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Title: The Right Honourable Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe P.C., D.C.L., F.R.S.

Author: T. E. Thorpe

Release date: February 14, 2018 [eBook #56569]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Sonya Schermann and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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Produced by Sonya Schermann and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
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THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR HENRY ENFIELD ROSCOE

P.C., D.C.L., F.R.S.




[Illustration: Henry E. Roscoe

_Photo. E.H. Mills._

_Walter L. Colls. Sc._]




                          The Right Honourable
                        Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe
                          P.C., D.C.L., F.R.S.

                          A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

                                   BY
                     SIR EDWARD THORPE, C.B., F.R.S.

                         LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
                       39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
                  FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
                      BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
                                  1916

                         [_All rights reserved_]




ADVERTISEMENT


This sketch of the life and activities of Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe
is based, to a large extent, upon an obituary notice prepared at the
request of the Councils of the Royal and Chemical Societies, of which its
subject was a distinguished member, with a view to publication in their
respective _Proceedings_ and _Transactions_. In its present more extended
form it is offered to a wider public as the record of “a life in civic
action worn,” and as a slight tribute from a grateful pupil, an attached
co-worker, and a lifelong friend to the memory of a strenuous high-minded
man, of large aims and generous impulses, who spent his abilities and
energies unstintingly in promoting the welfare of science and the good of
his kind.




CONTENTS


                                                              PAGE

                            CHAPTER I

    WILLIAM ROSCOE—HENRY ROSCOE                                  1

                           CHAPTER II

    HENRY ENFIELD ROSCOE—BIRTH AND EDUCATION                    16

                           CHAPTER III

    OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER                                   28

                           CHAPTER IV

    THE YORKSHIRE COLLEGE                                       53

                            CHAPTER V

    THE VICTORIA UNIVERSITY                                     77

                           CHAPTER VI

    ROSCOE AS A TEACHER                                         97

                           CHAPTER VII

    ROSCOE AS AN INVESTIGATOR                                  110

                          CHAPTER VIII

    ROSCOE AND CHEMICAL LITERATURE                             138

                           CHAPTER IX

    ROSCOE AND THE ORGANIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES        146

                            CHAPTER X

    PUBLIC SERVICES—POLITICAL AND PROFESSIONAL WORK            152

                           CHAPTER XI

    UNIVERSITY OF LONDON—ETON COLLEGE—UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
    OF DUNDEE—SCOTTISH UNIVERSITIES COMMISSION—ROYAL
    COMMISSION OF THE 1851 EXHIBITION—CARNEGIE TRUST:
    SCOTTISH UNIVERSITIES—SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT:
    SCIENCE MUSEUMS—LISTER INSTITUTE OF PREVENTIVE
    MEDICINE                                                   161

                           CHAPTER XII

    DIGNITIES AND HONOURS—THE _DEUTSCHE REVUE_—GERMANY
    AND ENGLAND—WORLD SUPREMACY OR WAR                         175

                          CHAPTER XIII

    HOME LIFE—LADY ROSCOE—WOODCOTE LODGE—PERSONAL
    CHARACTERISTICS—DEATH                                      190

    INDEX                                                      204




THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR HENRY ENFIELD ROSCOE




CHAPTER I

WILLIAM ROSCOE—HENRY ROSCOE


The subject of this memoir had no particular pride of ancestry. _Stemmata
quid faciunt?_ Although with no convictions on the subject, he was
willing to believe that his line stretched at least as far back as Adam
and Eve, and he doubted whether any man could with certainty claim—_pace_
Darwin—a more ancient lineage.[1]

As he has told us in his Autobiography, his family was one of the many
that could not trace its origin for more than three or four generations
back. All he knew was that he came of a North-country stock, members of
which—village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons—had been settled in
the County Palatine and in the vicinity of Liverpool for many years. He
had a distinguished grandfather, a man of mark and public weight in his
native town, and who bears an honoured name in our literature. Of him
it is related that when a certain Garter Principal King-at-Arms desired
to trace his pedigree (which had hitherto baffled his researches), he
replied that he was a good patriarch, and the proper person to begin a
family, as he had a quiverful of sons. “Accordingly the whole descent is
registered, and the Roscoes may now go on _in sæcula sæculorum_. Amen.”

Mr. William Roscoe—Grandfather Roscoe as he was called in the family
circle—was justly claimed by his grandson to be the first man of
distinction that Liverpool had produced. Although more than one hundred
and fifty years have passed since his birth his name still remains one of
the most prominent in its history. His story is one of the Romances of
Literature.

Born in 1753, he was the son of a market gardener who kept a
bowling-green, attached to a tavern, in what was then a rural district of
Liverpool known as Mount Pleasant. He learned to read and write, and that
was practically all the schooling he received, for at the age of twelve
he was required to help his father in the cultivation of his garden,
and to carry cabbages and potatoes on his head to market. But he had an
insatiable appetite for knowledge, and such leisure as he could secure
he gave to reading and study. His love of literature led him to take
service in a bookseller’s shop, but finding that his duties were those of
a drudge, leaving him little opportunity for gratifying his passion, he
articled himself when fifteen years old to an attorney. He worked hard at
his profession, but still found time to cultivate the Muses, and, with
the assistance of a gifted friend of his own age who taught languages
in a school, he read the Classics and began the study of the literature
of Italy. He early tried his hand at poetry—imitations of Goldsmith and
Shenstone, or translations from the Italian. When he was twenty-four
he published a long poem—“Mount Pleasant”—a characteristically stilted
eighteenth-century production of no great merit and now forgotten,
but which on its appearance was praised by Sir Joshua Reynolds, less,
perhaps, for its poetry than for its passionate protest against the
iniquities of “that execrable sum of all villainies commonly called the
African slave trade”—at that time one of the sources of the commercial
prosperity of Liverpool. The courage of the struggling young lawyer
in thus inveighing against this vicious traffic roused the anger of
some of the wealthiest and most influential of his fellow-citizens. He
followed up his attack by another poem on the “Wrongs of Africa,” and
he had a fierce controversy with an apostate Roman Catholic priest who
had published a sermon on the “Licitness of the Slave Trade” as proved
from the Bible, for which he had been formally thanked by the Liverpool
Corporation.

The coming of the French Revolution was received with enthusiasm by all
eager lovers of civil and political liberty in England. Roscoe, who
welcomed its advent with inspiriting songs and odes, championed its
cause in pamphlets, one of them directed against Burke, who had bitterly
attacked the Jacobins. The ardent young Liberal was now identified with
the Whig party in Liverpool, and was in frequent communication with its
Parliamentary chiefs.

But he was not at heart a politician, and had but little liking for the
turmoil and violence of party strife. “Party,” he had declared with
Pope, “is the madness of many for the gain of a few.” His strongest
inclinations were intellectual, and as his means increased and he was
able to procure books he became more and more drawn to the study of
Italian literature and history. The story of the rise of the Medici
family, and especially the character and achievements of one of its
ablest members, Lorenzo, surnamed the Magnificent, strongly interested
and eventually fascinated him. These studies bore fruit in his well-known
“Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” published in 1796. The work was received
with a chorus of approval. The critics declared there had been nothing
like it since Gibbon. Horace Walpole was delighted with it. Men of taste
like Lord Lansdowne and Lord Bristol were equally charmed. It even became
fashionable, and new editions were speedily called for. The book has
been frequently reprinted, and was translated into French, German, and
Italian. In Italy it was received with especial favour as a noble tribute
to the national genius.

Its literary quality has gained for it an assured place in our
literature. As a permanent contribution to Italian history it has less
merit. It must be admitted it lacks features demanded by modern and
more scientific methods of historical treatment. Roscoe, we may assume,
made the best possible use of the material that was available to him.
His business prevented him from visiting Italy, but his friend William
Clarke, who had access to Florentine libraries, supplied him with such
information as he asked for or could obtain. It is obvious from the
work that what mainly interested him was the literary and artistic side
of Lorenzo’s career, and in particular his influence on Italian art and
learning. He had apparently less sympathy with, because he had less
knowledge of, his social and political activities. He was imperfectly
acquainted with the influences which affected him, or which at times he
sought to control. He was sometimes uncritical in his use of authorities,
and his judgment was occasionally at fault. But whatever may be its value
as a serious contribution to history, there is no doubt of its merit as
a piece of literary craftsmanship. It was written under the influence of
an enthusiastic sympathy with and admiration for its subject, to which
no reader could be wholly insensible, and there is much in Roscoe’s
subsequent career, both in his pursuits and in his civic activities, to
show that he was largely inspired by the example of his hero.

In 1798 appeared his translation of Tansillo’s “Nurse,” with a dedication
to his wife; and in 1805 his “Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth”—the
son of Lorenzo, and the Pope who saw the rise of the Reformation.
Although this latter book brought its author more money, it was less
favourably received than his “Life of Lorenzo,” mainly on account of his
treatment of the Reformation. But apart from this it is less satisfactory
as a historical work. His knowledge of the contemporary state of
intellectual Europe was too limited to enable him to deal adequately with
a subject of so wide a scope. Nevertheless the book had a large sale,
in spite of, or possibly in consequence of, the fact that the Italian
translation was placed in the “Index.”

Shortly after the publication of his first great work Roscoe renounced
his practice as an attorney. Having a competent fortune, he purchased
Allerton Hall, a fine old Jacobean house in a beautiful situation on the
banks of the Mersey. He now turned his attention to agriculture, set
up a model farm near his estate, cultivated the friendship of Coke of
Holkham, read papers on agricultural subjects to local societies, and
worked at the reclamation of Chat Moss. He also set in order the affairs
of a banking house in which his friend Clarke, who lived in Italy, was a
partner, and he thereby became involved in its direction and management.
But he had still leisure for literary pursuits. He had one of the largest
and most valuable private libraries in the district, especially rich
in Italian history and literature. He interested himself in typography
and induced John M’Creery—a well-known printer of his day—to settle in
Liverpool, where his works were printed. He was a generous lover of the
fine arts, and has the credit of discovering the genius of John Gibson,
the sculptor, originally an apprentice to a marble mason in Liverpool,
whom he sent to Rome. Gibson executed for Roscoe a basso-rilievo in
terra-cotta, now in the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, the patron in
his turn making his _protégé_ free of the treasures of his library at
Allerton Hall. It was in this way that Gibson first became acquainted
with the designs of the great Italian masters. The acquaintance thus
formed with the Roscoe family was continued in the case of Mrs. Sandbach,
a granddaughter of the Italian historian, who possessed many of Gibson’s
works, and was in frequent correspondence with him. Indeed most of the
details of Gibson’s life were only to be gleaned from his letters to Mrs.
Sandbach, who was a very accomplished woman of considerable literary
ability.

Mr. William Roscoe was fond of horticulture, and interested in botanical
pursuits generally. In the words of the late Professor Asa Gray, he was
one of the _Patres conscripti_ of the botany of his time, as the author
of a monograph on the monandrian plants, and of other contributions on
botanical subjects to the _Transactions_ of the Linnean Society. Roscoe’s
influence on the intellectual life of his native town may be seen in the
various educational and artistic institutions which he created or with
which he was concerned in founding. In 1773, when only twenty years of
age, he was one of the projectors of a Society for the Encouragement
of the Arts of Painting and Design, the first public artistic society
in Liverpool. It had only a short existence, but was revived ten years
later, and ultimately developed into the Liverpool Academy, of which
Roscoe became President. He designed and etched the admission card to
its exhibitions, contributed drawings and read papers to its members.
It was the first organization of its kind in the provinces. It not
only encouraged local talent, but served to familiarize Liverpool with
the work of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and other notable painters of the
period. He was a founder and President of the Liverpool Literary and
Philosophical Society; an active member of the Liverpool Library,
afterwards known as the Lyceum, and the first public collection of books
in the town. He was the means of establishing the Liverpool Atheneum,
an institution more especially concerned with the interests of learning
and scholarship. His love of horticulture led him to take an active part
in the creation of a public Botanic Garden; he drew up the plan of its
administration, and at its opening in 1802 gave a thoughtful address on
the obligation which rests upon a commercial community to encourage the
study of abstract science.

