FORBES, EDWARD (1815-1854), British naturalist, was born at Douglas, Isle of Man, on Feb. 12, 1815. He studied medi cine at Edinburgh, and in 1833 made a tour in Norway, the botanical results of which were published in Loudon's Magazine of Natural History for 1835-36. In 1836 he forsook medicine for natural science, and after a winter of lectures in Paris, he went to Algiers, where he obtained materials for a paper on land and freshwater Mollusca, published in the Annals of Natural His tory, vol. ii. In 1838 appeared his Malacologia Monensis, a synop sis of the species of Manx Mollusca, and in 1841 his Hist. of Brit. Star-fishes. From 1841 to 1842 he was employed in investi gating the botany, zoology and geology of the Mediterranean region, the results being made known in his "Report on the Mollusca and Radiata of the Aegean Sea, presented to the British Association in 1843," and in Travels in Lycia (1847) . In 1842 Forbes became curator of the museum of the Geological Society of London, in 1843 professor of botany at King's Col lege, and in 1844, palaeontologist to the Geological Survey of Great Britain. Two years later he published in the Memoirs of the Geological Survey, i. 336, his important essay "On the Connexion between the distribution of the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles, and the Geological Changes which have affected their Area," in which he maintains that the plants of Great Britain may be divided into five well-marked groups and that the majority of them, like the terrestrial animals, mi grated to these islands over continuous land at three distinct periods, before, during and after the glacial epoch. In 1851 Forbes became professor of natural history to the Royal School of Mines, and in the following year published the fourth volume of Forbes and S. Hanley's History of British Mollusca and his Monograph of the Echinodermata of the British Tertiaries (Palaeontographical Soc.) . In 1854 he became professor of natural history at Edinburgh, but he died on Nov. 18 of that year at Wardic, near Edinburgh.
See G. Wilson and A. Geikie, Memoir of Edward Forbes (1861) , containing a list of Forbes's writings, Literary Papers, ed. Lovell Reeve (1855) and Forbes' Centenary Commemoration by the London Manx Society (1915) . The following works were issued posthumously: "On the Tertiary Fluviomarine Formation of the Isle of Wight" (Geol. Survey), edited by R. A. C. Godwin-Austen (1856) ; "The Natural History of the European Seas," edited and continued by R. A. C. Godwin-Austen (1859) .