Forbes, Edward (1815–1854)

British naturalist. He 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 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' ideas could be commandeered for evolutionary purposes.

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.