Memoir of Edward Forbes, F.R.S., late Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh / by George Wilson and Archibald Geikie.

Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoir of Edward Forbes, F.R.S., late Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh / by George Wilson and Archibald Geikie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    23/620
    MEMOIR OF EDWARD FORBES. CHAPTER I. THE ISLE OF MAN. In the centre of the Irish Sea, midway between the shores of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, lies that diminutive continent which, as if it were an epitome of the whole world, bears the title of the Isle of Man. On the chart it looks like one of the pieces of a child’s puzzle-map which has strayed to a distance from the adjacent shores. It can be fitted, however, into none of them, and geologists tell us that it is in its true place, and represents one of the few surviving portions of a tract of land which once united the British Islands, but has long since left only fragments above the waves.1 i “ We know,” says Edward Forbes, “that the Irish Sea is scooped out of the elevated bed of the sea of the glacial epoch, masses of which, of great extent and thickness, we find bounding its sides in England, the Isle of Man, and, still more conspicuously, in Ireland, and that on the great Pleistocene plain, lived the (Jervus Megaceros.—(The Geological Re- lations of the existing Fauna and Flora 3$ of the British Isles, by Edward Forbes, Mem. of Geol. Sum. vol. i. 1846, p. 844.) There was thus a “ land of passage” occu- pying the Irish Sea and making England and Ireland one. Over this bridgeway the great elk, now extinct (as well as other creatures), passed and repassed, and its bones are now found alike in Ireland and the Isle of Man.