CHARLES DARWIN, A WEDGWOOD FAMILY MEMBER, & HIS CONNECTION TO ADAM SEDGWICK

My dear friend Lord Anthony Pulford of Glencoe is a Wedgwood collector and a lover of history.  One of his favorite activities is exploring historic connections regarding all things Wedgwood.  If you have read my posts, you have seen some of his other interesting contributions to this blog.  Many of us Wedgwoodians have been interested in the Wedgwood/Darwin family story over the years, and certainly since the Darwin birthday a couple of years ago.  Sir Anthony has come up with another very interesting tale involving Charles Darwin, another geologist and Ben Nevis, the famous spot in northern Scotland near which Sir Anthony lives.  We don't often see such direct comments TO Mr. Darwin in opposition to his views, but I think you will enjoy this one.  Thank you once again Tony for contributing information of interest to our readers.

Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge, England photo from the Museum website.

"The community garden on the grounds of the Kilmallie Hall at Corpach near Fort William [the town nearest to Sir Anthony] contains a stone circle made up of rocks from all over Scotland.  The circle was "opened" by Mr David Sedgwick, a surgeon at the Belford Hospital in Fort William and is dedicated to the memory of Mr Sedgwick's ancestor the Rev. Adam Sedgwick.

    It is Adam Sedgwick who is the link to Charles Darwin.  Born in 1785, the son of a Dent, Yorkshire, vicar, he was educated at Sedburgh School and Trinity College Cambridge, eventually becoming Woodwardian Professor of Geology in 1818, a position he held until his death in 1873.

   A leading geologist of his day, one of his geology students was a young Charles Darwin who, in 1831, accompanied him on a trip into Wales.  They corresponded while Darwin was on the Beagle Expedition and afterwards.  Sedgwick never accepted the case for evolution made in Darwin's book On the Origin of the Species in 1859.  After reading the book he wrote to Darwin saying;

  'If I did not think you a good tempered & truth loving man I should not tell you that.... I have read your book with more pain than pleasure.  Parts of it I admire greatly;  parts I laughed at until my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous - You have deserted - after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth - the true method of induction - & started up a machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkins' locomotive that was to sail with us to the Moon'.  Despite this difference of opinion, the two remained friends until Sedgwick's death.

   The Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, opened in 1903, contains a number of Darwin artifacts including rocks collected on the Beagle voyage as well as notebooks, scientific instruments and his pistol."