54 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
of peace, when notable advances were made in the Arts and 
Sciences, and in their application to University Education, 
in all of which he played a prominent part. 
Edward Forbes was born on the 12th of February, 1815, 
at Douglas, where his father was a banker. Though settled 
in the Isle of Man for several generations, the Forbes family 
was of Scottish descent, the great grandfather, who was involved 
in the Jacobite rising of 1745, having fled to the Island for 
refuge. The mother of Edward Forbes was Jane Teare, 
heiress of the estates of Corvalla and Ballabeg at Ballaugh, 
where her ancestors had lived for centuries, combining, no 
doubt, in their blood both the Scandinavian and the Celtic 
elements which are found in the Manx people. As his paternal 
grandmother again was English, our Naturalist, though born 
and bred a Manxman, was of mixed blood, and may have 
inherited qualities from all that is best im our complex British 
nation. 
As seems frequently to be the case with Naturalists, 
it was from his mother that Forbes derived his love of nature, 
and more particularly his early taste for botany. It was 
certainly inborn in him, as we hear that at the early age of seven 
he had already collected and arranged a museum of natural | 
objects, and had appointed a younger sister as Assistant 
Curator. He was a delicate boy, unable to go to school till 
the age of twelve, and it was, no doubt, to encourage these 
self-taught home studies that his father built an addition 
to their house to contain the boy’s museum, and it was there 
that in his early youth Forbes started those collections which, 
in later life, formed the basis of his celebrated books on British 
Echimoderms and British Mollusca. 
Home education in the case of a clever child probably 
always favours precocity, introspection and over-ambitious 
attempts. Still, he must have been a remarkable boy to have 
produced in his twelfth year ‘A Manual of British Natural 
