some progress in the preparation of the second at the time of his death on the 2nd of February 1876. In 1855 Forster had been appointed secretary to the lunacy commission, and from 1861 to 1872 he held the office of a commissioner in lunacy. His valuable collection of manuscripts, including the original copies of Charles Dickens's novels, together with his books and pictures, was bequeathed to South Kensington Museum. An admirable account of him by Henry Morley is prefixed to the official handbook (1877) of the Dyce and Forster bequests. FORSTER, JOHN COOPER (1823-1886), British surgeon, was born in 1823 in Lambeth, London, where his father and grandfather before him had been local medical practitioners. He entered Guy's hospital in 1841, was appointed demonstrator of anatomy in 1850, assistant-surgeon, 1855, and surgeon, 1870. He became a member of the College of Surgeons in 1844, fellow in 1849 and president in 1884. He was a prompt and sometimes bold operator. In 1858 he performed practically the first gastrostomy in England for a case of cancer of the oesophagus. Among his best-known papers were discussions of acupressure, syphilis, hydrophobia, intestinal obstruction, modified obturator hernia, torsion, and colloid cancer of the large intestine; and he published a book on _Surgical Diseases of Children_ in 1860, founded on his experience as surgeon to the hospital for children and women in Waterloo Road. He died suddenly in London on the 2nd of March 1886. FORSTER, WILLIAM EDWARD (1818-1886), British statesman, was born of Quaker parents at Bradpole in Dorsetshire on the 11th of July 1818. He was educated at the Friends' school at Tottenham, where his father's family had long been settled, and on leaving school he was put into business. He declined, however, on principle, to enter a brewery. Becoming in due time a woollen manufacturer in a large way at Bradford, Yorkshire (from which after his marriage he moved to Burley-in-Wharfedale), he soon made himself known as a practical philanthropist. In 1846-1847 he accompanied his father to Ireland as distributor of the Friends' relief fund for the famine in Connemara, and the state of the country made a deep impression on him. In 1849 he wrote a preface to a new edition of Clarkson's _Life of William Penn_, defending the Quaker statesman against Macaulay's criticisms. In 1850 he married Jane Martha, eldest daughter of the famous Dr Arnold of Rugby. She was not a Quaker, and her husband was formally excommunicated for marrying her, but the Friends who were commissioned to announce the sentence "shook hands and stayed to luncheon." Forster thereafter ranked himself as a member of the Church of England, for which, indeed, he was in later life charged with having too great a partiality. There were no children of the marriage, but when Mrs Forster's brother, William Arnold, died in 1859, leaving four orphans, the Forsters adopted them as their own.