PREFACE. 



WILLIAM ALEXANDER FORBES, Fellow of St. John's College, 

 Cambridge, Prosector to the Zoological Society of London, and 

 Lecturer on Comparative Anatomy at Charing Cross Hospital, 

 was born at Cheltenham on June 24, 1855, the second son of 

 Mr. J. S. Forbes, the well-known Railway Director. He was 

 educated at Kensington School and Winchester College, which he 

 entered at the early age of eleven. On leaving Winchester in 

 1872 Forbes passed a year at Aix-la-Chapelle, studying German, 

 and then became a student of the University of Edinburgh, where 

 he pursued the regular medical course, paying special attention to 

 Zoology and Botany, and commencing collections of insects and 

 plants. In 1875 Forbes transferred his residence to London, and 

 entered himself as a student of University College, with the idea 

 of taking a medical degree in the metropolis. Here he quickly 

 became intimate with other zoologists, who were very soon 

 attracted by the astounding general knowledge of zoology and the 

 acute intelligence of one so young. By the advice of the late 

 Prof. Garrod and other friends Mr. Forbes was induced, in October 

 1876, to leave London and to enter as an undergraduate at 

 St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was subsequently elected 

 Scholar, and took his B.A. degree with a First Class in the Natural 

 Sciences Tripos in 1879. The post of Prosector to the Zoological 

 Society of London having become vacant in October 1879, by the 

 lamented death of Prof. Garrod, Forbes was appointed (omnium 

 consensri) to that office in the January following : indeed Garrod on 

 his death-bed had designated him as his most obvious and proper 

 successor, and appointed him his literary executor. 



