The late Professor Edward Forbes. 307 



pathized with his tastes, and participated in his admiration of 

 the beautiful productions of nature. His little daughter, too, 

 often accompanied him in his botanical rambles in Hong Kong, 

 and it was an unfailing source of satisfaction to him to be 

 able to combine the indulgence of his feelings of love, affec- 

 tion, or friendship, with his attachment to his scientific pur- 

 suits. 



The late Professor Edward Forbes. 



[As every thing connected with the late Editor will be in- 

 teresting to the readers of this Journal, the present Editors 

 have ventured to insert the following sketch by Dr George 

 Wilson, which has already appeared in the pages of Black- 

 wood's Magazine.'] 



Edward Forbes was born in the Isle of Man in February 

 1815, and died near Edinburgh on the 18th of November 1854, 

 in his 40th year, six months after his appointment to the Regius 

 Chair of Natural History in the University of that city. His great 

 and varied gifts and accomplishments, his remarkable discoveries, 

 and his singularly lovable, generous, and catholic spirit, made him 

 an object of esteem and affection to a very wide circle of friends, 

 and a still wider circle of acquaintances. All were exulting in the 

 prospect of the long and honourable career which awaited him, 

 when, in the height of his glory and usefulness, he was suddenly 

 stricken- by a fatal disease, and died after a brief illness. 



The following lines seek to apply, mutatis mutandis, to the 

 mystery of the great Naturalist's death, certain canons which he 

 enforced in reference to the existence of living things, both plants 

 and animals. Their purport was, to teach that an individual 

 plant or animal cannot be understood, so far as the full signifi- 

 cance of its life and death is concerned, by a study merely of it- 

 self; but that it requires to be considered in connection with the 

 variations in form, structure, character, and deportment, exhi- 

 bited by the contemporary members of its species spread to a 

 greater or less extent over the entire globe, and by the ancestors 

 of itself, and of those contemporary individuals throughout the 

 whole period which has elapsed since the species was created. 



He further held, that the many animal and vegetable tribes or 

 races (species) which once flourished, but have now totally perished, 

 did not die because a "germ of death" had from the first been 

 present in each, but suffered extinction in consequence of the 

 great geologic changes which the earth had undergone, such as 