But perhaps Roscoe’s greatest service to Liverpool was his share in the
foundation of its Royal Institution. He was chairman of the Committee
which drew up the scheme of its establishment, and wrote the Report for
publication concerning its objects; and at its opening in 1817 gave an
address on the part it was calculated to play in fostering the connection
which ought to exist between the intellectual and the business life of
a city devoted to trade. “It is to the union,” he declared, “of the
pursuits of literature with the affairs of the world that we are to look
for the improvement of both; for the stability and foundation of the one,
and the grace and ornament of the other.” He was no less mindful of the
claims of science: “imperfect indeed would be the civilization of that
people who, devoted to the accumulation of wealth by industry, should,
from an apprehension of expending their means on useless objects, refuse
to encourage scientific inquiries.” He pointed out that all improvements
in the mechanical arts and in manufactures were to be attributed to the
labours and discoveries of those who had applied themselves to the
enlargement of the boundaries of science. Even at that time he was able
to show that many occupations hitherto pursued empirically were being
practised under a growing recognition that they were based on scientific
principles, and that it was only by a wider appreciation of that fact,
combined with increased facilities for the acquisition and diffusion
of scientific knowledge, that the improvement and expansion of such
industries could be secured.

More than sixty years afterwards it fell to his grandson’s lot to
dilate upon the same theme in the same place, and to indicate how the
intervening time of scientific and industrial progress had served to
confirm the wisdom and accuracy of his grandfather’s insight.

Mr. William Roscoe, however eminent he might be in civic virtue, was
precluded from taking any part in the municipal affairs of the town,
as he was not a freeman of the borough. Nor, for the same reason, was
he able to exercise the Parliamentary franchise. But whilst he himself
had no vote, there was nothing to prevent the voters from sending him
to the House of Commons as their representative if he and they were so
minded. In 1806 a swing of the political pendulum brought the Whigs
into general favour, and the burgesses of Liverpool returned him at
the head of the poll. By speech and vote he threw all his influence on
the side of Clarkson and Wilberforce in their successful efforts to
abolish England’s participation in the slave trade. Although those who
sent him to the Legislature must have known his views on this subject,
his constituents were highly incensed at his action in thus seeking to
destroy, as they imagined, one of the chief sources of the prosperity
of the town. Moreover, he had added to the enormity of his offence by
speaking and voting in favour of Catholic Emancipation. Accordingly, a
mixed and muddled mob of ardent Protestants and drunken sailors, crews of
slave-ships, were gathered together in order to assail him on his return
from Westminster at the close of the session. A riot broke out, but his
friends had taken timely precautions, and he escaped without injury. But
the House of Commons had few attractions for him. He resigned his seat,
and nothing would induce him to seek re-election. He still maintained
his interest in the political movements of the time, and became a busy
pamphleteer, wrote in favour of the abolition of slavery as a logical
consequence of the abolition of the slave trade; on Parliamentary reform;
penal jurisprudence and the treatment of criminals; and on national
education.

In 1816 Roscoe, whose prosperity had been hitherto unbroken, was
overtaken by sudden disaster. The downfall of Napoleon and the
termination of the Continental wars were followed by much financial
unrest, and a sudden panic seized the bank in which he was interested.
Although perfectly solvent—its assets exceeded its liabilities by more
than £60,000—it was impossible to realize these assets without grievous
loss; the bank’s credit had been severely shaken, and it was compelled
to stop payment. Roscoe called the bank’s creditors together, explained
its condition, and convinced the majority that with time its position
might be restored. After four years of anxious efforts to rehabilitate
the bank he was forced to give up the struggle owing to the persistent
action of a small number, who insisted on preferential treatment, and he
allowed himself to be made bankrupt. Allerton, with its beautiful gardens
and ample woods, with all its refinements and delights as a home—the home
which had welcomed guests like Aikin and his daughter Mrs. Barbauld, Dr.
Parr the scholar, Fuseli the painter, Coke of Holkham, Henry Brougham,
and many others eminent in politics, learning, and scholarship—had to be
given up, together with all its artistic and literary treasures. Thanks
to the care he spent in cataloguing these works for sale they realized
good prices. Friends vied with each other in preventing the dispersal of
the more valuable books and pictures. Many of the former were secured for
the Atheneum, on condition that he should be allowed their use, and they
still remain on its shelves. His collection of early Italian paintings
was presented to the Royal Institution, and is now in the Walker Art
Gallery.

Roscoe received an honourable discharge. He was now sixty-seven years of
age. With such relics from the wreck of his fortune as could be saved he
set himself heroically to retrieve the disaster which had befallen him.
Literature, which had been the delight of his leisure, now became his
sole remaining prop. Eleven years were still left to him. He rearranged
the fine library of his friend Coke, edited an issue of Pope’s works,
completed the folio monograph on the monandrian plants, and executed
a number of other compilations. His old age was spent in a serene
dignity which secured for him the friendship of a devoted circle and the
universal respect of his townsmen. He had a paralytic attack a year
or so before his death which partially incapacitated him. The end came
peacefully on June 30, 1831.

A sitting statue of him by Chantrey, as one of Liverpool’s most
distinguished citizens, is in the St. George’s Hall, and his name
is associated with the chair of Modern History in the University of
Liverpool.

Washington Irving, in the “Sketch-book,” thus spoke of him:

    Those who live only for the world and in the world may be cast
    down by the frowns of adversity; but a man like Roscoe is not
    to be overcome by the reverses of fortune. They do but drive
    him in upon the resources of his own mind.… He lives with
    antiquity and posterity; with antiquity in the sweet communion
    of studious retirement, and with posterity in the generous
    aspirings after future renown.… The man of letters who speaks
    of Liverpool, speaks of it as the residence of Roscoe. The
    intelligent traveller who visits it inquires where Roscoe is to
    be seen. He is the literary landmark of the place, indicating
    its existence to the distant scholar. He is like Pompey’s
    column at Alexandria, towering alone in classic dignity.

Henry Roscoe, the father of the subject of this biography, was the
seventh and youngest son of Mr. William Roscoe. He was born at Allerton
Hall on April 17, 1799. In physical and mental characteristics he more
nearly resembled his father than did any other member of the family. He
was educated almost entirely at home, and in constant companionship with
his father, from whom he acquired a love for rare and curious books and a
taste for literature and art.

At the time of the panic of 1816, in which his father was so deeply
involved, Henry Roscoe was serving as a clerk in the bank. After its
collapse he entered a lawyer’s office, became a member of the Inner
Temple, and in 1826 was called to the Bar. He had already turned his
attention to literature, and was supporting himself by his pen. In 1825
he gained a considerable success in legal circles by the publication of
an elaborate treatise on “The Law of Actions relating to Real Property,”
and by three small volumes entitled “Westminster Hall,” by his “Law and
Lawyers,” and other works.

In 1828 appeared the first edition of his “Digest of the Law of Evidence
in the Trials of Actions at the Nisi Prius Law,” which in the next ten
years ran through five editions. During 1829 and 1830 he produced a
“Digest of the Law of Bills of Exchange,” which also passed through
many editions, and he contributed to Lardner’s Encyclopædia a volume of
“Lives of Eminent British Lawyers.” For some years he was engaged in
the preparation of Parliamentary Bills, and under the direction of Mr.
Gregson drew up the original draft of the Reform Bills of 1831-1832.

Two years after the death of his father, he produced the “Life of William
Roscoe.” This work, undertaken at the request of the family, was no light
task, on account of the mass of correspondence, pamphlets, etc., which
had to be dealt with. It was completed during three or four months of the
legal vacation, when rest and change were much needed. He was already
suffering from overwork, confinement, and lack of exercise, and this
additional tax upon his strength and nervous energy seriously affected
his health.

Between 1830 and 1835 he produced other legal works, among them, “The
Digest of the Law of Evidence in Criminal Cases,” and a “General Digest
of Law from 1835-6,” and he contributed to many magazines and journals.
In January 1836 he published his last work, a pamphlet “On Pleading the
General Issue.” During the previous summer the serious state of his
health compelled him to abandon the idea of continuing to live in town.
He therefore gave up his house in London and went to reside at Gateacre,
near Liverpool, in the hope that country air and rural life might improve
his condition. He had been appointed in 1834 Judge of the Court of
Passage, Liverpool, by Lord Brougham, then Lord Chancellor, and from that
year until 1836 he omitted no weekly sitting.

Unfortunately persistent ill-health, aggravated by years of overwork and
constant strain, had taxed to the uttermost a delicate constitution, and
in March 1837, after a few weeks of suffering, he died at the age of
thirty-six.

But for his early death he would certainly have risen to high distinction
in his profession. His talents and learning, combined with his moral
worth and charming personality, endeared him to his family and to a large
circle of friends.

An appreciation by Henry Chorley speaks of him as the most gifted of
the sons of the Italian historian—of quick sympathy and solid judgment,
and with such instant justice and strength of decision as belongs to a
truthful, acute, and strong man.

Certain of his legal books were standard works long after his death.
Somebody once asked Sir Henry Roscoe if “Roscoe on Evidence” was any
connection of his. “No nearer than that of father,” was the reply.

In 1831 he married Maria Fletcher, second daughter of a respected
Liverpool merchant, and chairman of the West Indian Committee,

    An honest man …
    Broadcloth without and a warm heart within,

who also was ruined by the failure of a Liverpool bank. Her maternal
grandfather, Dr. William Enfield, author of a “History of Liverpool”
and of the well-known “Speaker,” a man distinguished for elegance of
taste and sound literary judgment, was the last rector of the famous
Warrington Academy, where he had as colleagues at one time or another,
Joseph Priestley, the chemist; Taylor of Norwich; Aikin, the father of
Mrs. Barbauld; John Reinhold Forster, the naturalist to one of Cook’s
expeditions; and Gilbert Wakefield, the editor of “Lucretius.”




CHAPTER II

HENRY ENFIELD ROSCOE—BIRTH AND EDUCATION


Henry Roscoe brought his young wife to 10 Powis Place, Great Ormond
Street, London, and here on January 7, 1833, his only son, Henry Enfield
Roscoe, first saw the light. A daughter, Harriet, was born in 1836.

The young judge had little opportunity of making provision for his
family, and on his death they were left with very straitened means.
His widow moved with her children into a small cottage at Gateacre,
and as she had considerable artistic gifts sought to add to her
slender income by teaching water-colour painting at a girls’ school
in the vicinity. She also possessed some of the literary power of her
distinguished grandfather, and in 1868 published a “Life of Vittoria
Colonna,” with admirable translations of the sonnets. She was a strong,
vigorous character, devotedly attached to her son and proud of his
success in life. Her Manchester friends used playfully to refer to her
as “the Mother of Owens College,” and the allusion to her association
with its fortunes gave her pleasure. She was always deeply interested
in its progress and rejoiced in its success. She died at the age of
eighty-seven, falling “like autumn fruit that mellowed long.”

Young Roscoe went for a few years to a preparatory school in the
neighbourhood of his home. In 1842 his mother moved her small charges
to Liverpool, when he was sent to the High School of the Liverpool
Institute, among the earliest of the so-called “modern” schools. He
remained here seven years, taking the usual English subjects—mathematics,
French, a little Latin and less Greek, and some elementary physical
science. The school was furnished with a chemical laboratory—a very
unusual provision in those days—and in it he obtained his first lessons
in chemical manipulation from William H. Balmain, the discoverer of
“luminous paint” and of boron nitride. Balmain, who was one of the early
contributors to the then newly founded Chemical Society, in his published
account of the latter substance apologizes for his inability to state its
exact composition, as he was unable to obtain a better balance than such
as he could construct himself “of wood and paper”—a circumstance which
throws some light upon the means of instruction in the laboratory which
introduced Roscoe to the study of practical chemistry. He always had a
grateful recollection of his first instructor, whom he described as a
genial fellow, and a stimulating and original teacher. The boy also came
under the influence of Hugo Reid—a noteworthy man, and of some reputation
at the time as a writer and teacher of natural philosophy—and of W. B.
Hodgson, an excellent teacher of English, who afterwards became Professor
of Political Economy in the University of Edinburgh.

Years afterwards, when the “old boy” had become a person of some
consequence in the world, he was invited to distribute the prizes at his
school, and told his auditors, in the course of a short address, that he
had come across one of his school reports, addressed to his mother, in
which it was stated: “Roscoe is a nice boy, but he looks about him too
much, and does not know his irregular verbs.” He added that he thought
this early habit of looking about him, which had persistently clung to
him through life, had possibly done more for him than the irregular verbs.

