PROCEEDINGS FOR 1918 IX 



The late Dr. Girdwood was an interesting and conspicuous 

 figure among the scientific men of Canada, especially during the last 

 quarter of the nineteenth century. He was a type which our modern 

 methods of education will not reproduce, the type of the all round 

 scientist, cultured, enthusiastic and interested in many fields of 

 science. 



Breadth of scientific knowledge and versatility of accomplish- 

 ments were his outstanding characteristics as a scientific man. He 

 was very much more than dilettante in almost every field of natural 

 and experimental science. He had a sound knowledge of medicine, 

 surgery, medical jurisprudence, botany, physics, hygiene, micro- 

 scopical technique, including photomicrography, besides being funda- 

 mentally a chemist. These varied accomplishments were all the 

 more astonishing when we remember that he began life as an assistant 

 surgeon in a fashionable British regiment, namely, the Grenadier 

 Guards, where he was conspicuous as an athlete and a genial com- 

 panion. 



Before entering the army medical service, and while still a young 

 man, he studied chemistry in London and Liverpool. With Mr. 

 Rodgers, a London chemist, he devised the method which is known 

 as the Rodgers and Girdwood method for the detection of strychnine, 

 by which it is possible to detect less than one hundredth thousandth 

 part of a grain of this poison. 



During his career as a scientific man, and while engaged in 

 general practice, he was connected with many important legal cases, 

 where his knowledge of medical jurisprudence was of great value to 

 the country. He was not only a good toxicologist, but was the first 

 to use enlarged photographs and the application of reagents for the 

 detection of forgeries, counterfeits, and the identification of hand- 

 writing. In this field he was one of the best experts in America. 



He was associated with the late Dr. Sterry Hunt in many of his 

 chemical studies, among which was the production of Hunt's Chronium 

 Oxide Green, which is still used as an ink in the printing of bank 

 notes. In the field of microscopy he was an expert in the identifica- 

 tion of starch granules and was a pioneer in the stereoscopic photog- 

 raphy of crystals under the microscope and also in the application 

 of the stereograph to the study of the photographs produced by the 

 Roentgen rays. He was the first to demonstrate that the position 

 of a foreign object in relation to a bone could be shown perfectly by 

 the application of stereoscopic principles in taking Roentgen ray 

 photographs. 



In his busy life he found time to contribute many valuable scientific 

 articles to the London Lancet, the Montreal Medical Journal, the 



