1854- - LIFE OF EDWARD FORBES. 265 



learning, I hope, more and more to trust God, and to put 

 faith in Christ ; and to leave these, and a thousand other 

 black mysteries to be explained, if God please, hereafter, 

 and if it does not so please Him, to be left unexplained." 



" I have agreed very reluctantly," he tells his brother 

 Daniel, " to write Edward Forbes's life. I have been so 

 importuned to become his biographer, that I have assented. 

 I loved him very dearly, and knew him well, and the task is 

 in that respect very welcome ; but I had labours of my own 

 to work out which must be put aside. 1 I enclose some verses 

 on his loss, which embody two ideas of his own applied to 

 plants and animals." The verses alluded to appeared in 

 'Blackwood's Magazine' for March, 1855, with a short 

 explanatory preface : 



" The lines seek to apply, mutatis mutandis, to the mystery 

 of the great Naturalist's death, certain canons which he 

 enforced in reference to the existence of living things, both 

 plants and animals. Their purport was, to teach that an 

 individual plant or animal cannot be understood, so far as 

 the full significance of its life and death is concerned, by a 

 study merely of itself ; but that it requires to be considered 

 in connexion with the variations in form, structure, cha- 

 racter, and deportment, exhibited by the contemporary 

 members of its species spread to a greater or less extent 

 over the entire globe ; and by the ancestors of itself, and of 

 those contemporary individuals throughout the whole period 

 which has elapsed since the species was created. 



" He further held, that the many animal and vegetable 



1 "I hope I shall live to write Edward Forbes's Life," is an expression 

 in a letter about this date. But this hope was only partly fulfilled. 

 The amount of labour demanded from him by the duties of the sub- 

 sequent years, left almost no leisure for literary work. Every attempt 

 was made to get on with it, but at his death it was left unfinished. 

 It has since been completed by the hand of another. 



