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.]
SEEBOHM, FREDERIC (1833–1912), historian, was born at Bradford 23 November 1833. He was the second son of Benjamin Seebohm, a wool merchant and prominent minister of the Society of Friends, who had come over from Friedensthal, in the principality of Waldeck-Pyrmont, as a boy of sixteen and had settled at Bradford. His mother, Esther Wheeler, was a descendant of one of the staunchest adherents of George Fox. Both parents were profoundly imbued with the spirit of intense and active Christianity characteristic of the early quakers. There was a wide scope for charity in the 'thirties of the last century, and Frederic Seebohm kept through life the memory of the piteous struggle of the handloom weavers of the West Riding against the introduction of machinery. After going through the Bootham School, York, Seebohm read law in London and started in practice as a barrister in 1856. In 1857 he married Mary Ann, daughter of William Exton, a banker, and settled definitely in Hitchin as a partner in a bank (Sharples & Co.), which was amalgamated with the firm of Barclay & Co. in 1896. His house, ‘The Hermitage’, became the happy home of a family of five daughters and one son. He proved an able and hard-working man of business, but as in the case of George Grote, Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), and Thomas Hodgkin, his professional duties did not prevent him from becoming a leader of research; on the contrary they seemed to sharpen his intellect and to stimulate his energy. Nor did he shirk his duties as a citizen. As a friend and supporter of William Edward Forster [q.v.] he took an active share in the campaign for organizing popular education; he was a poor law guardian, a justice of the peace, a governor of the secondary schools at Hitchin, and a member of the Hertfordshire County Council education committee. After the split of the liberal party over Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill (1886) he took the side of the liberal unionists. In 1893 he acted as a member of the Welsh land commission.
Seebohm's civic activity was prompted by the atmosphere of the community of Friends—the spirit of Christian fraternity. He was well acquainted with the critical work achieved by science and philosophy, but he kept up his devotion to Christianity as the moral guide in the history of the world. Speaking of various movements towards emancipation, he wrote in his little book, The Christian Hypothesis (1876): ‘Looking at all these broadly, they are ripples and waves in a great tide which is moving onwards towards the political development of mankind. And not only is the direction of the movement, taken as a whole, evidently towards the realization of the goal and object of Christian civilization, but Christianity itself has mainly furnished the moral force by which it has been so far accomplished.’
The subject which attracted Seebohm's attention in his early literary work was the rise of modern civilization in opposition to the organization of society under the sway of the Roman Church. He traced this process from the revival of learning in his book, The Oxford Reformers (1867); as he expressed it, ‘Their fellow work had been to urge, in a critical period in the history of Christendom, the necessity of that thorough and comprehensive reform which the carrying of Christianity into practice in the affairs of nations and men would involve.’ It seemed to him that the revolutionary crisis of the Reformation might have been avoided if the reforms advocated by Colet, Erasmus, and More had been carried out. The main lines of the conflict in the sixteenth century were sketched by Seebohm in a little volume on The Era of the Protestant Revolution (1874). While The Oxford Reformers lays stress on the new outlook in
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