The late Professor Edward Forbes. 137 



has far transcended all others in the importance and extent of 

 his submarine researches in the British Seas, as well as in 

 those of Greece and Asia Minor. 



He thus pursued his studies with great intensity of thought 

 and application, yet with so much of the buoyant light- 

 headedness of youth, as no doubt to draw many very worthy 

 common-place people into the belief that he was making no 

 particular progress in his pursuits, and had too much of the 

 unconstrained, it might almost seem, unacademical, spirit of 

 the German " Burschen " in his general bearing and mode 

 of life. But the result more than justified the hopes and 

 expectations of those who augured, because they knew of, 

 better things. He did not confine himself to scientific pur- 

 suits, but mingled with them many miscellaneous literary 

 exercises, thus strengthening and enlarging his intellectual 

 faculties, and fitting himself all the more to take eventual 

 advantage of those points in the minds of others, to whom a 

 discursive power, and some imaginative impulse, were required 

 to create a tendency towards scientific studies, rather than a 

 dry enunciation of technical details, which so often fails to 

 affect the feelings. It is not knowledge or intellect alone that 

 is required in science, though each is indispensable, and both 

 are too often found wanting. There must be feeling and 

 affection, as towards a living being, as if it formed almost an 

 inseparable component portion of our own existence. It was 

 thus that Edward Forbes built up all his great things on a 

 secure foundation, — no man more cautious yet so bold, — but it 

 was by the exercise of something akin to the imaginative 

 faculty that he first foresaw and felt the grandeur of those 

 general views, — such as the zones of living life, which exist 

 not alone upon the sunny surface of the earth, but in the dark- 

 some waters far beneath it, — and which he afterwards wrought 

 out with the patient zeal of a devoted inquirer, not less than 

 rapid apprehension of an accomplished naturalist.* It is but 



* The natural law above alluded to, and of which Professor Edward For- 

 bes was the first, as he continued to be the principal exponent, is this, — that 

 as there are great and characteristically distinct zones of animal and vegetable 

 life, in altitude, as we proceed upwards on the sides of mountains, or into alpine 



