1859. Siluria. The History of the Oldest Fossiliferous Rocks and their Foundations; with a Brief Sketch of the Distribution of Gold over the Earth, 3rd edn. John Murray, London.

Porter, R. 1979. John Woodward: ‘a droll sort of philosopher’. Geological Magazine, v.116, pp.335–417.

Price, D. 1989. John Woodward and a surviving geo-logical collection from the early eighteenth centu-ry. Journal of the History of Collections, v.1, 79–95.

Salter, J.W. 1873. Catalogue of the Collection of Cam-brian and Silurian Fossils Contained in the Geological Museum of the University of Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Secord, J. 1985. John W. Salter: The rise and fall of a Victorian palaeontological career. In: Wheeler, A. & Price, J.H. (eds), Linnaeus to Darwin: Commentar-ies on the History of Biology and Geology, pp.61–75. Society for the History of Natural History, Lon-don.

Secord, J.A. 1986. Controversy in Victorian Geology: the Cambrian–Silurian Dispute. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Secord, J.A. 2004a. Salter, John William (1820–1869). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford. http://www.ox-forddnb.com/view/article/24571.

Secord, J.A. 2004b. Sedgwick, Adam (1785–1873). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25011.

Spielman, M.H. 1902. E. Onslow Ford, R.A.: in me-moriam. The Magazine of Art, v.26, 181–184.

Stocker, M. 2004. Ford, (Edward) Onslow (1852–1901). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford. http://www.ox-forddnb.com/view/article/33196.

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Sedgwick and his trilobite