the rebels were driven, and the force returned to Shahjahanpur on the 29th. He took part also in an expedition against Shakabad on the night of 31 May, returning to Shahjahanpur on 4 June, when, the rebels having been driven out of Rohilkhand, the field force to which Tombs was attached was broken up. Tombs was promoted on 20 July 1858 to be brevet colonel for his services, received the Indian mutiny medal with two clasps, and was referred to by name and in terms of great eulogy by Lord Panmure, the secretary of state for war, in the House of Lords in proposing a vote of thanks to the army.
Tombs was promoted to be lieutenant-colonel in the royal artillery on 29 April 1861, and was appointed to the 2nd brigade. From 16 May 1863 he was appointed a brigadier-general to command the artillery brigade at Gwalior. In 1865 he received a good-service pension. In 1864 he commanded the force which recaptured Dewangiri in Bhutan, for which campaign he received the medal and clasp and the thanks of government, and was on 14 March 1868 made a knight commander of the Bath. After the Bhutan expedition he returned to his duties as brigadier-general commanding the artillery at Gwalior. He was promoted to be major-general on 11 March 1867. On 30 Aug. 1871 he was appointed to the command of the Allahabad division of the army, and was transferred to the Oude division on 24 Oct. of the same year. He became a regimental colonel of artillery on 1 Aug. 1872. He was obliged to resign his command on account of ill health, and returned to England on sick leave. He died at Newport, Isle of Wight, on 2 Aug. 1874. Tombs married, in 1869, Georgina Janet, the youngest daughter of Admiral Sir James Stirling [q. v.]; she married (19 Dec. 1877), as her second husband, Captain (afterwards Sir) Herbert Stewart [q. v.]
On the news of Tombs's death reaching India, Lord Napier of Magdala, commander-in-chief in India, issued a general order expressing the regret of the army of India at the loss of so distinguished an officer, identified for thirty years with the military history of the country.
A portrait is reproduced in the third volume of Stubbs's ‘History of the Bengal Artillery;’ another, reproduced from a photograph, is given in Lord Roberts's ‘Forty-one Years in India.’
[India Office Records; War Office Records; Despatches; London Gazettes; Vibart's Addiscombe, its Heroes and Men of Note; Stubbs's History of the Bengal Artillery; Malleson's History of the Indian Mutiny; Hayes's History of the Sepoy War; Thornton's History of India; Calcutta Review, vol. vi., ‘Sikh Invasion of India;’ Thackwell's Second Sikh War; Sandford's Journal of a Subaltern; Lawrence Archer's Commentaries on the Punjab Campaign; Times, 6, 7, and 12 Aug. 1874; Rotton's Narrative of the Siege of Delhi; Shadwell's Life of Lord Clyde; Bosworth Smith's Life of Lord Lawrence; Cane Brown's Punjaub and Delhi; Grant's History of the Sepoy War; Dewé White's History of the Indian Mutiny; Russell's My Diary in India; Lord Roberts's Forty-one Years in India, 1898, vol. i. passim; United Service Journal, September 1874.]
TOMES, Sir JOHN (1815–1895), dental surgeon, eldest son of John Tomes and of Sarah, his wife, daughter of William Baylies of Welford in Gloucestershire, was born at Weston-on-Avon in Gloucestershire on 21 March 1815. His father's family had lived at Marston Sicca or Long Marston in the same county since the reign of Richard II in a house mentioned in the ‘Boscobel Tracts’ as having sheltered Charles II after the battle of Worcester, when Jane Lane [q. v.], a relative of the Tomes family, assisted in his escape.
Tomes was articled in 1831 to Thomas Farley Smith, a medical practitioner in Evesham, and in 1836 he entered the medical schools of King's College and of the Middlesex Hospital, then temporarily united. He was house surgeon to the Middlesex Hospital during 1839–40, and while holding this office he invented the tooth-forceps with jaws accurately adapted to the forms of the necks of the various teeth. These were the first exemplars of the modern type of forceps which supplanted the old ‘key’ instrument. His attention was turned during the same period to the histology of bone and teeth, for he fed a nest of young sparrows and a sucking-pig upon madder and examined their bones with a microscope bought of Powell. This work brought him under the notice of Sir Thomas Watson (1792–1882) [q. v.] and of James Moncrieff Arnott, who advised him to adopt dental surgery as his profession. He was admitted a member of the College of Surgeons of England on 21 March 1839, and in 1840 he commenced practice at 41 Mortimer Street (now Cavendish Place). On 3 March 1845 he took out a patent (No. 10538) for a machine for copying in ivory irregular curved surfaces, for which he was awarded the gold medal of the Society of Arts. In 1845 he delivered a course of lectures at the Middlesex Hospital which marked a new era in dentistry. He was also much occupied with the question of general anæsthesia, shortly after the introduction of ether into surgical practice by William