Roscoe’s mother encouraged his inclination towards chemical pursuits by
providing him with a room at home in which he could make his experiments,
and such spare cash as he had was devoted to the purchase of chemicals
and apparatus. In this manner he early obtained familiarity with the
simpler operations of practical chemistry and laid the foundations of
that dexterity in manipulation which contributed so greatly to his
success as a lecturer.

Roscoe’s forbears on both sides were of Presbyterian or Unitarian stock,
and the household naturally moved mainly in Nonconformist circles.
These comprised some of the most respected and cultured families in
the district—the Booths, Yateses, Martineaus, Taylors, Sandbachs:
all well-known names in Lancashire—with some of whom his people were
connected by marriage.

In 1848 he was entered at University College, London, at that time the
only seat of higher learning and research in England open to men who were
refused admittance to the older Universities on denominational grounds.
Among the teachers in Gower Street at this period were De Morgan,
Francis Newman, Malden, Sharpey, Graham, Lindley, Williamson, Jenner, and
Liston. No more remarkable group was to be found in any institution for
higher education in England. Among Roscoe’s contemporaries as students
were Lister, Langton-Sandford, Farrer-Herschell, Bageot, Jessel, Richard
Hutton (who married as first and second wives two of his cousins), Osler,
Henry Thompson, and Edward Fry—all names afterwards distinguished in law,
literature, and medicine.

Of his teachers at this time, the one who had most influence in shaping
his career was undoubtedly Thomas Graham, the chemist. Graham had
been elected in 1837, largely through the action of Lord Brougham, as
successor to Edward Turner in what was then known as the University
of London, founded some nine years previously. Although nervous and
hesitating in manner, and with little fluency of speech, Graham was
a sound and suggestive teacher, whose lectures were characterized by
a philosophic method of exposition, and by accuracy and breadth of
knowledge. These were always carefully prepared and well illustrated by
experiments. The greater number in the class were, of course, medical
students, for in those days there were few followers of pure science, and
science faculties and degrees in science were unknown.

Roscoe, in entering Graham’s class-room, found himself, as he says, in
a new world. One indication of the eagerness with which he exploited it
may be gleaned from the circumstance that the enthusiastic young tyro
at the end of the session came out the head of the class and gained the
silver medal. His mother and sister soon followed him to town, and the
family lived first in Torrington Square and next in Camden Town, where
his cousin, Stanley Jevons, the economist, and afterwards one of his
colleagues at Owens College, came to reside with them. One of his uncles
was Mr. Justice Crompton, who had married into the Fletcher family, and
was a great friend of his father. The judge always took a strong paternal
interest in his nephew, and would have sent him to Cambridge had he been
disposed to go there. The Crompton cousins were, he says, like brothers
and sisters to him. It was in their drawing-room in Hyde Park Square that
he first met Miss Lucy Potter, his future wife, then a girl of seventeen.

Roscoe now elected to follow chemistry as a career, somewhat to the
dismay of his relatives, who, he tells us, imagined he intended “to
open a shop with red and blue glass bottles in the window,” such being
the external indications of the calling of a chemist in this country.
And no wonder they were perturbed, for any one not being registered as
a “pharmaceutical chemist,” or as a “chemist and druggist,” who should
presume to style himself a chemist was punishable with a fine. Liebig
was not altogether well informed of the facts when he wrote to Berzelius
that the English chemists were ashamed to call themselves such because
the apothecaries had appropriated the name. It was not so much that they
were ashamed as they were actually prohibited by law. Although nearly two
generations have passed since those days, it may be doubted whether even
now the public mind has quite grasped the distinction between a chemist
properly so-called and an apothecary.

Having settled upon his life’s work, Roscoe entered the Birkbeck
Laboratory at University College, then under the direction of Williamson,
whom Graham had just brought over from Paris, where he had been working
with Laurent and Gerhardt. Roscoe had the highest appreciation of the
genius and power of Williamson, and pays grateful homage to his memory in
the following extract from his Autobiography:

    At the time I entered the laboratory Williamson was engaged
    in the researches which have made his name a household word
    to chemists all the world over. His was a mind of great
    originality, and his personality was a most attractive one.
    And, despite his physical disabilities—for he lost an eye and
    the proper use of his left arm in early childhood—he was a
    diligent and accurate worker. Ardently devoted to his science,
    he infected all who worked under him with the same feeling.
    And his pupils willingly own that much of the success that
    they may have met with in after years was due to his teaching
    and example. I well remember the feelings of interest he
    aroused as he each day came down to the laboratory brimful
    of new ideas. First it was his explanation of the theory of
    etherification, of which he proved the truth by preparing the
    mixed ethers, thereby ascertaining the general constitution of
    alcohols and ethers, and laying one of the foundation-stones
    of modern chemistry. Next it was his well-known paper on the
    constitution of salts, in which he enunciated principles which
    have since been generally adopted. Then came his views on
    atomic motion and interchange, the first definite statement of
    a series of chemical phenomena which in the hands of Van ’t
    Hoff and others have become of the highest import.… He clearly
    foresaw the principles upon which the modern development of
    the steam-engine depends, and though he failed for want of
    constructive skill, he pointed the way which engineers have
    since followed with conspicuous success.

In his second year in the Birkbeck Laboratory Roscoe became Williamson’s
private assistant, and took part in his researches, and when Graham
accepted the Mastership of the Mint, and Williamson succeeded to
the chair at University College, Roscoe was made lecture assistant.
Williamson had the idea at that time of publishing an abridged
translation of Gerhardt’s _Chimie Organique_, for the benefit of English
students, which Roscoe was to prepare, but nothing came of the project.

Graham, who had been commissioned to send out an assayer to the Sydney
Mint, offered Roscoe the position. The salary was very tempting, but
as his mother and sister had no desire to go to Australia, the offer
was declined, and his cousin Stanley Jevons, who had passed through the
Birkbeck Laboratory, was sent in his stead.

It was in recognition of Roscoe’s association with Williamson that nearly
forty years afterwards he was deputed, on behalf of the subscribers, to
present the portrait of his master which now hangs in University College.

Roscoe took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in the University of London,
with Honours in chemistry, in 1853, and as he was now more than ever
determined to follow a career of science, he decided to enlarge his
experience by a course of study in a continental laboratory, as was then
the usual custom. Of the great leaders of British chemical science in
the first half of the nineteenth century—Dalton, Thomson, Davy, Faraday,
Graham—only Thomson and Graham, and to a limited extent Dalton, were in a
position to exert any influence as teachers, and even in their case there
was little provision of instruction in practical chemistry.

The older English universities had practically nothing of the kind; their
disciplines offered no encouragement to the study of chemical science.
The university which prides itself on having afforded a home to Boyle
extended no opportunity to a man to make any research unless he found his
own laboratory and apparatus. Dr. Liveing started the first laboratory
for students in Cambridge at his own expense in 1852, hiring a cottage
in the town for the purpose. On the other hand, at that time, thanks to
the influence of the French school of chemists; of Berzelius in Sweden;
Liebig, Wöhler, Mitscherlich, and the two Roses in Germany, systematic
instruction in chemistry was being actively pursued on the Continent,
and nearly every leading University abroad could show a more or less
well-equipped laboratory, and a body more or less large of eager and
enthusiastic investigators. Accordingly, at this period, aspirants for
chemical fame in this country naturally turned to one or other of the
chemical schools in France or Germany to seek there what they were unable
to find at home.

Roscoe elected to go to Bunsen, who had recently been called from
Breslau to Heidelberg in succession to Leopold Gmelin, the author of the
well-known “Handbuch.” Bunsen had already won for himself a European
reputation by his masterly investigation of the cacodyl compounds, by the
improvements he had effected in gasometric methods, by his investigations
on the chemistry of the blast-furnace, his invention of the carbon-zinc
battery and photometer, and his inquiries into the chemical aspects of
the volcanic and pseudo-volcanic phenomena of Iceland.

It is perhaps idle to speculate why Roscoe should have left Williamson at
the most fruitful period of his career, and when, under his stimulus,
organic chemistry was apparently about to enter upon a great development
in this country. But the probability is that then, as afterwards, the
problems of organic chemistry and the purely speculative aspects of the
science had few attractions for him, and that he saw in the many-sided
nature of Bunsen’s work, in its eminently practical character, and
the precision of its quantitative methods, much that appealed to his
inclination towards the operative, and especially the determinative side
of chemistry, for Bunsen was pre-eminently a master of manipulation, as
every one who aspired to a professional career in chemistry and who hoped
to direct a chemical laboratory fully recognized.

Roscoe, with his mother and sister, who elected to keep house for him,
reached Heidelberg in the autumn of 1853 with an introduction to von
Mohl, the Professor of International Law, with whose family they became
well acquainted. One of the daughters, Anna von Mohl, was the second wife
of Helmholtz. By von Mohl he was made known to Bunsen.

    I shall never forget (says Roscoe in his Autobiography) my
    first sight of him—the man who afterwards became one of my
    dearest friends, and to whom I owe more than I can tell.… He
    was then at the height of his mental and physical powers. He
    stood fully six feet high, his manner was simple yet dignified,
    and his expression one of rare intelligence and great kindness.
    This first impression of his bearing and character only became
    stronger as my knowledge of him increased, and the feelings
    of respect and affection with which I regarded him were those
    of all with whom he came in contact. His singular amiability
    was not a sign of weakness, but of strength of character. His
    modesty was natural and in no degree assumed. In his lectures,
    when giving an account of some discovery he had made, or some
    new apparatus or method of work which he had investigated, I
    never heard him mention himself. It was always “man hat dies
    gefunden,” or “es hat sich so herausgestellt.”

In the cloisters of the old monastery which then did duty as the
Heidelberg laboratory, Roscoe was first indoctrinated into the art and
mystery of quantitative chemical analysis, and he there acquired the
familiarity with Bunsen’s methods and with his system of laboratory
instruction that he was to turn to such signal account in the
establishment and direction of the Manchester school of chemistry.
Among his fellow-workers were Lothar Meyer, Pauli, Beilstein, Pebal,
Schischkoff (a Russian officer who investigated with Bunsen the course
of decomposition of fired gunpowder), Quincke, Bahr, Landolt, Baeyer,
Lourenço, and, amongst Englishmen, Russell, Atkinson, and Matthiessen—a
group of well-known names constituting a striking testimony to the
influence and power of attraction of the great German chemist.

One of Roscoe’s earliest quantitative exercises was in silicate analysis,
and his first published paper, which appeared in _Liebig’s Annalen_ for
1854, was a joint production with Schönfeld on the composition of certain
samples of gneiss.

At the close of his second session he passed his doctor’s examination
_summa cum laude_, and then embarked upon the well-known inquiry in
association with Bunsen on the measurement of the chemical action of
light, which occupied much of his time and energy during the next eight
years.

In the obituary notices he wrote for _Nature_ of August 31, 1899, and
for the _Proceedings_ of the Royal Society, and more especially in the
admirable Memorial Lecture which he gave to the Chemical Society,
Roscoe has done full justice to the memory of Bunsen as a great chemist,
pre-eminent as a discoverer and teacher, and lovable as a true and
noble-hearted man. The Memorial Lecture was reprinted in America by
the Smithsonian Institute, and translated into German to be prefixed
to the collection of Bunsen’s works published by the Society—the
Bunsen-Gesellschaft—founded in his honour. In course of their long and
uninterrupted friendship he received many letters from his illustrious
master. These, 126 in number, were suitably bound and presented by him to
the Bunsen Society.

Roscoe took advantage of the opportunity afforded by his residence in
Germany to study its university system, and to make himself familiar with
the general character of its working, and in his vacations he sought
the acquaintance of its leading men of science, with some of whom he
contracted lasting friendships. In his Autobiography, written in 1906, he
gives expression to the sentiments of respect and esteem with which he
regarded the Germany and his German friends of half a century ago:

    My knowledge of the Germans and Germany has led me to love
    the Fatherland, and, I venture to think, to understand as
    well as to respect and admire the nation. As to any feelings
    antagonistic to England and the English existing in the minds
    of the many Germans with whom I became intimate, I never found
    a trace, for Treitschke I did not know. All with whom I ever
    came in contact expressed a feeling that England was the old
    home of freedom, that she had led the van in securing that
    freedom by gradual and peaceable measures, and, in short, that
    the path in which the Englishman trod was that in which they
    wished to follow. “We cannot,” my friends said to me, “express
    our opinion on political matters with the freedom to which you
    in England are accustomed. How indeed can this be otherwise,
    when we are governed by an autocratic power which believes in
    the divine right of kings, and have to submit to a condition of
    things in which summary punishment for ‘Majestätsbeleidigung’
    is possible?”

