Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Sedgwick, Adam
SEDGWICK, ADAM (1854–1913), zoologist, was born at Norwich 28 September 1854, the eldest son of the Rev. Richard Sedgwick, vicar of Dent, Yorkshire, by his wife, Mary Jane, daughter of John Woodhouse, of Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire. Through both his parents he came of country-bred, land-owning ancestry. His great-uncle was Adam Sedgwick [q.v.], professor of geology in the university of Cambridge, one of the founders of British geological science. Sedgwick's childhood was spent at Dent vicarage, and from Marlborough College he passed to King's College, London, with the idea of becoming a medical student; but his stay there was brief, and he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a pensioner, in 1874. There he came under the strong influence of (Sir) Michael Foster, at that time praelector of physiology in Trinity College, and of Francis Maitland Balfour, who was then inspiring a school of comparative embryology in the university. In 1877 Sedgwick obtained a first class in the natural science tripos, and in the following year he became Balfour's demonstrator. In 1882, when Balfour, just elected to a special chair of animal morphology, lost his life in the Alps, Sedgwick was appointed to a readership in that subject.
For many years Sedgwick was the head of a great school of zoological research, and many of his students became distinguished teachers and investigators. A visit to Cape Colony in 1883 led to a series of highly important memoirs on the structure and development of peripatus, an archaic type which many regard as a connecting link between annelid worms and arthropods. It is probably in connexion with peripatus that Sedgwick's name will be longest remembered.
In 1897 Sedgwick, who had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1886, accepted a fellowship and tutorship at Trinity College, a position which he held for ten years, when he succeeded Alfred Newton as professor of zoology in the university (1907). His duties at Trinity College had already seriously interfered with his researches, and he had hardly settled down to his professorial work when, in 1909, he was called to London as professor of zoology in the new Imperial College of Science and Technology, South Kensington. Into the reorganization of the zoological department, which in former years had been, in a sense, T. H. Huxley's special domain, Sedgwick threw himself with enthusiasm, and he had the satisfaction of seeing some of the fruits of his labours. But an old-standing pulmonary weakness grew on him, and, in spite of vigorous resistance and a winter in the Canary Islands, he died in London 27 February 1913.
Sedgwick was an independent, resolute thinker with a strong critical faculty which expressed itself in timely reactions against outworn views, notably in regard to recapitulation and the cell-theory. He was the author, and subsequently editor, of a monumental Text-Book of Zoology in three volumes (1898, 1905, 1909), but his greater work was as an investigator and as an inspirer of research.
Sedgwick married in 1892 Laura Helen Elizabeth, daughter of Captain Robinson, of Armagh. They had two sons and one daughter.
[Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. lxxxvi, B, 1912–1913.]