78 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
Monaco, and also by the programme of work of the “ Conseil 
Permanent International pour Vexploration de la Mer,” a 
scheme of co-operation between the nine or ten maritime 
nations of North-West Europe (unhappily now in abeyance 
on account of the war), and, I think I may add, although 
the methods and the objects may now be very different, also 
quite in the spirit of the pioneer work performed in the Irish 
Sea by Edward Forbes seventy to eighty years ago. 
It must always remain an interesting speculation as 
to what part Edward Forbes would have played, had he lived, 
in the great controversy which raged a few years later round 
the Darwinian theory of Evolution by means of Natural 
Selection. Forbes and Darwin were practically contemporaries,” 
but whereas Forbes’ life work was ended in 1854, Darwin’s 
more celebrated works were not published until after 1858, 
the year when he and Wallace laid their epoch-making com- 
munication upon the Origin of Species before the Linnean 
Society of London. 
Forbes, at the time of his death was, in the opinion of 
his contemporaries, the most original naturalist of the time, 
and he had certainly had as much to do with the recognition 
and description of species—species of animals, of plants-and 
of fossils—as anyone of his day. Would this knowledge have 
helped him to appreciate Darwin’s new views, or would it 
have confirmed him in the more orthodox opinions of the 
time ? Huxley was his junior by ten years, and Huxley was 
the protagonist of Darwinian Evolution. Would Forbes 
have been found in the same camp, or would he have been 
one of those more senior men in regard to whom Darwin 
said that he did not expect to convince experienced 
Naturalists whose minds had been accustomed during many 
years to an opposite point of view, but looked with confidence 
* Darwin was precisely six years senior, being born on February 12th, 
1809. 