In the autumn of 1856 Roscoe returned to London, and with the help of
friends set up a private laboratory in Bedford Place, Russell Square,
with Wilhelm Dittmar to assist him in research work. He also obtained
employment as a science lecturer at an army school at Eltham, and did
some analytical work on ventilation for a Departmental Committee, the
results of which were published in a Blue-book, and also in the _Journal
of the Chemical Society_.[2]

The London venture was very short-lived, for in the following year
Frankland, the first Professor of Chemistry in the recently founded
Owens College, Manchester, resigned his appointment, and Roscoe, who was
able to produce satisfactory testimonials from Bunsen, Liebig, Graham,
Williamson, and others, offered himself as a candidate for the vacant
chair and was appointed.




CHAPTER III

OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER


Owens College had its origin in a bequest of John Owens, a merchant of
Manchester, who left the bulk of his fortune to trustees to found a
collegiate institution in Manchester, open to persons of every variety
of creed and free from every religious test. He was born in 1790, the
son of Owen Owens, a Flintshire man, who settled in Manchester in early
life and established a small business as a hat-lining cutter and furrier.
Some time after 1815 Owen Owens took his son into partnership, when the
firm extended the scope of their business and became general merchants,
shipping calicoes and coarse woollens to China, India, South America, and
New York, and importing hides, wheat, and other produce in return.

John Owens was described as possessing a good deal of hard-headedness and
practical common sense, a keen buyer and a good payer, very methodical
in his habits and operations, and who acted up to his favourite motto,
_Honestas optima politia_. He was a staunch Dissenter and a “stalwart”
Radical, a shy, silent man, known only to a few intimates, a misogamist,
if not actually a misogynist, of no great intellectual ability, and
with few cultured tastes, nor, so far as can be gathered, particularly
friendly to learning. There is reason to believe that his first intention
was to leave the greater part of his fortune to his lifelong friend
and former schoolfellow, George Faulkner, a well-known and prosperous
Manchester merchant, who in declining it appears to have suggested the
idea of founding a college in Manchester. The suggestion took root.
In developing it Owens seems to have been mainly moved by a feeling
of bitterness against a system which imposed subscription to articles
and creeds on a young man before he could be admitted to the ancient
Universities.

    He was determined to break down this injustice so far as he was
    able; he therefore made the trust subject to “the fundamental
    and immutable rule and condition … that the students,
    professors, teachers, and other officers and persons connected
    with the said institution shall not be required to make any
    declaration as to, or submit to any test whatsoever of, their
    religious opinions, and that nothing shall be introduced in
    the matter or mode of education or instruction in reference to
    any religious or theological subject which shall be reasonably
    offensive to the conscience of any student, or of his
    relations, guardians, or friends, under whose immediate care he
    shall be.”[3]

John Owens died, unmarried, in July 1846, at the age of fifty-five. Mr.
George Faulkner, who had been named as one of the executors, proceeded
to carry out the provisions of the will. The estate took some years
to realize, and the accounts were not finally closed until 1857, when
the total sum received for the purposes of the college amounted to
£96,942—not a very large amount considered as endowment, but still
sufficient, viewed from the standpoint of the middle of last century,
to enable a modest start to be made, with prudent management on the part
of the trustees, and a reasonable amount of sympathy and goodwill on the
part of the community that was to be benefited.

The executors, without waiting for the complete realization of the
estate, proceeded to execute the provisions of the bequest as regards
the projected college. In the selection of the trustees appointed to
carry out his intentions John Owens acted with sound judgment and a wise
liberality. It is evident from the terms of the will that he had given
considerable thought to the character of the institution he wished to
found. But in spite of all his care and of the legal skill with which
his wishes were expressed, the theological difficulty managed to creep
in, and ingenious casuists raised doubts and differences of opinion
concerning the interpretation of the testator’s will in regard to
religious instruction. This occasioned delay, and a certain amount of
sectarian jealousy and unfriendly feeling was stirred up which acted
prejudicially against the new institution for some years after its
establishment.

The College was formally opened in March 1851. Its first Principal was
Mr. A. J. Scott, who was Professor of English Literature in University
College when Roscoe studied there. In addition to being Principal he was
appointed Professor of Logic, Mental and Moral Philosophy, and English
Language and Literature. The circumstance that he undertook, with the
consent of the trustees, to give courses of lectures on “The Influence
of Religion in Relation to the Life of the Scholar,” was one cause of
the hubbub which was raised in the town and which brought the Church
party to the support of the trustees who had sanctioned these courses.
Other teachers were Mr. J. G. Greenwood, Professor of the Language and
Literature of Greece and Rome; Mr. Archibald Sandeman, Professor of
Mathematics; Dr. Edward Frankland, Professor of Chemistry; Mr. W. C.
Williamson, Professor of Natural History, Botany, and Geology; Mr. T.
Theodores, teacher of German, Hebrew, and Oriental languages; and M.
Podevin, teacher of French.

The College was located in what had been a private house, formerly the
residence of Richard Cobden, and situated in a dreary and somewhat
disreputable neighbourhood in the vicinity of Deansgate, one of the main
thoroughfares of the poorer quarters of the city. This building was
purchased from Mr. Cobden by Mr. George Faulkner, the chairman of the
trustees, and was subsequently conveyed by him to the other trustees as
an absolute donation for the benefit of the College. As it was unsuited
for the provision of a chemical laboratory, the trustees determined to
erect at the rear of the house a building specially designed for the
purpose; but as they were precluded from using any of the corpus of
the estate for building, they raised a sum of nearly £10,000 for the
installation of a chemical laboratory and lecture theatre, the formation
of a library and for general purposes. The chemical laboratory, which was
planned under the direction of Dr. Frankland, could accommodate about
fifty workers; it was conveniently arranged, and was indeed one of the
best of its kind at the period of its erection.

The College made a fairly auspicious start as regards numbers, but for
various reasons such popularity as it had rapidly declined, and each
succeeding session saw a diminished entry. At the time Roscoe joined the
students numbered only thirty-five, of whom fifteen were working in the
chemical department.

We gather from the reports of the professors to the trustees that
many causes contributed to retard the progress of the institution.
Curiously enough, one of the chief of these was what was subsequently
considered the chief glory of the foundation, namely, its unsectarian
character. But another and more practical reason was that the generally
unsatisfactory character of the school work of the students prevented
them from obtaining full advantage of the College courses. In fact, the
training afforded by the College was beyond the desires of the people.
Higher education was not considered by Manchester as requisite for the
accumulation of wealth. In those days lack of education had little or no
effect on the social position of its moneyed men. They were inclined to
think that a highly educated youth was unfitted for the routine work of
a counting-house and was of little use as a salesman on the floor of the
Exchange.

But there were doubtless other causes of a different nature. It was
unfortunate for the College that the days of its infancy should be cast
in the troubled times of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny—events
which dislocated trade and affected the prosperity of the district.

It was significant of what the town thought of the financial outlook of
the College that the new professor should be refused the tenancy of a
house when the landlord learned that he was one of its staff.

Its ill-success was the subject of leading articles in the local press.
The _Manchester Guardian_ of July 9, 1858, wrote: “Explain it as we
may, the fact is certain that this College, which eight years ago it
was hoped would form the nucleus of a Manchester university, is a
mortifying failure.” And Professor Roscoe was blamed for not awarding
the Dalton scholarship because he had the hardihood to say that none of
the laboratory students was sufficiently qualified to be worthy of it.
The _Manchester Examiner_ was somewhat more appreciative of the efforts
of the little band who were gallantly striving to raise the very low
standard of middle-class education in Manchester at that time.

    We are compelled (it said) to look for the causes of
    non-success elsewhere than in the collegiate machinery. If an
    objection can be raised against the College at all, it is that
    such an institution is either in advance of our felt wants, or
    altogether unsuited to the economical conditions of Manchester
    life. Still, this is the fault of the community, not of the
    College. The worst that can be said of it is that it is too
    good for us.

This might certainly be said, in a certain sense, of the first Principal
of the College. Excellent in many respects as a man, and inspiring as
a teacher, he was altogether unfitted to direct the development of the
young and struggling institution in such a community and at such a time.

Principal Scott, whom Mrs. Oliphant described as “a man whose powerful,
wilful, and fastidious mind has produced upon all other capable minds
an impression of force and ability which no practical result has
yet adequately carried out,” had little constructive or directive
power. Earnest, upright, and conscientious, he was essentially an
idealist—almost a visionary—a man of words—forceful and even eloquent
at times—but with no capacity for action. As a thinker he lived a
strenuous and exhaustive life. Although only forty-six at the date of his
appointment, his constitution, never very robust, was already undermined
and his nervous energy impaired. He was frequently ill, and his repeated
absences from the College necessarily interfered with his administrative
work. After struggling for six years with the duties and responsibilities
of a position for which circumstances and the times in nowise fitted
him, he tendered his resignation as Principal a few months before Roscoe
was appointed to the chair of Chemistry and was succeeded by Professor
Greenwood.

The public criticism to which the College was subjected was not
altogether without a salutary effect on its policy. It must be remembered
that it was the first attempt of the kind to bring the higher training,
and something of the spirit of collegiate life, directly within the reach
of the middle-class youth of a great business community, and it was
necessary to have some regard to the conditions of the district and its
special requirements and, it may be added, even its peculiar prejudices.

Roscoe’s antecedents, his associations with Lancashire, and his knowledge
of and sympathy with what is strongest and best in the Lancashire
character, made him quick to realize the factors upon which the ultimate
success of the institution depended. It was no use for it to set
itself athwart the economical conditions of the community. Young as he
was—he was then twenty-four—he was perhaps more alive to the practical
necessities of the position than the majority of his colleagues.

He quickly revealed himself as the man of the hour. His accession to the
College at this crisis was the turning-point in its career. He brought
new vigour and a fresh spirit into its policy, and from that time forward
its fortunes began steadily to mend.

As regards his own department, it was his ambition to establish at Owens
College a school of chemistry which should worthily serve the interests
of the great manufacturing district of South Lancashire—the largest and
most important seat of chemical industry in the kingdom. Associated
with him in this effort, he had as assistants Frederick Guthrie, who,
on his appointment to the chair of Chemistry at the Royal College in
Mauritius, was succeeded by Dittmar, and afterwards by Schorlemmer—all
men of originality and admirable teachers. Schorlemmer spent the greater
part of his life in Manchester, and died in the service of the College,
latterly as Professor of Organic Chemistry—the first to be so designated
in the kingdom. His connection with the institution is commemorated by
the association of his name with one of the chemical laboratories of the
Victoria University. His co-operation with Roscoe in the production of
the well-known treatise which bears their joint names will be referred to
later.

Roscoe from the outset threw himself heartily into the educational and
scientific activities of the community in which he was to make his
home for the next thirty years. He joined the Philosophical Society
of Manchester—so honourably associated with the name and fame of
Dalton. Founded in 1781, the Society has played a worthy part in the
intellectual life of Manchester. In the second year of its existence one
of its members—the Rev. Dr. Barnes—drew up “proposals for establishing
in Manchester a plan of liberal education for young men designed for
civil and active life, whether in trade or in any of the professions,”
which may be said to have anticipated the foundation of Owens College.
The management was to be free from sectarian exclusiveness. “A plan
formed for public utility should be generous and enlarged, so as to
extend itself as widely as possible for the common interest. Science and
arts are of no political or religious party.” These liberal sentiments
commended themselves to the Society, who ordered that the paper should
“be printed and offered to the consideration of the public.” The seed
fell on stony ground at the time and made only a feeble attempt to
germinate; two generations had to come and go before it definitely took
root.

Roscoe quickly acquired an influential position in the Philosophical
Society. He served for many years as its secretary, and ultimately became
its president. He was the first recipient of its Dalton medal, awarded
to him in recognition of his efforts to throw light upon the reasoning
which led Dalton to the formulation of his great generalization, by
the publication in association with his friend and former pupil, Dr.
Harden, of “A New View of the Origin of Dalton’s Atomic Theory” (London:
Macmillan & Co., Ltd.), based upon Dalton’s manuscripts and laboratory
note-books in the possession of the Society. The book will be referred to
at greater length when considering Roscoe’s contributions in general to
the literature of chemistry.

