REVIEWS. 
401 
ijreat activity and energy. Fond of travel, of society, and social pleasures, 
freehanded, and better at spending than at saving money. His grandfather 
■was for soQie 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 Forbeses, and in none of 
tiiem 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 Forbes was a liappy one. His father's affairs for a long season 
were prosperous, and his mother also possessed property in her own right, 
which, bv 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 tlie Isle of Man his 
residence, except at vacation intervals. 
lu 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 
iu 1832, he spent the three autumn montlis of the year in diligent work. He 
liad brought back from Edinburgh greatly enlarged views of natural history, 
and a greatly increased acquaintance with its recorded facts. Furnished 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- 
carried out this intention. His " Malacologia Monensis" was published at 
Edinburgh in 1838. Four years later he contributed to Mr. Cummin^'s work, 
" Notes on the Flora of the Isle of Man, and a chapter on its 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 
m his apprehension strikingly illustrated and confirmed by the characters of 
the Fauna and Flora of his native island as compared with those of Great 
Britain and France on the one hand and of Ireland on the other. To take an 
example which has Ions: 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 
VOL rv. 2 u 
tory, and a fuU account of 
In the end he partially 
