314 Mr. John Forbes. 



remotest extremity of Europe, has within the last few days 

 been overturned by one of the Lieutenants of His Majesty's 

 Navy, now commanding a revenue cutter stationed between 

 the Lizard and Land's End, assisted by a party of his men. 

 The barbarous and wanton folly which could induce an officer 

 bearing Mis Majesty's commission to commit so unwarrantable 

 an act, as to remove a great national curiosity from a position 

 in which it had stood for ages, defying the hand of time, and 

 affording to the enlightened traveller an object of such singular 

 interest, will, it is hoped, be visited with the severest displea- 

 sure of the Admiralty. In a tour through Cornwall in the 

 summer of 1821, I was informed by a cottager who lived near 

 the spot, that an attempt was made by a party of seamen some 

 years before to remove it, but without success. Cornwall, by 

 this wanton outrage, has lost one of its most interesting mo- 

 numents. Yours, &c. 



Plymouth, April 18, 1824. George Harvey. 



Obituary. — Mr. John Forbes. 



Botanical science has sustained a severe loss in the death 

 of this intelligent and enterprising young man. He was sent 

 out by the Horticultural Society of London, under the sanc- 

 tion of the Lords of the Admiralty, with the squadron com- 

 manded by Captain William Owen ; the object of which was 

 to make a complete survey of the whole eastern coast of 

 Africa. Such an expedition afforded loo favourable an op- 

 portunity to be omitted by the Horticultural Society to send 

 out an intelligent collector, and Mr. Forbes, whose zeal as a 

 botanist was known to the Society, was fixed on as a proper 

 person to accompany it. 



The squadron sailed in February 1822, and touched at 

 Lisbon, Teneriffe, Madeira, and Rio Janeiro, at each of which 

 places Mr. Forbes made collections in almost every branch 

 of natural history ; the whole of which were received by the 

 Society. 



His extensive collections subsequently made at the Cape of 

 Good Hope, Delagoa Bay, and Madagascar, were also re- 

 ceived by the Society in high preservation, and by their mag- 

 nitude and variety evinced the unremitting attention which 

 he had paid to the objects of his mission. With the appro- 

 bation of Captain Owen, and with a zeal highly creditable to 

 his own character, although not instructed by the Society, he 

 engaged himself to form part of an expedition which was pro- 

 ceeding from the squadron, up the Zambezi River, on the 

 eastern coast of Africa. It was intended to go about eight 

 hundred miles up the river in canoes, and the party was then 



to 