In the Society at the time Roscoe joined it were several men of
scientific eminence, or who played notable parts in the industrial life
of the district—among them Joule, Schunck, Fairbairn, W. C. Williamson,
Angus Smith, and Crace Calvert. Joule, a pupil of Dalton, a shy, retiring
man, was several times President of the Society, and Roscoe, who greatly
admired his character and powers as an original thinker, became one of
his most intimate friends. In the later years of his life Joule, who was
a member of a brewing firm at Stone in Staffordshire, suffered great
reverses of fortune, and was only saved from actual poverty by the grant
of a Civil List pension, which Roscoe, with the help of Tyndall, Huxley,
and other friends of science, was instrumental in obtaining. A letter
which Roscoe wrote to the _Times_ resulted in the creation of the Joule
Memorial Fund, administered by the Royal Society. It takes the form of an
international studentship or grant to assist research in those branches
of physical science more immediately connected with Joule’s work. With
the assistance of Lord Kelvin, he secured the placing of a tablet to
Joule’s memory in Westminster Abbey.

In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall a life-size marble statue
by Gilbert of the discoverer of the Law of the Conservation of Energy
stands opposite to a statue of the author of the Atomic Theory. It was
unveiled in 1893 by Joule’s most intimate scientific friend, Lord Kelvin.
Concerning this unveiling, Roscoe could occasionally be induced to tell
a story. In proposing a vote of thanks to Lord Kelvin, he stated that
one inducement that drew him to Manchester was that he might sit at the
feet of Joule, whose name was as well known on the Continent as that of
Newton, but he found that all that the Manchester of that day knew of
Joule was his Stone Ales. One of his lady auditors, in complimenting him
upon his little speech, observed: “Of course I quite understood your
remark about sitting at Dr. Joule’s feet, but why make allusion to his
_toe-nails_!”

The visit of the British Association to Manchester in 1861, when Roscoe
served as one of the local secretaries, afforded him an excellent
opportunity of showing his organizing powers and business aptitudes.

These were still further demonstrated in the winter of 1862, during
the memorable cotton famine in Lancashire, when he acted as one of the
secretaries to a committee created to provide some form of intellectual
occupation for the thousands of operatives thrown out of employment by
the stoppage of the staple industry of the district. He gave lectures,
illustrated by experiments, on subjects likely to attract a working-class
audience. These were highly popular, and undoubtedly awakened a general
interest in scientific matters in quarters which knew nothing of science.
Their success encouraged him to institute the series of Science Lectures
for the People, which he began in 1866, and carried on for eleven
consecutive winters. In this movement he secured the co-operation,
amongst others, of Huxley, Carpenter, Tyndall, Huggins, Lord Avebury,
Abel, Stanley Jevons, Clifford, and Spottiswoode. The lectures were given
in some of the largest public halls in the city, and were attended by
thousands. They were published week by week as delivered, and were sold
for a penny all over the world.

In 1874 the writer, then recently appointed to the newly founded
Yorkshire College at Leeds, had the privilege of taking part in these
courses, when he undertook to give some account of the life and work of
Joseph Priestley, the chemist, who, as already stated, was a colleague of
Dr. Enfield at the Warrington Academy.

Mrs. Roscoe, the mother of the subject of this memoir, then an old lady
of seventy-six, who had shown the writer many kindnesses during his
student-days at Owens College, was pleased to interest herself in this
lecture and, unsolicited, to write the following characteristic and
charming little sketch of Priestley and his wife as a contribution to the
subject.

                                        10 YORK PLACE, OXFORD ROAD,
                                              _November 12_ [1874].

    MY DEAR PROFESSOR,

    I have a few particulars at your service for your lecture on
    Priestley if you intend to sketch his character, which was a
    fine example for working-men. I should be glad to send you the
    papers if you will return them. You of course have Huxley’s
    enlarged notice in the _Contemporary_, which is very good and
    full.

    His poverty, energy, and extreme industry raised him from the
    humblest condition. His first place of Christian ministry for
    three years was at a small chapel at Needham, and his stipend
    only £30 a year, to which he added a small school. Here he
    bought a pair of globes (made by John Senex, F.R.S.). When he
    removed to Nantwich, where he was minister for three years,
    he took the globes with him, and also kept a small school.
    There he bought a small air-pump and an electrical machine
    and a few books, going on with preaching, teaching schools,
    and learning himself. He says: “I was barely able, with the
    greatest economy, to keep out of debt—but this I always made a
    point of.” (The globes and the first electrical machine belong
    to friends of mine.—M. R.)

    In 1761 he removed to Warrington, where he remained six
    years, connected with the Academy there. Here he married his
    wife—a most admirable woman—who excelled so greatly in ruling
    the home that “it allowed him to give his whole time to the
    prosecution of his studies and other duties.” Her behaviour
    during the Persecution and Emigration to America was above all
    praise. She said of herself: “There is something inherent in me
    which always makes me swim to the top of affliction, so that
    I am ready to pop out to the first friendly hand that offers
    assistance—otherwise I am surprised at myself that I have borne
    it so well, and greatly rejoiced that Dr. Priestley has kept up
    under all the malignity that attended the riots. Our property
    may be said to be entirely destroyed, the few remains that have
    been picked up so demolished as to be of little value.” The
    loss of books, MSS., and instruments was valued at £10,000.

    There is an interesting chapter on visiting Priestley’s grave
    in Harriet Martineau’s “Retrospect of Western Travel,” vol.
    i. pp. 175-90. Also a poetical account of the uses of oxygen
    by George Dawson of Birmingham, which I cut out for you. The
    list of all Priestley’s works and portraits, medallions and
    engravings, as well as remains of other kinds, is given by Rev.
    James Yates, and appended to the Life of Priestley by Hutt.

    Priestley was driven from England in 1794, and Lavoisier was
    guillotined in the same year at Paris after confiscation of all
    his property; and it was in 1874 that Birmingham was “made to
    eat humble-pie” by erecting a statue to Priestley’s memory on
    the centenary of his great discovery.

    I hope you have made a good beginning at Leeds and will
    nevertheless not be too busy to read this note and to excuse my
    troubling you.

                         Very truly yours,

                                                      MARIA ROSCOE.

Of the stimulating influence of these Penny Lectures Roscoe received
abundant testimony: in after-life he frequently met persons, some
occupying a high and responsible position in commerce and industry, who
informed him that they were indebted to them for their first interest in
science. One such person was the late Mr. Thomas Parker, a self-made man,
and founder of the well-known electrical firm of Elwell-Parker.

Services such as these, combined with Roscoe’s growing popularity
and influence, necessarily reacted favourably upon the fortunes of
the College, and it steadily grew in favour. The chemical department
especially increased in numbers, and the laboratory soon became
inadequate to accommodate the students, who came to it from all parts of
England, attracted by its fame as a chemical school.

The prospects of the College were now so well assured that in 1865 the
governing body and the professors began to consider the desirability of
extending its scheme of studies, and, what at the moment was even more
urgent, providing new and greatly increased accommodation. Owing to the
adverse state of trade at the time, no immediate steps were possible; but
in 1867 a town’s meeting resolved “That the time had come for the public
of the district to unite for the purpose of developing the College on a
more comprehensive scale, and in appropriate and convenient buildings.”
An executive committee, on which Roscoe was placed, was appointed to
carry out this and certain consequential resolutions. He was also
required to serve on various sub-committees, dealing with the new site,
buildings, extension and rearrangement of courses of study. It says
much for the influence and weight he had now acquired in the counsels of
the College, and for the confidence reposed in his judgment and business
capacity, that no other member of the staff was called upon to take so
large and so responsible a share in the extension movement.

The new Constitution as settled by the extension committee, to the
extent that it modified or enlarged the original scheme of the founder,
necessitated an application for a Bill in Parliament. The action of
the Governing Body in enlarging the scope of the College was generally
approved and was warmly supported, amongst others by Mr. Freeman the
historian. He considered that the members of the two ancient Universities
ought to feel, and he was sure that they largely did feel, a special
sympathy in the planting of an institution like Owens College in such a
city as Manchester.

    It was called a college, but it had really much more of the
    character of a university; and it was as a new university in
    Manchester that he was ready and delighted to welcome it.
    It was a great and noble work which had been begun in their
    city.… He looked then upon Owens College as a university rising
    in a great city; neither did he look on a great city as an
    unfitting place for a great university. As a rule, the ancient
    universities of Europe had arisen in great cities. Owens
    College, unlike most modern institutions, did not begin with
    a building. Here was a college which had been at work for a
    good many years, and the common academical buildings were only
    now being planned. This was just as it should be; at any rate
    it was just in the spirit of the old founders. They got their
    men first, and let the buildings come afterwards. If Owens
    College had hitherto to do with makeshift buildings, it was
    just what the old colleges of Oxford did for a while, and in
    both cases for the same reason, because the college itself, the
    living members of the college, came first in the ideas of the
    founders, and the material house existed for their sake only.

The draft of the new Constitution was prepared, under the direction of a
sub-committee, by Mr. James Bryce, now Lord Bryce, then Regius Professor
of Civil Law at Oxford, and formerly Professor of Jurisprudence and
Law at Owens College. A Bill was next drafted to enable the College to
procure modifications of certain features of John Owens’s foundation,
and Roscoe was requested to sign as one of the promoters of the petition
for the Owens College, Manchester, Bill, 1870. This Bill met with a
certain amount of parliamentary opposition, mainly in the House of Lords,
where it was first introduced. It was alleged that it was a Bill for
incorporating a non-existent charity, enabling it to annex the property
of another charity and to set aside to a great extent the expressed
intention of the founder. Objections also were raised in Manchester
itself by the executor of the late chairman of trustees, on the ground
that it was proposed to include females as students of the College. The
promoters met both the parliamentary and local opposition with skill and
judgment. The Lords passed the second reading by a majority of nearly
six to one, and as no petitions were lodged against it after lying on
the table for forty days, it was read a third time and passed. In the
Commons the Bill was read a first and second time without opposition.
A difficulty was threatened in Committee in regard to the inclusion of
the words, “A college wherein young persons, including if and when the
proper authorities of the College so direct, persons of the female sex,
may receive instruction.” This was stayed by the promoters agreeing to
accept in lieu the words “such young persons as the proper authorities
of the College may from time to time direct”—a sapient amendment which
made little or no essential difference when the inclusion of women came
to be dealt with as a practical question. The Owens College Extension Act
received the royal assent in July 1870.

The foundation-stone of the first block of the new buildings was laid
by the Duke of Devonshire, the first President of the Owens College, on
September 23, 1870. The design of the chemical laboratories was wholly
inspired by Roscoe, after a careful examination of every continental
example that might furnish suggestions concerning internal arrangements
and fittings, the details being admirably carried out by the late Mr.
Alfred Waterhouse, R.A. It is not too much to say that these laboratories
have served as models for practically every chemical laboratory which has
been subsequently built in this country or abroad.

Roscoe’s interest in the new buildings was not by any means exclusively
confined to his own department. As a member of the building committee he
took an active and leading part in its work generally. The position he
thus acquired may be illustrated by the following story. When Principal
Greenwood was asked how many master-keys would be needed by the staff,
he replied: “Three: one for me because I’m Principal; one for Ward as
Pro-Principal, and one for Roscoe because he is Roscoe.”

The actual incorporation of John Owens’s trust within the scheme of
the extended College could only be effected with the sanction of the
Charity Commissioners. There was no difficulty in the trustees of the
original College and the governors of the enlarged institution coming
to an agreement. The difficulty was raised by the Charitable Trusts
Commissioners, and it again arose on the question of the “eternal
feminine,” the inclusion of women being held to be a departure from the
expressed objects of Owens’s foundation. After a lengthy correspondence
this and certain other points raised by the Commissioners were adjusted,
when a Confirming Bill was introduced into Parliament; it passed through
both Houses and received the royal assent in July 1871.

The Owens College was now free to develop towards that consummation to
which all friends of education desired it should proceed.

