Memoir of Edward Forbes, F.R.S., late Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh / by George Wilson and Archibald Geikie.

Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoir of Edward Forbes, F.R.S., late Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh / by George Wilson and Archibald Geikie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    never been exclusively directed to any one of the natu ral sciences. He was equally a botanist, a zoologist, and a geologist from first to last/'1 Another friend, the Rev. Dr. Campbell, now Princi- pal of the University of Aberdeen, who made his ac- quaintance at the Botanical Classroom, has kindly sent me the accompanying sketch :— “ I have a vivid remembrance of the occasion on which Edward Forbes first fixed my attention. Dr. Graham, the Professor of Botany, whose class we at- tended during the summer of 1832, was in the practice of marking by numbers, certain of the British plants in the garden, and requiring the students to discover and report to him their names. When standing one day after lecture with some class-fellows over a plant thus marked, none of us being able to assign its name, I heard a voice call out over my shoulder, ‘ Oh ! that is Eupa- toriub Caddcibidub’ [Eupcitorium Gcinnabinum]. Our surviving fellow-students will at once recognise by the peculiar pronunciation and the ready answer, that the speaker was Forbes. At that time he always spoke as one does when the nose, as the phrase is, is stuffed with cold ; and this peculiarity, although greatly modified by time, was never, I think, entirely got rid of. “ On turning round I saw a student, a year or two my junior in age, clad in an olive-coloured surtout, whose tall, slightly-stooping figure, pale and somewhat sallow complexion, and kindly, intelligent eye, had sometimes arrested a passing glance in the class-room. We entered 1 Scots'nian newspaper, Nov. 22, 1854. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, January 1855, p. 51.