110 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



tory. He was endowed by nature with that rare and fine 

 intellectual capacity where the reasoning and moral faculties 

 are equally balanced, the one, as it were, becoming the 

 counterpoise of the other ; hence his whole life has been 

 actively employed in devising means to ameliorate suffering, 

 to extend civilisation by Christian philanthropy, and to 

 promote the universal welfare of society. John Coldstream 

 was born and brought up in Leith, and, after having com- 

 pleted his school education, he was apprenticed to Dr Charles 

 Anderson, an eminent physician in that town, and one of 

 the earlier members of the Wernerian Society. Having 

 finished his apprenticeship, he became an alumnus of the 

 University of Edinburgh, and obtained his degree as doctor 

 in medicine in 1827, his thesis being " De indole Morborum 

 periodica." Shortly after this, we find Dr Coldstream 

 engaged in the pursuit of natural history at Torquay, in 

 Devonshire, where he had gone for the benefit of his health, 

 which appears about this time to have been somewhat im- 

 paired. He afterwards took up his residence in Leith, where 

 his professional skill and gentlemanly deportment soon 

 acquired for him an extensive practice, which he retained 

 even after his removal to a wider field in Edinburgh. His 

 lieal th began to give way upwards of a year ago, and for 

 some months previous to his death he was obliged to give 

 up his professional avocations. In the autumn he went to 

 Cumberland, and seems to have so far benefited by the 

 change as to be able to take a journey to Newcastle at the 

 time when the British Association met there. He died, 

 however, somewhat suddenly, a few days afterwards, at Gils- 

 land, in Cumberland, on the 17th September, in his 58th year. 

 Dr John Coldstream early distinguished himself as a suc- 

 cessful cultivator of science, by his researches in meteorology 

 and zoology, and more especially by his masterly essays on 

 ehromophorous globules of the Cephalopoda, and onLimnoria 

 terebrans. He was elected a member of the Eoyal Physical 

 Society on the 11th of February 1849, having been proposed 

 by Professor Fleming. On the 10th of May 1849, he read a 

 paper " On the Kespiratory Currents in the Acephalous 

 Mollusca, with general remarks on the mechanism of Respir- 



