ABSTRACT
Adam Sedgwick's chief memorial is the museum in Cambridge that is named after him, which is now incorporated in the department that grew out of his university teaching. So it is appropriate to begin with those activities. But it would be highly misleading to regard Sedgwick's university work as functionally similar to what the current professors and curators now do in those buildings. In the academic year 1834-35 Sedgwick's lectures almost certainly followed the revised syllabus he had published only two years earlier, though with modifications to bring them right up-to-date with his own and his colleagues’ latest research. Sedgwick was evidently an eloquent and persuasive lecturer, but he himself got even greater pleasure from his fieldwork. Almost every summer, he and most other leading geologists exchanged town for country, fashionable clothes for weatherproof ones, and the company of gentlemanly colleagues for that of innkeepers, farmers and quarrymen.
