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 hidole 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 
health 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 
chromophorous 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 Respiratory Currents in the Acephalous 
Mollusca, with general remarks on the mechanism of Respir- 
