In 1853 Forbes held the presidency of the Geological Society of London, and in the following year he obtained the fulfilment of a long-cherished wish in his appointment to the professorship of natural history in the university of Edinburgh, vacant by the death of R. Jameson, his former teacher. Since his return from the East in 1842, the determination and arrangement of fossils, frequent lectures, and incessant literary work, including the preparation of his palaeontological memoirs, had precluded Forbes from giving that attention to the natural history pursuits of his earlier life which he had earnestly desired. It seemed that at length he was to find leisure to reduce to order his stores of biological information. He lectured at Edinburgh, in the summer session of 1854, and in September of that year he occupied the post of president of the geological section at the Liverpool meeting of the British Association. But he was taken ill just after he had commenced his winter's course of lectures in Edinburgh, and after not many days' illness he died at Wardie, near Edinburgh, on the 18th of November 1854. See _Literary Gazette_ (November 25, 1854); _Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal_ (New Ser.), (1855); _Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc._ (May 1855); G. Wilson and A. Geikie, _Memoir of Edward Forbes_ (1861), in which, pp. 575-583, is given a list of Forbes's writings. See also _Literary Papers_, edited by Lovell Reeve (1855). The following works were issued posthumously: "On the Tertiary Fluviomarine Formation of the Isle of Wight" (_Geol. Survey_), edited by R.A.C. Godwin-Austen (1856); "The Natural History of the European Seas," edited and continued by R.A.C. Godwin-Austen (1859). FORBES, JAMES DAVID (1809-1868), Scottish physicist, was the fourth son of Sir William Forbes, 7th baronet of Pitsligo, and was born at Edinburgh on the 20th of April 1809. He entered the university of Edinburgh in 1825, and soon afterwards began to contribute papers to the _Edinburgh Philosophical Journal_ anonymously under the signature "[Delta]." At the age of nineteen he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1832 he was elected to the Royal Society of London. A year later he was appointed professor of natural philosophy in Edinburgh University, in succession to Sir John Leslie and in competition with Sir David Brewster, and during his tenure of that office, which he did not give up till 1860, he not only proved himself an active and efficient teacher, but also did much to improve the internal conditions of the university. In 1859 he was appointed successor to Brewster in the principalship of the United College of St Andrews, a position which he held until his death at Clifton on the 31st of December 1868.