Xll. PROCEEDINGS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
J. J. DRYSDALE, M.D. 
John James Drysdale, M.D., who died August 20th, 
1892, aged 75 years, was the second President of the 
Society and from its commencement one of its most earnest 
members and a very regular attender at its meetings. 
A son of Sir William Drysdale at one time Lord Provost 
of Edinburgh and a member of an old Aberdeenshire 
family, Dr. Drysdale matriculated at the University of 
Edinburgh having chosen the Medical Profession for his 
career in life. Having completed the ordinary curriculum 
and passed through the University with distinction, 
Drysdale graduated as M.D. in 1838 being admitted a 
Licentiate of the College of Surgeons during the same 
year. He had been a pupil of Dr. Fletcher well known as 
a successful lecturer and physiologist and whose teachings 
led Drysdale to a study of homceopathy, seeing in it cor- 
roborative evidence of some physiological speculations of 
his own. With this end in view he spent some time in 
Vienna where he became acquainted with some of the 
homeeopathic physicians of the city and was induced to 
ceive homceopathy that further practical investigation to 
which the teaching of Fletcher had predisposed him. 
After returning home, Dr. Drysdale selected Liverpool as 
a sphere for practice. He was then thoroughly assured 
that in homeeopathy lay the scientific basis of therapeutics 
and which system he most successfully practiced to the 
close of his life; and he was from its foundation the senior 
consulting physician of the Liverpool Hahnemann Hos- 
pital. , 
But it is as a Biologist that we must here chiefly 
speak of him. Almost his first literary work amid the 
cares of a large practice was his editing of Fletcher’s 
‘“‘Hlements of General Pathology.”’ In 1874 he published 
“The Protoplasmic Theory of Life,” and during the same 
