Edinburgh, Sutherland & Knox, 1855. 8vo (22.3 x 14.0 cm). 24 pp.; several text engravings (after drawings by Forbes). Original printed wrappers.

Edward Forbes (1825-1854) was one of the most prolific British marine biologists and malacologists, publishing, in his short career, the famous " History of British Mollusca" (together with Sylvanus Hanley), as well as the influential Report on the Mollusca and Radiata of the Aegean Sea, the Malacologia Monensis (1938 - his first work, on the shells of his native Isle of Man in the Irish Sea). In 1848 the series of the Ray Society published his monograph on the British Naked-eyed Medusae (jellyfish). He was also the author of the Monograph of the Echinodermata of the British Tertiaries, published by the Palaeontographical Society, and numerous botanical, phytogeographical and zoogeographical studies. "Forbes theorized that the majority of British terrestrial animals and flowering plants migrated there over land bridges before, during and after the ice age" (Wikipedia). He was mentor to Thomas Henry Huxley and a friend of Charles Darwin. His "Introductory Lecture" was the best Charles Darwin ever read (acknowledged in a letter to Joseph Hooker). The biographer, John Hughes Bennett (1812-1875) was an English physician, physiologist and pathologist. "His main contribution to medicine has been the first description of leukemia as a blood disorder (1845)" (Wikipedia). This work contains a list of friends of Forbes, titled "Edinburgh bust of the late Professor Edward Forbes". Among the subscribers we find the names of William Jardine, R. Godwin Austen, Edward's brothers David and James Forbes, J. H. Balfour, Robert M'Andrew, Wyville Thomson, and the ornithologist John Gould. Uncut. This copy with a handwritten dedication by the author to "Dr Lonsdale", and a printed list of his publications on the front wrapper verso. Weak vertical fold, some light creasing from handling, otherwise a good, clean copy. Cat. BM(NH), p. 592 (not naming Bennett).