Forbes, EDWARD

Forbes, EDWARD, naturalist, was the son of a banker, and was born at Douglas, Isle of Man, February 12, 1815. He received a desultory and imperfect education in early life in consequence of ill-health. In 1831 he went to London with the intention of becoming a student at the Royal Academy, but later in the same year entered the university of Edinburgh as a student of medicine; and in 1836 he finally relinquished his medical studies to devote himself exclusively to the natural sciences. In 1836-37 he studied at Paris under Geoffroy St-Hilaire, Jussieu, and De Blainville. From the first year of his college life Forbes had spent his summer vacations in rambles over various parts of Great Britain or in excursions on the Continent, publishing the results of the observations which he made either as separate works or in the pages of scientific journals. In 1841 he joined the surveying ship Beacon as naturalist, and accompanied that vessel during the survey of a part of Asia Minor. On his return to England in 1843 he became professor of Botany in King's College, London, and curator of the Geological Society. In 1844 he was appointed palaeontologist to the Museum of Geology in connection with the Ordnance Geological Survey; in 1851 professor of Natural History in the School of Mines; in 1852 president of the Geological Society; and in 1853, on the death of Professor Jameson, he was elected to the vacant chair of Natural History in the university of Edinburgh. In the summer of 1854 he delivered a short course of lectures—the only one he was destined to give—for at the commencement of the winter session he was seized with a severe illness, which speedily proved fatal; and he died on the 18th November 1854, in the thirty-ninth year of his age, and in the very zenith of his fame. Forbes had been a voluminous writer and a diligent observer of nature from his earliest youth, and had collected an immense mass of materials, many of which were, however, left at his death in a state of disorder. He did much to advance and systematise special departments of natural history, both by his own labours and by the stimulus which he imparted to his associates and pupils. His classification of the British star-fishes opened a new era in that branch of zoology; and his discovery that air-breathing molluscs lived at the period of the Purbeck beds rectified many erroneous hypotheses. From an early period he had directed his attention to the distribution of animal and vegetable life in different zones of the sea and land, and his observations in this path of inquiry have opened many new fields of research. Of his separate works, papers, and monographs upwards of two hundred were published, many of them copiously illustrated by his own beautiful drawings. Among them may be instanced the following: On the Distrib. of Pulmonif. Mollusca in Europe (1838), Malacol. Monensis (1838), Star-fishes (1841), The Radiata and Mollusca of the Ægean (1843), Travels in Lycia (in conjunction with Spratt, 1846), Naked-eyed Medusæ (1847), British Mollusca (conjointly with Hanley, 4 vols. 8vo, 1853), and Collection of Literary Papers by E. Forbes (1855). See the Memoir by G. Wilson and A. Geikie (1861).—His brother DAVID (1828–76) was distinguished as a geologist.