

EDWARD FORBES. 203 



month. Thus died one of the most accomplished and 

 original naturalists that this country has yet produced, in 

 the prime of life, for he was not forty years old, in the 

 zenith of his fame, and at the moment when he had just 

 commenced the happiest and most hopeful period of 

 his laborious career. 



Of Forbes's multifarious scientific publications but few 

 can be noticed here. His special subjects in natural 

 history proper had always been the Zoophytes, the 

 Echinoderms, and the Mollusca, together with all 

 problems relating to the geographical distribution of 

 animals. As regards the first of these subjects, his chief 

 contributions are the following : 



1 i ) ' On the Morphology of the reproductive system of the 

 Sertularian Zoophyte.' This memoir was published in the 

 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History' in 1844, and in 

 it he demonstrated that the singular urn-shaped capsules 

 which are seasonally produced by the common Sertularian 

 Zoophytes of our seas, and which have the function of 

 reproducing the species, are really a modified condition of 

 the ordinary buds of the colony, the function of which is 

 nutritive. In other words, he showed that just as the 

 flowers of a plant are only specially modified buds, and 

 therefore composed of altered leaves ; so the reproductive 

 buds of the sea-firs and their allies are only modifications 

 of the ordinary nutritive ' polypites.' 



(2) 'On the Pulmograde Medusae of the British Seas,' 

 published in the ' Annals and Magazine of Natural History ' 

 in 1846. 



(3) 'A Monograph of the Naked-eye Medusae,' published 

 by the Ray Society in 1848. In this last well-known 



