If) 4 DEATH AND BURIAL. 



friend, Mr. Spence, professor of surgery. After much 

 suffering, and within a few days of completing his 53d 

 year, he died very peaceably on the 6th March 1867, 

 in the presence of his devoted brother and sister, and 

 in the same cottage (South Cottage, Wardie) that wit- 

 nessed the last hours of his friend Edward Forbes 

 (Nov. 1854). The youthful companions — John Goodsir 

 and Edward Forbes — who had sat on the same benches 

 as students, and had fraternised so well in natural 

 history research, and struggled up the arduous steep 

 of science to professional eminence and European fame, 

 came to breathe their last under the same roof. And 

 as if the ties of life and love were to find a fitting re- 

 sponse in death, the remains of John Goodsir are 

 interred next to the grave of Edward Forbes, in the 

 Dean Cemetery of Edinburgh. 



John Goodsir's funeral was attended by professors 

 and medical teachers, the fellows of the royal colleges, 

 and many mourning friends. Two hundred of his 

 pupils joined the procession, and manifested their 

 deeply-felt sorrow at the graveside of one whom they 

 loved so much. A granite obelisk marks the grave, 

 and upon it are inscribed the simple words — " John 

 Goodsir, Anatomist. Born March 20, 1814. Died 

 March 6, 1867." The Eev. J. T. Goodsir has had the 

 spiral curved line engraved on one side of the obelisk, 

 to exemplify the feeling pervading the professor's 

 mind on the subject of organic growth — the spiral 

 being symbolic of the law of the vital force, set forth in 

 p. 180 of this memoir, and more developed in Goodsir's 



