- British naturalist
who studied molluscs and made significant contributions to oceanography.
In palaeobotany, he divided British plants into five groups, and proposed
that Britain had once been joined to the continent by a land bridge.
Forbes was born on the Isle of Man and studied at Edinburgh. He became
palaeontologist to the Geological Society of London, then professor
of natural history at Edinburgh and from 1851 at the Royal School of
Mines in London.
Forbes discounted the contemporary conviction that marine life subsisted
only close to the sea surface, spectacularly dredging a starfish from
a depth of 400 m/1,300 ft in the Mediterranean. His The Natural History
of European Seas 1859 was a pioneering oceanographical text. It developed
his favourite idea of 'centres of creation'; that is, the notion that
species had come into being at one particularly favoured location. Though
not an evolutionist, Forbes's ideas could be commandeered for evolutionary
purposes.
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