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great activity and energy. Eond of travel, of society, and social pleasures, 

 freehanded, and better at spending than at saving money. His grandfather 

 was for some time at sea in command. One uncle died at Demerara ; another 

 in Surinam ; a third travelled into the interior of Africa, and was last heard of 

 some twenty or thirty years ago as king or sultan of some native African tribe. 

 One of his own brothers perished by drowning in Australia ; another was killed 

 in America ; a third, who resembles himself in genius, has seen many adven- 

 tures in Norway and in South America. " A love of roaming," says his bio- 

 grapher, " certainly runs in the blood of the Manx Eorbeses, and in none of 

 them was it stronger than in Edward, whose happiest hours were spent in 

 travelling in strange lands and dredging in unfathomed seas." His mother, 

 by the universal testimony of all, was a singularly gentle, amiable, and pious 

 woman, devoted to her children, and beloved by rich and poor. The childhood 

 of Edward Eorbes was a happy one. His father's affairs for a long season 

 were prosperous, and his mother also possessed property in her own right, 

 which, by Manx law, was under her own control. He remained at his father's 

 house till 1831, when he had reached his sixteenth year, and it was thought 

 time to select a profession for him. His mother wished him to be a clergyman ; 

 his father a physician. His own wish was to be a naturalist, but, with the 

 consent of all parties, a compromise, curiously illustrative of his versatility, 

 was entered into, and he was sent to London to become a painter. The com- 

 promise failed in its purpose ; but he did not again make the Isle of Man his 

 residence, except at vacation intervals. 



In the volume before us we are next passed on through his false start as an 

 artist, his residence in London, his student life in Edinburgh, his abandonment 

 of medicine as a profession, and then we come to the time when he adopted 

 natural history as a permanent vocation. When he returned to the Isle of Man 

 in 1832, he spent the three autumn months of the year in diligent work. He 

 had brought back from Edinburgh greatly enlarged views of natural history, 

 and a greatly increased acquaintance with its recorded facts. Eurnished by 

 his training at the University with a knowledge of the means by which great 

 naturalists had observed nature, he discovered new riches every day in the ter- 

 ritory of Man, and he formed the resolution to write a work on the entire 

 natural history of the Island, including some reference to its civil his- 

 tory, and a full account of its antiquities. In the end he partially 

 carried out this intention. His " Malacologia Monensis" was published at 

 Edinburgh in 1838. Eour years later he contributed to Mr. Cumming's work, 

 " Notes on the Elora of the Isle of Man, and a chapter on il s Natural History 

 and Geology." He did not live to achieve a complete account of the Isle of 

 Man, but the uncompleted investigations which he made in reference to its 

 physical features, and especially his dredgings along its coasts, furnished the 

 starting points for some of the widest generalizations with which he enriched 

 the whole science of natural history. The doctrine of Specific Centres 

 of Distribution of Plants and Animals, if not suggested to him, was at least 

 in his apprehension strikingly illustrated and confirmed by the characters of 

 the Eauna and Elora of his native island as compared with those of Great 

 Britain and Erance on the one hand and of Ireland on the other. To take an 

 example which has long been of popular and even superstitious interest, the 

 absence of poisonous reptiles from Ireland and the Isle of Man was explicable 

 on the hypothesis that they originated on the continent, and spreading from 

 their centre of birth there, reached England in the course of their western 

 divergence, when Great Britain formed part of the now adjacent mainland. 

 Before, however, they had travelled to Ireland, or even to Man, these had 

 become islands, and could no longer be reached. On the other hand, the great 

 Elk (Cervus Megaceros), whose bones are found both in Ireland and Man, may 



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