Adam Sedgwick Quotes
From first to last it is a dish of rank materialism cleverly cooked up ... . And why is this done? For no other reason, I am sure, except to make us independent of a Creator.
Sedgwick, Adam. Letter to Macvey Napier, 10 Apr. 1845. The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, edited by John Willis Clark and Thomas McKenny Hughes, vol. 2, Cambridge UP, 1890, p. 82.
In an interview with a Norwegian magazine, the Eco stated that he had based his novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum”, on Chesterton’s epigram: “When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” See related quote.
Adam Sedgwick was a British geologist and priest, one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Cambrian and Devonian period of the geological timescale. Based on work which he did on Welsh rock strata, he proposed the Cambrian period in 1835, in a joint publication in which Roderick Murchison also proposed the Silurian period. Later in 1840, to resolve what later became known as the Great Devonian Controversy about rocks near the boundary between the Silurian and Carboniferous periods, he and Murchison proposed the Devonian period.
