of Man, having no special relation to Edward Forbes, beyond the fact that he was born on the island. In a later portion of the volume, we have similar disquisitions on chemistry and the combustion tube, needlessly expanding the book with irrelevant matter. These are blemishes that we might have been spared. There is also a confusion in the arrangement that is troublesome to the reader. The chronology of the narrative and that of the letters run in recurring lines; so that after we have obtained the gist of a part of the life, and seem to be progressing, the letters of the period bring us back again, sometimes as much as five years, and compel us to go over the ground anew. Notwithstanding these defects, the book is a readable one, and will recall to a wide circle many events, some painful, others pleasant, connected with one whom few knew without loving. Edward Forbes was born at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, on February 12th, 1815. His father was the managing director of a joint-stock bank in the island, which subsequently became more notorious than beneficial to its shareholders. He was also engaged in the timber trade, which the requirements of the Manx mining districts rendered a profitable one, and had some pecuniary interest in the fisheries on the coast. The elder Forbes was a speculative man, to which tendency poor Edward Forbes owed many of his later troubles. The fact is, their race was evidently characterized by unsettled and rambling tendencies, ill calculated to adapt them for the slow, monotonous discipline of ordinary life. Edward's mother appears to have been a superior woman, with a devoted love for flowers, which taste she was instrumental in planting in the breast of her son. Though, in childhood, Forbes's health was delicate, he soon displayed signs of possessing the vigorous intellect which he displayed in his riper years. The relations subsisting between the intellectual states of the child and the man yet remain to be investigated. On attempting a solution of the problem, we are met by facts of the most opposite kinds. We find such men as Sir Isaac Newton, the younger Scaliger, Humboldt, and Douglas Jerrold, passing through a childhood of the most ordinary kind. On the other hand, Leibnitz, Mirandola, Galileo, Niebuhr, and a host of others, indicated, during their early youth, what they would become in their maturer years. Such contradictions render it difficult to measure the value of juvenile precocity. But no such doubts can exist respecting juvenile tastes and pursuits. These cannot be guided and fostered at too early a period. Here, we are fully satisfied, the child is indeed father to the man: hence the importance of early " direction.* Though thus indebted to his mother for his first introduction to natural objects, his mind, even in boyhood, was too comprehensive to be limited to her flowers. From his seventh to his tenth year, we find him busily engaged as a juvenile collector of natural specimens. Insects appear to have been the first objects of his pursuit; but, by the time that he completed his tenth year, he had accumulated a small museum. of objects belonging to all the great kingdoms of nature. Sent to a school, of the old-fashioned and almost extinct sort, we find him reading Virgil in the usual premature and superficial style. Nevertheless, he made quick progress, soon accomplishing his own tasks, and readily helping the boys who were duller than himself. Even at this period, he displayed a talent which possessed him with unabated force to the end of life, viz., that of sketching grotesque figures. His class-books and exercise papers abounded with products of his merry brain and fertile pen. Such sketching was to the end of his life an irresistible passion. However mind or tongue might be engaged, his pen or pencil was rarely idle. Most persons have some habit, dangling a watch chain or twirling a button, through which they expend their superfluous nervous irritability; and humorous sketching seems to have fulfilled the same purpose in Edward Forbes. At this early period, he also displayed his talent for rhyming, which became a rich source of fun to the companions of * May we be pardoned in expressing our fears that this point is too often neglected in religious circles? Themselves earnestly attentive to religious duties, and the work of the Church, parents often forget that these things are not naturally attractive to the very young, to whom excitement of some kind is more essential than to those of more advanced years. Such parents very properly exclude their children from the theatre, the ball-room, and the card-table; but they too frequently neglect to supply their place with something equally exciting, but less injurious. If the void be not filled up by the parents, the children will soon fill it up for themselves; and thus such parents will leave to chance what should be the result of pre-arranged plans. The lamentable failures that are too common amongst children in religious families, tell, with melancholy significance, of prevalent error on this point. To teach children to attend multiplied religious services is easy and right; but to expect them to take the same kind of interest in them as is done by mature Christians, is scarcely wise. Hence the danger that such unrelieved services may become associated, in the minds of the young, with a wearisome feeling of vacuity; and, as soon as they have the chance, they too often fill up the vacuum by deep draughts at the interdicted fountains of the world. Let parents learn the wisdom of labouring as diligently to establish pure intellectual tastes, as to discipline them in the routine of the schoolroom, or to train them in habits of reverence for the sanctuary. Here it is that nature offers us such an inexhaustible and acceptable field. Under parental guidance, the love of flowers, shells, or insects, finds in the juvenile mind a ready soil in which to root. The desire to accumulate is so natural to children, that they are soon taught to become collectors; and such children, to use the expressive remark made by one so trained, 'become spoiled for the world.' A father's guidance made Linnæus a florist, and Herschel an astronomer; and a mother's gentle hand first led Edward Forbes into the fields, where he found the joy of his life. his later life. He was now a tall, thin lad, with long hair, and awkward, half-disjointed limbs, diligent in school, and spending his hours of recreation apart from his schoolfellows. Whilst they were engaged in their sports, he was wandering over the hills, picking up plants and creeping things, unopposed, but unencouraged. But though he thus held himself aloof from the games of his schoolfellows, he was already the centre of their circle, attracting them around him by his loving, gentle nature. Wherever he went, he carried with him this polarizing power. We shall find him exercising it as the Edinburgh collegian, as the rising star amid the philosophers of London, and at the close of life as the honoured professor in his own Alma Mater. His loadstone was ever the same,—a loving, genial heart. When he left school, he carried away with him a little Latin, less Greek, still less algebra, mathematics, or even common arithmetic, no physical science, no French, German, or other modern language.