It had gradually enlarged the scheme of its studies so as to include
nearly every department of learning, other than theology, professed at
the older universities. It was inevitable therefore that sooner or later
it should seek for university powers. That this was to be its goal was
clearly foreseen by all who were actively engaged in its extension. The
main difference of opinion was as to whether the time was opportune. Many
distinguished friends of the College, who had watched its development,
were of opinion in the late ’seventies that it had already attained a
university position, and that steps should then be taken to make it the
university of Manchester.

The idea of a Manchester university was not by any means new. It was as
old, indeed, as 1640, when Henry Fairfax, Rector of Ashton-under-Lyne,
moved his brother, the second Lord Fairfax, to petition the Long
Parliament

    “for an university to be erected at Manchester, as the want of
    an university in the northern parts of this kingdom, both in
    this and former ages, hath been apprehended a great prejudice
    to the kingdom in general, but a greater misery and unhappiness
    to these countries in particular, many ripe and hopeful wits
    being utterly lost for want of education, some being unable,
    others unwilling, to commit their children of tender and
    unsettled age so far from their own eyes, to the sole care and
    tuition of strangers.”

Lord Fairfax replied that this could not be done except by a Bill in
Parliament, “which will be a charge of one hundred marks at least [£66
13s. 4d.], too much to be hazarded on so great an uncertainty.”

The successive stages in the growth of this conception are given in Mr.
Joseph Thompson’s “History of Owens College.” These can only be shortly
indicated here.

The establishment of a university at Manchester was boldly advocated in
1829 by Mr. W. R. Whatton, who contemplated the alteration and extension
of the plan of the existing Royal Institution for the purpose, and drew
up a scheme of higher education on a wide and liberal basis. Mr. Whatton
combated the objections which were raised with considerable skill, but
the “religious difficulty” got mixed up with the controversy: it proved
insurmountable and nothing came of the project. In 1836, Mr. H. L. Jones
read a paper before the Manchester Statistical Society on a plan of a
university for the town of Manchester, which was subsequently published
in pamphlet form at the expense of the late Mr. James Heywood, F.R.S.,
a well-known Manchester worthy. Mr. Jones, who was a member of the
University of Cambridge, was a strong advocate of university reform
and of the principle of introducing university culture into the larger
industrial centres, in a form suited to the intellectual needs of modern
life. An attempt was made to put the scheme into effect, but it died of
inanition in a few months. It is, however, interesting to note that many
details of Mr. Jones’s plan foreshadowed what were subsequently adopted
in the arrangements of John Owens’s foundation. Naturally the idea
eventually centred itself in this institution. The language of the local
newspaper Press in the early days of the College, even when its fortunes
were at their lowest ebb, clearly indicates what was the hope and
aspiration of the more public-spirited and thoughtful of the community.
As the College grew and prospered, their hope was strengthened and their
aspiration encouraged by friends of education from the older universities
like Freeman the historian, by men of science like Lord Kelvin, Huxley,
and Brodie, and by public men like Lord Bryce and the late Lord Avebury.

With the provision of new buildings, spacious class-rooms and admirable
laboratories, designed by an artist who has left the impress of his
genius upon some of the most noteworthy architectural features of the
city, Manchester now realized that it possessed a temple of learning of
which it might well be proud. And there can be little doubt that this
fact quickened the local feeling in favour of the realization of that
hope which, however faint at times, had persisted, in spite of many
disappointments, for more than two hundred years. A few months after
the College had been installed in its new premises, Roscoe and his
colleagues, Professor Ward—now Sir A. W. Ward, the Master of Peterhouse,
Cambridge—who was then Professor of History in Manchester, Principal
Greenwood, and Professor Morgan, took the first effective steps towards
this consummation. The historian of Owens College thus testifies to their
action:

    It is to the zeal and untiring devotion of these four
    gentlemen (wrote Mr. Joseph Thompson) that Manchester owes its
    university; others cordially supported the movement, but they,
    through five weary years, placed their case before the public,
    removed prejudices, advanced good arguments, and lived down
    opposition.

Roscoe has himself told the story of how he attempted to move Lancashire
through the local Press, and strove to create a public opinion in
favour of the project, for, as he clearly recognized, without public
support nothing could be accomplished. He sought to show how the
establishment of a new university in the North would benefit the great
middle classes of the community in which it was placed, and what its
influence might be expected to be upon the great hives of industry in
the most densely populated districts of the kingdom. It was, he said,
to be “The University of the Busy,” as distinguished from the old
universities of Oxford and Cambridge—“The Universities of the Wealthy.”
He pointed to the existence of the Scottish universities, and explained
what their influence had been for generations back on the middle and
poorer classes of their country. Was not Lancashire, with its many
populous manufacturing towns, as fully entitled to the advantages of
a university as the cities over the Border? The time had passed for
imagining that Oxford and Cambridge, rich and powerful though they
were, could do all that England legitimately required in the way of the
highest academic culture. Where was the evidence that the establishment
of provincial universities would lower the tone of higher education, or
that the creation of new avenues to degrees would injuriously affect the
reputation of those symbols of culture? That “many ripe and hopeful wits”
among the youth of Manchester were well qualified for and desirous of
receiving university training, but who, for a variety of reasons, could
not go to the older universities, was no less true now than in Cromwell’s
time. Moreover, it must be admitted, there is a great deal in the _genius
loci_. That spirit had succeeded in developing John Owens’s foundation
into a splendid institution suited to the local life and requirements.
They in Manchester knew what the busy North wanted, but they were not
quite so sure that the Dons of Oxford and Cambridge knew it as well
as they themselves did. They asked to be allowed to work out their
own salvation in their own way. They were already to all intents and
purposes a university; their students were university students in age and
education, and their courses of instruction were fully up to university
standard, and their yearly entry would compare not unfavourably with that
of many universities in our own and other countries.

Other arguments were adduced, possible objections were anticipated
and met, and a strong case was established. The senate, however, moved
cautiously. They proceeded to collect and circulate opinions on the
propriety of seeking a university charter, and eventually the matter
was brought before the court of governors, who appointed a special
committee, on which Roscoe was placed, to consider and report upon the
whole subject. A considerable number of persons, heads of colleges,
university teachers, and others eminent in the educational world, or who
had identified themselves with educational movements, were consulted,
and with the consent of the writers their replies were collected and
distributed to the leading newspapers and journals with a view to elicit
public opinion. An analysis of the general feeling so far as it could
be ascertained from newspaper and other criticism was made by Roscoe in
concert with Principal Greenwood and Professor Ward, and laid before the
special committee. The _Liverpool Daily Post_ was adverse to the project,
for reasons which will appear subsequently. The late Lord Sherbrooke,
who, as the Rt. Hon. Robert Lowe, at that time represented the University
of London, was equally condemnatory in the pages of the _Fortnightly
Review_. But the preponderating opinion was undoubtedly favourable.

The committee reported, some six months after its appointment, to a
special meeting of the governors, when it was resolved, with practical
unanimity, that it was expedient to take such steps as might be
calculated to promote the success of the proposal to seek for the Owens
College a charter as a university granting degrees. A memorial was
presented to the Privy Council through the Lord President of the Council
(the Duke of Richmond and Gordon), praying for the grant of a charter to
the College conferring upon it the rank of a university, to be called the
University of Manchester, with power to grant degrees in arts, science,
medicine, and law. The memorial was influentially supported by eminent
men, who recapitulated the arguments which had led the governors to their
decision; it was further supported by memorials from the corporations of
the chief towns of Lancashire (Liverpool excepted), and from a number of
public bodies and educational institutions in the county.

The very success of Owens College as an educational agency in the town
and district in which it was situated was, for the moment, the cause
of opposition to its attempt to obtain for itself university powers.
Other towns, conscious of the benefit of such institutions, were seeking
to establish colleges of the type of Owens College, and which it was
hoped might ultimately develop into universities. Leeds had founded the
Yorkshire College in 1874. Originally started as a science college, and
with special reference to the educational requirements of the industries
of the district, its scope had been rapidly enlarged so as to include
arts and languages. It had already established relations with the local
medical school, and its development as a college was not very dissimilar
from that of Owens prior to the extension movement. At that time it had
upwards of four hundred students—registered occasional, medical, and
evening—with some eighteen professors, instructors, and assistants, and
an income from fees of about £1,500. The governing body of the Yorkshire
College, and others interested in its progress, therefore viewed with
some apprehension the establishment of a degree-granting body so close to
its own area. The majority were not opposed to the creation of another
university in the north of England, provided that the interests of their
own college were safe-guarded. They desired that the charter of the
contemplated university might be so modified as to admit of the inclusion
of other institutions of collegiate rank which might be able to fulfil
the conditions of incorporation as constituent colleges with a definite
share in its government. This, indeed, was actually contemplated by the
promoters of the Manchester University, but the terms of incorporation
were, in the opinion of Yorkshire, not sufficiently well defined, and
there were other conditions which failed to satisfy local aspirations.
The friends of the young College were keen and active; the Leeds Press
took up their cause, and public opinion in the district set strongly in
their favour.

As the action of the neighbouring county was successful in effecting
certain fundamental modifications in the Constitution of the proposed new
University, it may be desirable to give some account of the origin and
growth of the Yorkshire College up to the period with which we are now
concerned, and to point out the reasons which seemed to its friends to
justify their efforts to safeguard its position in the interests of the
higher education of an industrial community hardly less populous than
that of Manchester and its immediate vicinity.




CHAPTER IV

THE YORKSHIRE COLLEGE


The Yorkshire College of Science, as it was first styled, had its origin
in the general movement towards a fuller recognition of the duty of the
community in regard to national education, of which the Education Act of
1870, the Technical Instruction Act of 1889, and the more comprehensive
Education Act of 1902 were at once the signs and the practical outcome.
The immediate cause of the creation of the College may, however, be said
to have been found in the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867. One of
the reporters of that exhibition was a well-known Leeds merchant, the
late Mr. Thomas Nussey. In a report in vol. iii of the General Reports,
Mr. Nussey drew attention to the great advance that had been made since
the London Exhibition of 1862 in the quality, style, and cheapness of
production of the foreign exhibits. Whilst he was of opinion that Great
Britain might still be said to maintain its pre-eminent position in the
woollen industry, Leeds and the West Riding generally had failed in many
classes to make the best use of their opportunities. He proceeded to
point out to what in his judgment the great advance in the character of
the continental production was due. He says:

    There can be no doubt that the French, Belgian, and Prussian
    manufacturers are greatly indebted for their progress in this
    and many other industries to the very superior technical
    education which their manufacturers and workmen obtain by means
    of the schools instituted for special instruction, not only
    in design, but in everything which has any relation to each
    particular manufacture. Without education we cannot expect
    to have skilled workmen of the highest class, and to a fair
    general education must be added a special training under good
    masters in every branch of trade. The adoption of similar
    schools in Britain will before long become a necessity, and the
    sooner they are established the better.

Prompt effect to these opinions was given by two other members of the
same family in a pamphlet, published in Leeds, entitled: “A Technical
Institution for Leeds and District, proposed by George Henry Nussey and
Arthur Nussey. Leeds: Edward Baines and Sons, 1867.” This institution was
avowedly designed to serve the interests of the staple industries of the
West Riding. Its projectors formulated a scheme of technical education
which should in the first place combine the existing School of Art with a
School of Weaving and Design, and should afford instruction in mechanical
engineering; in the manufacture and dyeing of woollen and worsted goods;
in weaving and designing; in the manufacture of linens, and of leather;
in mining, metallurgy, and building construction. Two years later they
sought to give a practical development of their ideas by establishing
“The Leeds Art and Science Institute” in connection with the Science
and Art Department, South Kensington. Six teachers and assistants were
engaged and the classes were held in the evenings.

Other agencies, however, were at work tending to the same end. There
is a small social organization in Leeds which has existed since 1849,
known as the Conversation Club, and which, with less ambitious aims, has
played much the same part in the intellectual life of the town that the
famous Lunar Society did in that of Birmingham. In this club the idea of
an Educational Council for Leeds took its rise, and out of this grew the
Yorkshire Board of Education, of which Lord Frederick Cavendish, M.P.,
was President, and Sir Andrew Fairbairn, and Dr. J. D. Heaton, an active
member of the Conversation Club and of the Educational Council, were
Vice-Presidents.

