66 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
had a narrow escape. His companion, writing in 1842, says: 
“Poor Forbes, the Naturalist, was taken ill on the way from 
Rhodes to Syra, of the country fever, and remained for thirteen 
days together without tasting food, and without medicine 
or medical advice.” 
During this expedition, however, his mai work was 
not on land, but at sea; and his marine dredgings in the 
Aigean gave great results. Captain Graves tells us how 
Forbes converted everyone on board—officers and men 
alike—into ardent naturalists, bringing back shells and 
other offerings, “ curios’”’ as they called them, from every 
surveying trip in the boats. 
Of the Greeks, in one letter, he foretells—‘ they will 
be a great people yet, and are almost as interesting as the 
shell-fish that live on their shores.” One of the points of 
interest, of course, in the shell-fish was that they and many 
of his other captures were precisely the animals collected 
and described by Aristotle from these same coasts over 2,000 
years before. He dredged successfully at a greater depth 
(230 fathoms) than anyone had done before, and to his surprise 
he brought up living starfishes and other animals from 200 
fathoms. He writes that the shell-fish from the deeper water 
all belong to types only known in the fossil condition, and 
that, so far, he is the only zoologist who has seen them alive. 
His Report on the distribution of animals in the Aigean Sea, 
which eventually appeared before the British Association at 
Cork in 1843, was, a contemporary tells us, a most important 
and philosophic summary of the facts, which at once raised 
him to a high rank among living naturalists. He defined, 
in the Aigean, eight zones of depth characterised by peculiar 
assemblages of animals, and he “conjectured that the zero 
of animal life would probably be found somewhere about _ 
300 fathoms “—so he named the region below that, the “ Azoic — 1 
zone —a conclusion which has since been found to be erroneous. 