* e. He was deemed a proficient in drawing, in which he had received some instructions, as also, in smaller measure, in oilpainting. But, whatever besides he had or lacked, he was now a confirmed naturalist. Dredging the bays of his native island was his favourite amusement, and his collection of natural objects had become large. But even in this department his studies were desultory and unsystematic. We have already remarked that he pursued his hobby unopposed, but at the same time with little encouragement or guidance from those around him. How far this was advantageous or the reverse is difficult to determine. It led, doubtless, to much loss of valuable time; but meanwhile he was accumulating rich stores of material for future use; unbiassed by the hypotheses by which more systematic study might have caused him to be influenced. For ordinary students, we are well aware, this must have been a mischievous condition. Unequal to the task of independently deciphering the hieroglyphics of nature, and uninstructed in the knowledge which others had gained, they would simply learn nothing. But Edward Forbes never was an ordinary student. Unbiassed by the doctrines of scientific coteries, he learned to see things as they were, rather than as they were thought to be. At the same time, even for him much might have been done, had some skilled friend been at hand, to guide him equally in the field and in the closet. We know from weary experience what it is to labour unguided amidst a confused mass of material, unable to * Life, p. 65.. separate the ore from the dross,* and to be unfurnished with a few of those fundamental principles which would be like the labyrinthine thread. Such, however, with its advantages and disadvantages, was the school in which young Forbes was trained. But the time arrived when he had to select a calling for life, and here his real difficulties began. In harmony with the aspirations of every youthful naturalist, as well as with the erratic propensities of his race, he early cast a longing eye towards foreign travel. His imagination had already revelled amongst the woods of Brazil and with their feathery palms and gorgeous insects. The mysterious jungle of India, teeming with life, had a similar charm to his ardent mind. But however delightful such day-dreams might be, they held out no prospect of material support. Stern mammon has broken similar spells in the case of many an aspiring youth. So it was with Edward Forbes. The only professions for which he appeared fitted by tastes and training were painting and medicine; and, after much deliberation, art carried the day. At this stage of his career, Edward Forbes supplies another illustration how difficult it is to find a fitting niche for youthful genius. How many of our greatest men have barely escaped this maelstrom of life. We have bought our supplies for the week's campaign in the little shop on the Yorkshire coast where Cook was placed to learn the combined trades of the grocer and the draper. The great navigator cut the knot by the reckless, but, in his instance, unavoidable, method of running away. Strange, the engraver, was first a lawyer, then a sailor. Copernicus was a physician; Tycho Brahe, a limb of the law; and Newton had a narrow escape from being a Lincolnshire grazier. None of these men were fitted for the callings selected for them, neither was it the design of Providence that they should be so engaged; but how to escape them by creditable means was the difficulty. Then genius, and the triumphs that were ultimately to justify irregular courses, were not yet so manifest as future years were to make them. And cautious friends were always at hand, indulging their sneer at the youths who rejected their prudent * We well remember having discovered in the Yorkshire Lias a magnificent ichthyodorulite, as the large bony defence-spines of shark-like fishes were then termed, and . were about to publish an account of it as a claw of some gigantic fossil crab, which it much resembled. And on another occasion, a detached pentagonal plate from the stem of an Encrinite, and from the angles of which projected five radiating arms, was about to figure in print as a fossil starfish. Such blunders are inevitable to young naturalists working, unguided, in out-of-the-way corners of the provinces. Had poor Forbes been living, he could, doubtless, have related many similar experiences. counsels. At the same time, we must remember that many young men, under the influence of an ambition unjustified by their native powers, have left the safe highways of life, and been irretrievably lost. What early evidence was there in the case of any of the men referred to that they would succeed better? Ordinary callings present a fair chance of winning a livelihood, which none of the bye-paths of science afforded in those early days, and which they rarely afford even now. Hence in most cases the prudent friends who predict ruin to the erratic scapegraces are not far from the truth. To the bulk of dreamy and ambitious lads, fame is the will-o'-the-wisp that rarely fails to land them in the morasses of life; and the number of those who emerge upon the firm ground of literary eminence is too small to justify any one in selecting science as a profession on which to depend. To those who are independent of the world the case is otherwise. They may please themselves; but to the mass of young men scientific pursuits must be made the relaxation from less fascinating, but safer and more remunerative, labours. Let young men who are ambitious of these high distinctions study the case of Edward Forbes; let them note how weary an interval of anxiety and care had to be bridged over before even he reached the sunny land of success. And let them pause before they choose as their business that which they can pursue with equal enjoyment as the recreation of life. These remarks have been suggested by the fact that Forbes, like many other youngsters, was anxious to be a professional naturalist; but this was at present hopeless. Consequently, art being chosen as his calling, he went to London as a student; presented his trial-picture at the Academy, in order to be admitted into their school, and was rejected. He then turned to the well-known instructor of young artists, Mr. Sass, who also discouraged his artistic aspirations. He spent three months working in that gentleman's studio, until, having satisfied himself that he had mistaken his calling, he abandoned it and London together, in October, 1831. But, during the interval, Forbes was not the man to sink into gloom. He enjoyed to the uttermost the sights of the metropolis, and also indulged his love of literature, which was almost as strong as his love of nature. His short studentship under Mr. Sass was not without its value in preparing him for the more skilful illustration of his own future discoveries. Providence was, in many ways, training him for his work, though he knew it not. Meanwhile, he returned for a short period to the Isle of Man, where it was decided that he should now apply himself to medicine; and with this object he went to Edinburgh in the sub |