The work of the Board up to the period of which we write had been mainly
concerned with the provision of science classes and science teachers, in
connection with mechanics’ institutions working in conjunction with the
Science and Art Department.

In 1869 a meeting of the General Council of the Yorkshire Board of
Education was held at the Town Hall, Leeds, with Lord Frederick Cavendish
in the chair. It was attended by representatives of the more important
industries in Yorkshire, as well as by persons interested in higher
education. A resolution was carried “That in the opinion of this Council
it is desirable that a College of Science should be established in
Yorkshire”; and a committee was appointed “to investigate, consider, and
propose the best means of carrying out the proposal.” Members of this
committee naturally visited, in the first place, the neighbouring Owens
College, and gained valuable information concerning its rise and progress
and the nature of its operations, much of which was embodied in their
report; others visited King’s College, London, in order to inspect its
Department of Applied Science and Engineering Workshops. Correspondence
was also entered into with the Endowed Schools Commissioners, who held
out prospects of assistance for Exhibitions in Physical Science and in
the Secondary Education of Girls.

The Committee presented their report in 1872. Their suggestions were
limited by the probabilities of realizing them. Too ambitious a scheme
would overreach itself: public support would probably be deterred by the
very magnitude of the effort needed to give effect to it. On the other
hand, no attempt would be worth making unless it afforded reasonable
assurance of practical benefit. After full consideration the Committee
recommended the establishment of the following professorships: (1)
Mathematics and Engineering; (2) Chemistry; (3) Mining, Metallurgy, and
Geology; (4) Experimental Philosophy; and they came to the conclusion
that the minimum sum required for a beginning was £60,000, which they
apportioned as follows: site and buildings, £25,000; endowment, in
addition to students’ fees, £25,000; establishment expenses, £10,000.

The Council accepted the report, and at once appealed for subscriptions.
Sir Andrew Fairbairn headed the list with £1,000, followed by like
amounts from the Duke of Devonshire, Sir Titus Salt, Bart., Messrs.
Beckett & Co., the Lowmoor Iron Company, and Messrs. Hargreave and
Nusseys, members of which firm had started “The Leeds Art and Science
Institute.” The project, however, made but slow progress: pecuniary
support was difficult to secure, and the Committee were forced to
realize that if a start was to be made something less than the £60,000
would have to suffice. It was therefore resolved to postpone all building
operations and, when a sum of £20,000 had been raised, to make a
beginning in temporary premises.

In April 1874 it was reported that the subscription list amounted to
£25,000, and on the 30th of that month a meeting of the subscribers and
donors was held in Leeds for the purpose of defining the Constitution of
the proposed College and electing a Board of Governors. Lord Frederick
Cavendish presided, and Dr. Heaton made a statement explaining the
progress of the movement, and the steps it was proposed to take in order
formally to constitute the College. In addition to the amount subscribed,
the promoters were able to announce offers of help in money, as well
as in science exhibitions, from the Endowed Schools Commissioners. The
Clothworkers’ Company of London promised £500 a year to found a Chair of
Textile Fabrics. But Dr. Heaton went on to remark:

    The work is far from being completed; it may be said to be only
    commencing. The governing body have an arduous task before
    them, both in organizing the College and in still prosecuting
    the canvass for subscriptions. £20,000 neither represents the
    amount to be expected from the large and wealthy West Riding
    of Yorkshire, nor does it approach to the amount necessary to
    give permanency and full efficiency to the institution which
    we desire to establish. Although it is proposed to commence
    operations in a rented building, both because our present means
    would not permit of the purchase of a site and erection of
    buildings thereon, and because of the long delay which would
    be occasioned by waiting for the completion of a building yet
    to be erected, it is most desirable, indeed essential, that
    the College should ultimately possess its own buildings,
    appropriately constructed and arranged for carrying on its work
    with the greatest efficiency and convenience. We have often
    been asked if Government should not assist the work we have
    in hand. Continental Governments do provide for scientific
    teaching as applied to industry, and it might be well if
    our own Government did more to promote this great national
    work. In this country we have always been left to do more for
    ourselves by individual action and by voluntary benevolence;
    and our national self-reliance and powers of organization and
    practical benevolence are no doubt strengthened and developed
    by our people being left to their own resources. But inasmuch
    as all are interested directly or indirectly in the commercial
    prosperity of the nation, this does seem to be an object
    towards which (when it is once commenced by private exertions)
    some assistance and encouragement by the Government would be
    peculiarly appropriate.

In the early autumn of 1874 the Council proceeded to appoint the first
professors of the College. The committee which drew up the scheme of
instruction had recommended the inclusion of the subject of Engineering,
with which should be associated the teaching of Mathematics by the
same professor. However desirable it might be to make provision for
instruction in the principles of Engineering—especially in Mechanical
Engineering, in view of its bearing upon one of the most important
industries of the town and district—the Council, for various reasons,
were unable to give immediate effect to this particular recommendation.
The subject of Mechanical Engineering, to be properly taught, requires
the provision of workshops, laboratories, and an installation of costly
plant. Even if the limited resources of the College had been sufficient
at the time to make the most modest of beginnings, the temporary premises
which had been leased would have been unsuitable for the purpose.
Accordingly the authorities, with that characteristic Yorkshire caution
which takes nothing on trust, goes no further than it can plainly
see—nor, in the common phrase, puts out its hand further than it can draw
it back again—decided to limit their appointments, to begin with, to
Professorships of (1) Experimental Physics (with which they associated
Mathematics); (2) Geology and Mining; (3) Chemistry. To the first Chair
they elected the late Mr. A. W. Rücker, Fellow of Brasenose College,
Oxford, and a Demonstrator in the Clarendon Laboratory—afterwards Sir
Arthur Rücker, Sec. R.S., Professor of Physics in the Royal College
of Science, London, and subsequently Principal of the reorganized
University of London. To the second they appointed the late Mr. A.
H. Green, formerly Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge,
and a distinguished member of the Geological Survey, who subsequently
became Professor of Geology in the University of Oxford. For the third
appointment the Council selected the present writer, who had been a
pupil, assistant, and demonstrator under the subject of this memoir at
Owens College, and who, prior to his selection, had held the Chair of
Chemistry in Anderson’s College, Glasgow, now merged into the splendidly
endowed and equipped Royal Technical College.

The premises in which the College was first housed consisted of a
disused Bankruptcy Court situated in Cookridge Street, one of the main
thoroughfares leading out of the town. After a somewhat chequered career
the building had been partially used as a school of cookery, with the
unfortunate result that it had been largely consumed by a fire just prior
to being taken over by the College authorities. Although not so spacious
as Richard Cobden’s old house in Quay Street, Manchester, in which Owens
College first started, the Leeds building, in some respects, was not
ill-adapted to the purposes of the limited professoriate with which the
Yorkshire College of Science began its operations. At all events, it
accommodated without the slightest difficulty all the students who sought
admission to its classes on its opening day.

The College began its work of teaching on October 26, 1874—somewhat later
than the normal time of opening a session—owing to delays in completing
the necessary structural rearrangements. But as there was no yearning
anxiety on the part of anybody to learn, no special inconvenience or
disappointment resulted. There was no preliminary flourish of trumpets;
hardly so much as an opening speech. The initial ceremony was as simple
as the appointments of the College were modest. Each of the three
professors in turn gave an introductory lecture to an audience consisting
of the members of the Council and such of the friends of the embryo
institution as cared to attend. Some encouraging remarks were made by the
Chairman, and so the College was launched. But for a time the students
were few and their advent as far between as the visits of angels.

Still, as the session progressed and the existence of the place became
gradually known the numbers slowly crept up, and by the end of the summer
term they had reached twenty-four and the students’ fees had amounted
to about £150. The authorities now determined to open the next session
with an Inauguration Ceremony. October 6, 1875, is a red-letter day in
the history of the College, for on that date one of the most notable and
helpful gatherings ever held in honour of the College took place. The
proceedings began at noon, when the College buildings were inspected by
a specially invited company; thereafter there was the inevitable public
luncheon and in the evening a general meeting in the Town Hall. On each
occasion the Duke of Devonshire was in the chair. At the College meeting
Lord Frederick Cavendish, its President, gave a short account of its
origin and aims. They were there, he said, to take care that they did
not through ignorance waste the natural wealth of the county, or stay
the further development of the natural qualities of its people. Wealth,
however, was not much in itself but only as a means. Were they quite
certain that in the great wealthy industrial North they had made the same
progress in intellectual culture and refinement as they had in wealth? He
pointed to the example of Owens College: inspired by that College, they
would try in Yorkshire if they could not do something of the same sort.

At the luncheon similar sentiments were uttered by the Dean of Durham,
the Marquess of Ripon, Canon Robinson, Sir Edward Baines, and Mr. W. E.
Forster. It was, however, at the evening meeting that the real success
of the day was achieved. The Victoria Hall was filled with a typical
Yorkshire crowd—alert, receptive, keenly interested, alternately critical
and tolerant, yet ready to be swayed by those who knew how to reach
their intelligence and rouse their enthusiasm. The Duke of Devonshire
opened the proceedings with a dignified and impressive address, worthy
of his high position as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and as
President of the College in the neighbouring city of Manchester. He gave
a broad and comprehensive account of the general state of educational
activity in the country and indicated the directions in which it was
tending. He pointed to the creation of institutions for secondary and
higher education in our large centres of industry as a sign that the
country was awakening to the fact that all our great branches of industry
were founded on a scientific basis. Although the education—however
indispensable it might be—of the eye and the hand could only be acquired
by actual practice, it could be nothing short of prejudice to deny that
the education of the intellect was also a matter of primary importance.
The Duke affected no flights of eloquence. His diction was simple and
unaffected, and a vein of strong, practical common sense ran through
the whole of his remarks. His presence was not unfamiliar to a Leeds
audience, but they never heard him to greater effect, or, it may be
added, at greater length. His speech was said to be the longest he had
ever made.

The late Lord Playfair, who as Dr. Lyon Playfair then represented a Leeds
constituency, followed on the same theme. He recalled the fact that more
than a generation had passed since standing on a Leeds platform he had
acted as interpreter to his friend Liebig in warning his audience not to
pride itself too much upon its industrial achievements, explaining how
impossible it was for England permanently to preserve her manufacturing
supremacy among nations, unless she bestowed more attention upon the
sciences which formed the groundwork of her industries. Then, in one of
those hortatory discourses with which he occasionally astonished and
delighted an ill-informed House of Commons, he poured forth a wealth of
facts in illustration of the movement in the industrial world which had
rendered these modern colleges an imperative necessity.

    Foreign nations had seen that their only chance of compensating
    themselves for our advantages in the materials of power and
    strength was to excel us in the intelligence and intellect
    applied to their use in production. They saw clearly that
    as new forces and their application were brought to aid
    industrial production, human labour was relieved from much of
    its drudgery, and that the conceptions of the brain became more
    important than the sweat of the brow. Look to Switzerland,
    as an example in point. She has no coal, and no seaboard by
    which she can introduce it. Separated from other countries
    by ice-clad mountains, and hemmed in by hostile tariffs, she
    still becomes an industrial nation. What has led to her great
    industrial industry? Not her water-power, for that she is
    only beginning to use effectively, but simply the educated
    intelligence of her whole population. Valleys in which a few
    years ago you only heard the tinkling of the bells of cattle as
    they strayed through the pastures are now busy with turkey-red
    works and calico print works. Our manufacturers shake their
    heads sagaciously, and say, “This is because the air and water
    of Switzerland are so well adapted for colours.” But the true
    explanation is contained in the answer of Opie, the celebrated
    painter, who being asked by an ambitious youth how he mixed his
    colours, replied “I mix them with my brains, sir.”

