borates this miserable account. It shows the face of a man not yet old, but worn and pinched.
Forbes married, in 1758, Lady Mary Capel, daughter of William, third earl of Essex, and by her had two daughters, twins; one of whom, Catherine Elizabeth, married the Hon. William Wellesley-Pole, afterwards third Earl of Mornington; the other, Maria Elinor, married the Hon. John Charles Villiers, afterwards third Earl of Clarendon.
[Memoirs of the Earls of Granard; Charnock's Biog. Nav. iv. 338; Naval Chronicle, xxv. 265, with an engraving of Romney's portrait; Gent. Mag. 1796, vol. lxvi. pt. i. p. 260.]
FORBES, JOHN (1733–1808), of Skelater, usually known as Forbes-Skelater, general in the Portuguese service, was the only son of Patrick Forbes of Skelater in Aberdeenshire, a branch of the Forbes of Corse. He entered the army when a boy of fifteen as a volunteer at the siege of Maestricht, and was successful in winning a commission. He was essentially a soldier of fortune, and when Portugal applied to England for officers to reorganise her army under the Count of Lippe Buckeburg, he was one of the first to volunteer. Forbes remained in Portugal after the termination of the seven years' war; and as he was a catholic and had married a Portuguese lady, he had no difficulty in getting employment. He acted for many years as adjutant-general of the Portuguese army, but at last, in 1789, he was asked to resign, owing to the jealousy of the Portuguese officers, and was made a knight of the order of Aviz, and promoted general. When Portugal decided to join the war against the French revolution, a corps was sent to assist the Spanish army in Roussillon, under the command of Forbes. The Portuguese soldiers behaved well, but the commanders of the Spanish army were always at variance, and Forbes himself had much trouble with his adjutant-general, Gomes Freire de Andrade. In the result the French republicans utterly defeated the combined Spanish-Portuguese army, and Forbes returned to Portugal with his corps. He was too old to seek further active service, so he went to Brazil with the Queen Maria Pia, the prince regent, and the court when they fled before Junot, and on arrival there he was appointed governor of Rio de Janeiro, in which city he died on 8 April 1808.
[Gent. Mag. September 1808; Diego de Lemos's Historia de Portugal.]
FORBES, JOHN, M.D. (1799–1823), botanist, was born in 1799, and became a pupil of Shepherd of the Liverpool botanic garden. The Horticultural Society despatched him to the east coast of tropical Africa, and for this he left London in February 1822, in the expedition commanded by Captain William Owen. He sent home some considerable collections from Madeira, Rio, the Cape, and Madagascar, after which he determined to march up the Zambesi to the Portuguese station Zumbo, three hundred leagues from the mouth of the river, and thence southwards to the Cape, but he succumbed to fatigue and privation at Senna, in August 1823, before accomplishing half the distance. The genus Forbesia, Eckl., commemorates the unfortunate collector.
[Revue Encyc. xii. 574; Nouvelle Biographie Générale, xviii. 146; Lasègue's Musée Bot. Deless. p. 376.]
FORBES, Sir JOHN (1787–1861), physician, fourth son of Alexander Forbes, was born in December 1787 at Cuttlebrae, Banffshire, N.B. In 1799 he went to the academy of Fordyce, where he passed three years. Here he was a schoolfellow of Sir James Clark [q. v.], with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. Having obtained a bursary to the grammar school at Aberdeen, he proceeded thither in 1802, and in the following year entered Marischal College, where he remained till 1806. He then went to Edinburgh, and took the diploma of surgery, and entered the navy as assistant-surgeon in 1807. He used to mention that he came up to London by a Leith smack, and was fourteen days on the passage, and that he spent three more days and nights on the journey to join his ship at Plymouth. He served chiefly in the North Sea and in the West Indies, and remained in the navy till the reduction in 1816, when he was placed on half-pay. He then returned to study in Edinburgh, and graduated there as M.D. in 1817. His inaugural dissertation, ‘De Mentis Exercitatione et Felicitate exinde derivanda,’ was characteristic of the man, and served as the basis of a little work published many years afterwards, ‘Of Happiness in its Relation to Work and Knowledge,’ 1850. He settled as a physician at Penzance, where he succeeded Dr. J. A. Paris [q. v.], who had recently removed to London. Here he remained about five years, and during the greater part of this time devoted himself chiefly to meteorological and geological pursuits, the results of which were his ‘Observations on the Climate of Penzance’ (1821) and two elaborate papers in the ‘Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association’ (vol. ii. 1834, vol. iv. 1836) on ‘The Medical Topography of the Hundred of Penwith, comprising the Dis-
