The Times/1913/Obituary/Adam Sedgwick

Professor Adam Sedgwick.

We regret to announce the death of Professor Adam Sedgwick, F.R.S, Professor of Zoology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, which occurred yesterday at his residence in South Kensington. He had been in failing health for about 18 months.

Adam Sedgwick was born at Norwich in 1854, but his parents' home, where his childhood was passed, was at Dent, in Yorkshire. His father was vicar of Dent; he belonged to a family which had been settled in the neighbourhood for several hundred years. To the same family belonged Adam Sedgwick, Professor of Geology at Cambridge.

Early Research Work

Educated at Marlborough, Sedgwick went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1874. His original intention was to be a doctor, but he soon came under the spell of that brilliant genius Frank Balfour, whose assistant he became. But his own daring originality soon asserted itself and he executed some research in embryology on his own account, in which arrived at views which were not altogether in accord with those of is friend and teacher. In 1881 the University was inducted to found a Professorship in Animal Embryology for Balfour, since it was mainly to the embryological side of biology that his studies had been directed. The tragic death of Balfour while on a mountain-climbing expedition in the Alps in the following year left the newly-founded school without a head, and Sedgwick was chosen to fill Balfour's place. The University, however, would not consent to continue the Chair of Animal Embryology, but created a Readership of Animal Morphology at a beggarly salary of £100, and to this Sedgwick was appointed. He had been made Fellow of his college in 1880, and he was now made lecturer and put on the permanent staff of the college, and so was enabled to accept such a pittance. Trinity thus, as on several other occasions, nobly stepped in and endowed scientific teaching when the University was unwilling to do so. Sedgwick succeeded to the Professorship of Zoology at Cambridge when Professor Alfred Newton died in 1907, and thus for 25 years he did the work without either the emoluments or the University status, of a Professor. He built up a splendidly equipped laboratory and filled it with eager and interested students; he systematized the teaching of biology and embryology in a way that had never been attempted before he collected round him a band of research workers. And sent his pupils all over the world to occupy professorial chairs and other important biological positions. All this work was carried out with the cordial sympathy of Professor Newton, and the relations between Sedgwick and Newton were most friendly and harmonious.

Shortly after taking charge of the Biological School at Cambridge Sedgwick made a voyage to the Cape to study the extraordinary form Peripatus which had been discovered by Guilding in 1826, and of which the zoological position as indicated by the researches of Professor Moseley seemed to be half way between the Annelida and the Arthropoda. As a result of that expedition he collected material which enabled him to work out the development of this form in great detail, and the papers which he published on this subject between the years 1884 and 1888 constitute one of the classics of zoology. Before the series had been completed Sedgwick had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he served twice on the Council. He was called on to serve on every important committee which was constituted to deal with biological subjects, and his advice carried greater weight than that of almost any other zoologist in the country.

In 1892 he married Miss Laura Robinson, a daughter of Captain Robinson of Armagh, and in 1897 he accepted the position of tutor of Trinity College. Although he devoted his vacations to the production of a standard textbook of zoology, which is the best complete exposition of the subject which has as yet been published in English, yet he was no longer able to engage in research himself. When he finally succeeded to the Chair of Zoology he threw himself heartily into the work of the reorganization of the zoological school.

Removal to London.

About this time the Government resolved to amalgamate the Royal College of Science, the Royal School of Mines, and the City and Guilds Engineering School into a new college, to be termed the Imperial College of Science and Technology, and in particular it was resolved to review, re-equip, and to restaff the School of Zoology, which since the death of Professor Howes, Huxley's successor, had been somewhat neglected. Professor Sedgwick was asked to join a committee whose duty it was to select a Professor of Zoology for the new college. When the committee presented their report to the governors, that board unanimously besought Professor Sedgwick himself to occupy the position. This offer he declined twice, but ultimately accepted from a sense of duty. Accordingly in 1909 he resigned the Chair of Zoology in the Cambridge and came to London as Professor of Zoology in the Imperial College of Science. He devoted himself at once to the task of reorganizing the department, and courses of lectures in those branches of the subject which are of special economic importance were organized. In every way Professor Sedgwick's efforts were bearing fruit when, to the dismay of all his friends, his health began to fail, and at the end of 1912 he had to go abroad for the winter.

In reviewing the general scope of Sedgwick's contributions to science it is important to bear in mind the peculiar cast of his mind. He had not the calm judicial character of his friend and teacher Balfour. Sedgwick's temper was rather that of a pioneer and the prophet. He used to brood over his new discoveries, and eventually give expression to them in rather violent terms, which certainly roused opposition. But most of Sedgwick's ideas are coming to their own. For example nothing met with so little favour as Sedgwick's attack on the cell-theory; at least, on that form of it which regarded the body of a higher animal as a cell-republic, the real vital unites being the cells. Yet the researches of Driesch and other works in developmental mechanics have gone far to confirm Sedgwick's conclusions, a confirmation all the more impressive because those workers with the parochialism so characteristic of many German scientists, appear to be totally unconscious of Sedgwick's work. Sedgwick's clarification of the confused ideas masquerading under the names of “mesoderm,” “body-cavity'” &c. was of fundamental importance for our conception of animal structure; his conclusions have now passed into the common-places of elementary teaching for English and American students.

Of Sedgwick the man it is difficult to write without the fear of exaggeration. He had in a high degree the gift of inspiring affection, and his very eccentricities seemed only to endear him the more to his attached pupils and friends.

He is survived by his wife and three children—two sons and a daughter. The elder son, after a brilliant career at Westminster School, has entered Cambridge as foundation scholar of Trinity. His wife, admired by all Sedgwick's friends for her Irish with and attractiveness, did much to render his house a charming resort for his scientific colleagues.