MR. WILLIAM ALEXANDER FORBES, Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, Prosector to the Zoological Society of London, and Lecturer on Comparative Anatomy to Charing Cross Hospital, whose untimely death on the Niger we announced last week, was born at Cheltenham on June 24, 1855, the second son of Mr. J. S. Forbes, the well-known railway director. He was educated at Kensington School and Winchester College, which he entered at the early age of eleven. On leaving Winchester in 1872, Forbes passed a year at Aix-la-Chapelle studying German, and then became a student of the University of Edinburgh, where he pursued the regular medical course, paying special attention to zoology and botany, and commencing collections of insects and plants. In 1875 Forbes transferred his residence to London, and entered himself as a student of London University with the idea of taking a medical degree in the metropolis. Here he became quickly intimate with other zoologists, who were very soon attracted by the astounding general knowledge of zoology and the acute intelligence of one so young. By the advice of the late Prof. Garrod and other friends Mr. Forbes was induced in October, 1876, to leave London and to become an undergraduate of St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was subsequently elected Scholar, and took his B.A. degree with a First Class in the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1879. Tne Post of Prosector to the Zoological Society of London having become vacant in October, 1879, by the lamented death of Prof. Garrod, Mr. Forbes was appointed (omnium consensu) to that office in the January following. Indeed he had been designated by Garrod on his deathbed as his mast obvious and proper successor, and had been appointed his literary executor.