Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/388

 duel at an end, against the wishes of the parties. Forbes resigned his appointment at the hospital, carrying a number of its subscribers with him. He declined an offer by Guthrie to give him the satisfaction of a gentleman and an officer of the same service, on the ground that the offer was not made until after events at the hospital had been allowed to take their course. He had a considerable practice among a number of families of the nobility, and was much esteemed. His only writings are two small pamphlets of correspondence, &c., on the Guthrie affair (1828), and a brief record of a case of fatal thrombosis of the thigh veins in the ‘Medico-Chirurgical Transactions,’ xiii. (1827). He was a knight of the Crescent, in 1837 was made a Guelphic knight of Hanover, and in 1844 an English knight. He died at Argyll Street on 22 March 1852.

[Gent. Mag. April 1852; Med. Times and Gaz. 1852, i. 355; Munk's Coll. of Phys. vol. iii.; pamphlets on the Guthrie incident.] 

FORBES, DAVID (1777?–1849), major-general, was the son of a Scotch minister in the county of Elgin, and entered the army when a mere boy as an ensign in the 78th highlanders, or Ross-shire buffs, when Francis Humberstone Mackenzie, afterwards Lord Seaforth, raised that regiment in March 1793. He was promoted lieutenant on 3 May 1794, and in the following September his regiment joined the army in the Netherlands, under the command of Lieutenant-colonel Alexander Mackenzie Fraser [q. v.] He served with distinction in all the affairs of the disastrous retreat before Pichegru, and was especially noticed for his behaviour at Geldermalsen on 5 Jan. 1795. He was present at the affair of Quiberon and the attack on Belle Isle in that year, and in 1796 he proceeded with his regiment first to the Cape and then to India. He remained in India more than twenty years, seeing much service. In 1798 his regiment formed the escort of Sir John Shore when he advanced into Oude to dethrone the nawab, and it was engaged throughout the Maráthá campaign of 1803, and especially at the storm of Ahmednagar. For his services in this campaign Forbes was promoted captain on 25 June 1803, and he remained in garrison until 1811, when his regiment was selected to form part of the expedition sent against Java in 1811, under Sir Samuel Auchmuty. He was placed in command of the flank companies of the various British regiments, and at their head led the assaults on the lines of Waltevreede and the lines of Cornelis, and was to the front in every engagement with the Dutch troops. For these services he was five times thanked in general orders, received the gold medal for Java, and was promoted major on 29 Aug. 1811. In May 1812 he commanded the grenadiers of the 59th regiment and the light companies of the 78th in an expedition for the reduction of the sultan of Djocjocarta, and in May 1813 he suppressed the serious insurrection which broke out among the Malays at Probolingo in the east of the island of Java. In this insurrection Lieutenant-colonel Fraser of the 78th was killed, and Forbes, as major, received the step in promotion on 28 July 1814. In 1817 he returned to Scotland, being the only officer who returned out of forty-two, and bringing with him only thirty-six out of twelve hundred rank and file. He went on half-pay and settled at Aberdeen, where he lived without further employment for the rest of his life. On 10 Jan. 1837 he was promoted colonel, in 1838 made a C.B., and in 1846 promoted major-general. He died at Aberdeen on 29 March 1849.

[Hart's Army List; Gent. Mag. May 1849; and for the affair at Probolingo the Military Panorama for February 1814.] 

FORBES, DAVID (1828–1876), geologist and philologist, born at Douglas, Isle of Man, on 6 Sept. 1828, was one of the nine children of Edward Forbes of Oakhill and Croukbane, near Douglas, and Jane, eldest daughter and heiress of William Teare of the same island. He was younger brother of Edward Forbes [q. v.] David Forbes showed an early taste for chemistry; he was sent to school at Brentwood in Essex, whence he passed to Edinburgh University. Leaving Edinburgh about the age of nineteen, Forbes spent some months in the metallurgical laboratory of Dr. Percy in Birmingham, but he was still under twenty when he accompanied Mr. Brooke Evans to Norway, where he received the appointment of superintendent of the mining and metallurgical works at Espedal, a post which he held for ten years. Forbes showed courage in arming four hundred of his miners to aid the government against a threatened revolution in 1848, and received the personal thanks of the king. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in June 1856. Entering into partnership with the firm of Evans & Askin, nickel-smelters of Birmingham, Forbes went to South America in 1857 in search of the ores of nickel and cobalt. From 1857 to 1860 he traversed the greater part of Bolivia and Peru, and embodied his observations on the minerals and rock-structure of those countries in a classical paper, which is printed in the ‘Quarterly Journal’ of the Geological