Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VII.djvu/319

 FORAMINIFERA FORBES 311 the Temple, and, plunging into a career of pleasure, in less than four years dissipated at the gaming table and by reckless extravagance two fortunes which he had successively inher- ited from his uncle and his father. He there- upon became an actor, and in 1744 made his debut at the Haymarket theatre in the charac- ter of Othello. He attracted little attention in tragedy or in comedy, and it was not until he brought the political and social notabilities of the day upon the stage by his wonderful gift of mimicry that he discovered his true road to success. In the spring of 1747 he opened the Haymarket theatre with a piece called "The Diversions of the Morning," written by himself, and in which he was the principal actor. The piece was successful al- most beyond precedent. The licensing act having been applied against him by those whose foibles he had thus publicly portrayed, he made his piece a morning entertainment, and under the title of "Mr. Foote taking Tea with his Friends," it was repeated for more than 50 successive mornings. A similar piece, entitled " The Auction of Pictures," proved equally successful, and the author was com- plimented with the title of the English Aristo- phanes. He kept the Haymarket theatre open without a license for ten years (during which he found time to dissipate a third fortune), furnishing a constant supply of new plays to replace the old ones, and became the admira- tion of the town, and also its terror, as no person whose character possessed any vulner- able points was safe from his mimicry. In 1767 a fall from his horse occasioned the am- putation of one of his legs ; and the duke of York, who witnessed the accident, procured him a regular patent to open a theatre. He still wrote and acted, but less frequently than before ; and in 1777, with a constitution under- mined by ill health and mental suffering, he undertook a journey to France, and died on the way at Dover. He wrote about 25 plays, of which 20 have been published, and some others have been attributed to him. Those which have kept the stage longest are " The Minor," in which the Methodists are satirized, " The Englishman returned from Paris," " The Bankrupt," which attacks the newspapers, "The Orators," "The Lame Lover," "The Liar," and "The Mayor of Garratt." His dramatic works have never been published in a complete edition. William Cooke published his memoirs, and some of his writings (3 vols. 8vo, London, 1805). FORiMNIFERA (Lat. foramen, an opening, and ferre, to carry), an order of the protozoa, of the class of rhizopods, having the power of projecting and retracting through openings in their calcareous shell temporary thread-like prolongations (pseudopodia) of sarcode, or the gelatinous protoplasmic substance of which the body is composed ; by these processes they move and obtain food ; they differ from amoeba in having a shell, and very long slender pseudo- 1. Textiraria globulosa. 2. Eotalia globulosa. 2'. Side view of Eotalia Boucana. podia, interlacing with each other ; they have no nucleus nor contractile vesicle, like the amoe- ba. The shell is often very complex and beau- tiful, enclosing the sarcode body, which has no structure nor definite organs, and yet has the power of making a cal- careous or sandy shell. The shell may be single or many-chambered, the latter produced by the budding of the former. Placed very near the bot- tom of the animal scale, structureless and with- out permanent organs, they yet perform all the great physiologi- cal functions of life, digestion, growth, repro- duction, secretion, and locomotion. They are mostly microscopic, though the nummulite at- tained the diameter of an inch. They are all marine, and are distributed all over the world ; they have been dredged from a depth of nearly three miles in the vicinity of Spitzbergen. They were among the earliest created animals, and the oldest known fossil, eozoon, is a foraminifer ; the great chalk deposit of Europe, wide as the continent, and sometimes nearly 1,000 ft. deep, is almost entirely made up of the foraminiferous globigerina, not to be distinguished from forms now living in the deepest Atlantic basin ; the building stone of Paris is largely composed of foraminifera. FORBACH, a town of Alsace-Lorraine, Ger- many, on the railroad near the frontier of Prus- sia, 11 m. N. W. of Saargemtind ; pop. in 1871, 5,428. Near the town are the coal mines of Petite Rosselle, Urselsbach, Schonecke, and Stiring-Wendel, which annually yield about 50,000 tons. After the battle at the heights of Spichern (Aug. 6, 1870), in which Gen. Fros- sard was defeated by several divisions of the armies commanded by Gen. Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles, and which is desig- nated by the French as the battle of Forbach, the town was occupied by the German troops, and was afterward annexed to Germany with the rest of Lorraine. Up to that time it had been the capital of a canton in the French de- partment of Moselle. FORBES, Duncan, a Scottish statesman, born at Buchrew, near Inverness, Nov. 10, 1685, died Dec. 10, 1747. He was educated at In- verness and Edinburgh, and at the university of Leyden, and in 1709 became an advocate. He had already won the friendship of John, duke of Argyll ; and in 1715 he took an active part in suppressing the rebellion. He was ap- pointed to aid in prosecuting the captured rebels, but it does not appear that he acted in the office, and he was prominent in aiding the Scotch prisoners in England. In 1716 he was appointed advocate depute, in 1722 was returned to the British house of commons for Inverness, and in 1725 became lord advocate. The office of secretary of state for Scotland being at this