The late Professor Edward Forbes. 139 



In the winter of 1839-40, he delivered a course of lectures 

 in Edinburgh on Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, of a 

 strictly scientific nature, for professed working students ; and 

 he also gave at that time a course of a more popular character 

 on Zoology, in its connection with Geology on the one hand, 

 and Mental Philosophy on the other. Early in the year 1840, 

 he completed his beautiful and still standard work on British 

 Star-fish and Sea-urchins (published in 1841), adorned by not 

 fewer than 120 accurate and highly-finished illustrations. 

 These latter were all designed by himself ; and we may here 

 note that his artistic skill was fully and frequently employed, 

 not only in the representation of animal forms, but in sketches 

 both of rural and architectural scenery, and, most character- 

 istically of all, in the vignettes and tail-pieces to his various 

 publications, where we have humour and sentiment, gracefully 

 and truthfully combined. This power of drawing was of in- 

 calculable advantage in his professorial career, by enabling 

 him to exhibit to the eye many things beyond expression by 

 the power of words. By making use of different coloured 

 chalks, he would give most life-like sketches, not only of outer 

 form, but of internal structure, both being in some cases of a 

 nature so fragile, unfixed, translucent, that little or nothing 

 could be understood regarding them, by those previously un- 

 instructed, from the inspection of the actual subjects. But 

 this accomplished instructor having ascertained, by the most 

 minute and pains-taking labour, the actualities of form and 

 substance, and having impressed them on his own mind, was 

 able, by the combined power of a retentive memory and a 

 skilful hand, to bring into the clearest light what was in itself 

 invisible to common eyes, or, if visible, then incomprehensible 

 by common intellects, till seen through the borrowed lustre of 

 his understanding. Alas ! it seems but as the remembrance 

 of yesterday, that the feeling returns upon us with all its 

 freshness, how in his recent summer course (so frankly under- 



Fauna to that of the neighbouring Sea," — Reports Brit. Assoc. 1840. We men- 

 tion the preceding merely as among the more prominent of his earlier contri- 

 butions, and to show how soon his determinations tended towards marine 

 researches. 



