OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED*. 



James David Forbes*)* was the youngest son of Sir William Forbes of 

 Pitsligo, who was descended from the ancient family of the Forbes of 

 Monymusk, on the banks of the Don, and was head of the well-known bank- 

 ing-house long established in the Parliament Square of Edinburgh. The 

 mother of James Forbes was the only child and heiress of John Belches, 

 afterwards Sir John Stewart, a cadet of the old house of Invermay. The 

 early death of Lady Forbes, while her youngest son was a child scarce two 

 years old, cast a sobering shade over his early years, and indeed coloured 

 his whole life and character. His father idolized the child, as the last 

 legacy of her whom he had lost. He retired from Edinburgh, and lived a 

 secluded life, surrounded by his young family, in his country place of 

 Colinton. There were spent James Forbes' s childhood and boyhood. The 

 teaching he got was of the most private, even desultory kind. Fear for the 

 boy's health made his father nervously anxious lest he should overwork 

 himself. So his education was left entirely to his sisters' governess, and to 

 occasional lessons from the neighbouring village schoolmaster, a worthy 

 man, to whom his distinguished pupil remained ever afterwards sincerely 

 attached. But though lessons were easy, his mind was active, and by his 

 twelfth year the natural bias towards physical knowledge was manifesting 

 itself. Already his head was busy with mechanical contrivances, — a new 

 velocipedometer, an anemometer, a metal quadrant made by his own 

 hands for astronomical purposes. At the same time he was devouring 

 every scientific book he could lay hands on, from the 'Nautical Almanac' to 

 Woodhouse's ( Astronomy.' But all this devotion to science was kept 

 strictly secret ; he laboured at it in private, and said nothing, for his father 

 would not have smiled on such pursuits. He would have objected to them 

 both as too serious a tax on the young brain, and also as likely to turn him 

 from the dry studies of the bar, for which he was destined. His own wish 

 was to take orders in the English Church, to which he was strongly 

 attached ; but from this aim he was, not without reluctance, withdrawn by 

 his father's expressed wish that he should study for the Scottish bar. This 

 accordingly, from his fifteenth to his twenty-first year, was his ostensible 

 purpose, but his heart was all the while turning secretly aside to the for- 



* Note to a passage in the Biography of M. Foucault, Proceedings of the Royal 

 Society, vol. xvii. 



It appears from a notice in the Report of the British Association for the Promotion 

 of Science for 1843, that Dr. Joule had made an experiment demonstrating the conver- 

 sion of work into heat, very similar to the experiment by M. Foucault described at the 

 end of page lxxxiii. 



t This notice of Professor Forbes, except what more especially refers to his scientific 

 work, has been taken, with abridgement, but without other alteration in matter or lan- 

 guage, from an inaugural address delivered by his distinguished successor, Principal 

 Shairp, at the opening of the Academical Session of the United College, St. Andrew's, 

 in 1869. 



vol. xix. a 



