MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 61 
Do-do! John Edward Gray, sir, 
Doubted what Mr. Blainville did say, sir, 
And held that the bird was a vile imposition, 
And that the old Dutchman had seen but a vision. 
A do-do! a regular do! 
And didn’t believe one word was true. 
Moral: Do-do! alas there are left us 
No more remains of the Didus ineptus, 
And so in the progress of science all prodigies 
Must die, as the palm-trees will some day at Loddiges, 
And like our wonderful do-do, 
Turn out not worth the hullabaloo. 
During his last few years at Edinburgh, Forbes made 
strenuous efforts to earn a livelihood by science. He prepared 
and announced courses of lectures at Edinburgh, St. Andrews 
and elsewhere, which, I fear, were but poorly attended and 
probably little more than paid expenses. It is interesting 
to notice that in January, 1840, he gave a course of eight 
lectures in Liverpool. 
It was probably on the occasion of these lectures that 
he made the acquaintance of Mr. Robert MacAndrew, a 
Liverpool merchant and yachtsman, interested in the mollusca, 
who, during the last decade or so of Forbes’ life, frequently 
took him, and Goodsir or other friends, on shorter or longer 
dredging expeditions.* For example, in the summer of 1845 
we find that he was with MacAndrew on his yacht dredging 
in Shetland Seas, and on the way back amongst the sea-lochs 
of the Hebrides. On other occasions MacAndrew took him 
im the yacht to dredge Milford Haven, or off the Coast of 
Cornwall, or other localities which Forbes required to examine 
in connection with the great work on the British Mollusca 
upon which he was then engaged. Again, we find Forbes and 
Goodsir in their important paper, “On some remarkable 
* Tam glad to have the opportunity of paying this tribute to a Liverpool 
yachtsman who found or helped to find many of the rarer Mollusca of British 
Seas. His name occurs frequently in the records of Forbes and Hanley’s 
“ British Mollusca,” and it is perpetuated in science in Calocaris macandreae, 
one of the rarer deep-water Crustacea, and in the names of several species 
of new shell-fish which he had been instrumental in discovering. 