    Every part of public education in Switzerland is well
    co-ordinated and organized. At Zurich, in addition to a
    university for general culture, there is a technical college
    larger than Buckingham Palace. And so Switzerland laughs at
    countries which look to raw materials as the source of their
    wealth, and imports cotton from the United States, tobacco from
    Havana, silk from Italy, and sends back to these very markets
    her finished products. Again, look at Holland, which is a
    reclaimed swamp, containing no mineral materials for industry,
    except in a small patch at Limburg. She also compensates for
    their absence by increasing the intellectual factor in labour.
    Every town of 10,000 inhabitants has its technical school,
    supported by the municipalities. Look at Germany, which,
    though it does possess valuable raw materials, cultivates with
    assiduity the intellectual factor of production. In war and
    in peace her population is able to be used to the greatest
    advantage. Europe has scarcely yet recovered from its amazement
    at the sudden development of that empire, though it had been
    laying the foundation for its prosperity in the educational
    organization which she gave herself when the wars of Napoleon
    taught her the sources of her weakness. Now, surely we should
    not close our eyes, in insular pride, to the means taken by
    other countries to increase their productive resources. France
    fully admits that her recent calamities were largely due to a
    want of enlightenment of her people. She is still far ahead of
    us in technical institutions, but her general and university
    education are very deficient. If you desire an example of a
    country which cannot progress because of the ignorance of
    her people, look at Spain. When the Duke St. Simon, once
    French Minister there, said, “Science in Spain is a crime and
    ignorance a virtue,” he explained in one sentence the cause of
    her misfortunes. A fertile country, washed by two great oceans,
    abounding in coal, iron, copper, and quicksilver, is unable to
    thrive because her people are ignorant.

The speaker then turned to the case of the institution whose formal
inauguration had been the occasion of his address, and he proceeded, as a
practical educationist, to give it and its projectors some advice.

    Such colleges are likely to receive little support until the
    middle-class schools understand their duty to Society by
    making Science part of the effective instruction of youth. A
    port constructed for the reception of ships, before the ships
    themselves are built, has a dreary time to wait for their
    arrival, and so the managers of the new College must not be
    discouraged because it does not grow quickly.

Nor did he think it would be wise, at least in its infancy, to give to
the College too much of a technical character.

    Teach science well to the scholars, and they will make the
    applications for themselves. Good food becomes assimilated
    to its several purposes by digestion. Epictetus used to say
    that though you feed sheep on grass, it is not grass, but wool
    which grows upon their backs. What the College should aim at
    is to increase the science and intelligence of the community,
    and not to teach industries which they know a great deal
    better than the professors. The new College is only the local
    expression of a general movement for higher education. That
    movement has no doubt received its primary impulse from the
    conviction that our industrial population ought to be educated
    in the principles which underlie their occupations. But the
    object is higher than this. There is a desire to spread culture
    throughout the country, and not to concentrate it in one or two
    favoured localities. The older Universities are beginning to
    recognize this fact. Cambridge had made the bold experiment of
    trying whether, if the youth of the provinces would not go to
    her, they would receive educational missionaries sent to them.
    The older Universities could do much from their wealth and
    educational resources. They could easily spread enlightenment
    over England if they were earnest in the work.

    No doubt our manufacturing and commercial classes require
    to be mellowed by culture, but our Universities must adapt
    that culture to the wants and spare time of busy communities.
    They cannot get hold of our great industrial centres in any
    permanent way unless they raise them in self-respect and
    dignity by giving them an intellectual understanding of their
    vocations, and upon that understanding they may engraft as much
    polite literature as they can. A college of science, such as
    we are inaugurating to-day, is admirable in itself, but it is
    not complete. Perhaps it even focuses the light too strongly
    on a particular spot, and for this reason it intensifies the
    darkness around. Its directors are too enlightened men not to
    see this, and I am sure they will aid in the co-ordination
    of your other educational resources. The ultimate effect of
    this may be that you may evolve a wider and more comprehensive
    college for higher education. I look to that time with hope,
    for differentiation of our colleges will be the best thing for
    learning and for vigour of intellect. Each great provincial
    town should have a college as a centre of intelligence, each a
    sun capable of warming and illuminating a region around it, not
    merely a moon to cast pale and cold beams as a reflection from
    a distant luminary.

Subsequent speakers, in so far as they went over the same ground,
merely ploughed with Dr. Playfair’s heifer. The Marquess of Ripon
was not discouraged by the small beginnings of the undertaking. All
the experiences of the past showed that those institutions which had
taken the deepest root, and which had flourished the longest and
wielded ultimately the most extensive influence, had sprung from small
beginnings. Our ancient universities had mainly sprung from individual
effort, and from private endowment. We were not less wealthy than our
ancestors who founded them. Surely we could do now what they did before
us. He trusted that there was not to be any doubt as to the future of
this institution. We were told that its managers had acted to a great
extent upon faith; that they had been doing their work partly out of
capital in the confidence that that capital would be repaid them by the
good sense and generosity of their countrymen.

Of all those who followed, and who pleaded the cause of the College,
none was received with greater heartiness and enthusiasm than Mr. W. E.
Forster, and there was none whose speech had a deeper or more genuine
note of sympathy and encouragement. There were perhaps special reasons
for the warmth of the welcome with which he was greeted. The political
circumstances of the time were peculiar, and Mr. Forster was known to be
the undeserved victim of them. The Liberal party was then in opposition,
and Mr. Gladstone earlier in the year had suddenly thrown up his position
as its leader. Public opinion had designated Mr. Forster as one of the
two or three politicians of eminence who might fitly be regarded as his
successor. But a considerable section of the Nonconformist Radicals
never forgave Mr. Forster for his action—or what they supposed to be
his sole action—respecting the religious question in the Education Act
of 1870. Led by the Birmingham League, they were determined to make his
selection as the party leader impossible. The League party in his own
constituency of Bradford passed a resolution hostile to his claims.
Eventually, rather than divide the Liberal party, Mr. Forster withdrew
from the contest, and Lord Hartington, whom all sections were willing to
follow, was chosen. These circumstances were well known to everybody in
that large audience, and most moderate-minded men in it had the fullest
sympathy with what Mr. Gladstone called “the thoroughly genuine and
independent character” whose natural ambition as a statesman had been so
rudely checked by the sectarian rancour of political allies. This was his
reward for the wise and statesmanlike measure of 1870—one of the finest
achievements to the credit of the Liberal party.

As he stepped to the front of the platform to make his contribution
to the cause of the College he was received with round after round
of applause, and for some minutes he was unable to proceed. Men
instinctively recognized that the effort for which he pleaded was
but another link in the educational chain which he had done so much
to forge—the Endowed Schools Act of 1869 and the great Education
Act of 1870. His was but a short speech, but each strong, vigorous
utterance went home. The College was to be as its name implied—a county
institution—not merely of the town in which it happened to be situated.
They might as well at once acknowledge that the call which had been made
by civilization upon civilized people had not been so much responded to
by England as it had been in some other countries. But they had awoke to
the fact that a call was made upon them. They had a habit of being late,
but not too late.

This demonstration had an immediate effect upon the fortunes of the
College. One practical result was a considerable increase in financial
support. Some of those who had already given, gave largely again;
and many additional subscribers came forward. The existence of the
College was made known throughout the length and breadth of the county.
The Inaugural Ceremony met with a splendid “press.” One of the most
gratifying features was the “uplifting” tone of the speeches: speaker
after speaker pointed out what should be the true character of the
institution: it was not to be a mere Trade School—not simply a Technical
College but a centre of liberal culture and of higher education,
containing within it the potentiality of a University discipline.

To those who had ears to hear, and an imagination to conceive, the future
of the College was plainly indicated within the first twelve months
of its existence. It was this aspect of its destiny that appealed so
strongly to that eminent journalist and man of letters, the late Sir
Wemyss Reid, at that time editing the _Leeds Mercury_, and to which he
gave emphatic expression in those forcible leaders so characteristic of
his pen. So long as he remained in Leeds, Reid proved a staunch friend
of the College and was ever ready to do what he could for its welfare.
Nor was the educational press in general at all backward in extending a
welcome to the infant institution: certain members of the teaching staff
did yeoman service in enlisting its interest and sympathy.

The result of this organized effort, in which all concerned—members of
the Council, officers, teachers—worked with enthusiasm and unanimity, was
seen in the record of the subsequent session’s work.

From this time onward the successive Annual Reports of the College
constitute an unbroken story of continued development. It was not,
of course, surprisingly rapid, but it was steady and continuous. The
progress of the institution was general; it was to be measured by the
gradual increase in the number of its teachers, in the character and
range of their subjects, and in the sessional entry of the students. It
is, perhaps, significant of the change that a quarter of a century had
made in the attitude of the middle class towards educational matters
that the growth of the Yorkshire College, during its early years, should
have been relatively far greater than that of Owens College at the
corresponding period of its existence. But there may have been other
factors to account for, or at least to increase, the difference. The
generally acknowledged success to which the Manchester foundation had
attained at the time of the establishment of the Leeds College may have
been, and probably was, by the force of example and desire of emulation,
a potent contributory cause.

The courses of study at Owens College, so far as circumstances and
its means would permit, were avowedly based, at the outset, on the
examples of the older Universities. The little regard that was then
paid to Science by the Trustees was indicated by the small stipend that
was attached to the science chairs as compared with those on humanity
subjects. There was no general recognition, even in the home of Dalton,
of the beneficent part that science was able to play in the industrial
life of the district. On the other hand, the Yorkshire College started
wholly untrammelled by the traditions of ancient seats of learning, and
its counsels were only remotely influenced by those who had been nursed
in them. As its original designation implied, its projectors clearly
recognized the value of science in relation to industry. They founded
the College, indeed, in the strength of their conviction. They began, in
fact, at a point to which Owens College had arrived when Roscoe made his
influence felt upon its policy.

It cannot be said, however, that the educational aims of the governing
body of the Leeds institution to begin with were very sharply defined;
nor was the action of the Council always consistent. This was, perhaps,
inevitable in a body which contained no professed educationists. Most
of its members had everything to learn of the technique of education,
and, as is not unknown in the history of similar institutions, it was
some time before the Council could be induced to adopt formal means of
availing themselves of the knowledge and experience of the academic
element they sought to direct. At the outset there was no clear
apprehension by them of the lines upon which the College should develop.

There were two distinct parties in the Council, and their views
occasionally conflicted. The College had been ostensibly founded to
serve the industrial interests of the district, and the support of many
of its wealthy manufacturers had been enlisted solely on that ground.
This fact led a certain section of the Council to attempt to impress
upon the College the character of an institute of technology. Whilst
they were willing enough to extend its science side so long as it bore
directly upon industrial needs, they had but little sympathy with the
_literæ humaniores_, and all attempts to include such subjects were
viewed with disfavour as a departure from the original intentions of the
projectors. But the majority of the Council soon came to have a higher
conception of the true functions of the young institution, and it was
only the limitations of their means—their poverty and not their will—that
prevented them from attempting to realize their ideals. To this section
the example of Owens College was, without doubt, a constant stimulus.
It served eventually to direct the College upon the lines upon which it
ultimately developed. But for a time this diversity of aim on the part of
the government of the College made itself manifest with each attempt to
enlarge its curriculum.

Fortunately the professoriate was of one mind on this question, and their
unanimity was not without influence on the policy of the College. They
recognized, of course, that there is no necessary antagonism between the
two aims. Both should be developed _pari passu_: that is a condition
demanded by modern necessities. It is the essential and characteristic
feature of the higher education of the present time. The difficulty
was to give practical effect to these views under the restrictions
imposed by the financial circumstances of the College. But the fact that
the Staff held them and not only gave expression to them, but sought
to realize them so far as lay in their limited power secured for the
Professors the appreciation and confidence of the governing body, and
ultimately obtained for them a responsible share in its counsels.

In the first few years of its existence several circumstances conspired
to enhance the public reputation of the College and to consolidate its
position. In its second session the teaching staff received a great
accession to its strength by the appointment of Mr. Louis C. Miall as
Lecturer in, and afterwards as Professor of Biology. Mr. Miall had
already established a reputation as a man of science, as an able and
attractive lecturer and a sound and experienced teacher. He brought
to the aid of his colleagues a wise judgment and a knowledge of local
conditions which under the special circumstances proved most helpful.
His appointment at this period was not without its significance as an
indication of the broad and liberal views which the majority of the
Council entertained as to the scope and functions of the College. It was
a wise policy to attach to its fortunes all who could in any way serve
its true interests, whether in teaching, in enlisting public sympathy, or
in the management of its affairs.

At the beginning of the following session (1876) the professors, who had
now formed themselves into an Academic Board holding regular meetings
in order to discuss the educational affairs of the College, addressed a
memorandum to the Council inviting them to consider the advisability
of extending the curriculum so as to include Literature and Classics.
They pointed out that they had frequent applications from students for
advice as to obtaining the degrees of the University of London, or as
to complying with the requirements for open science scholarships at the
other Universities, but that, as at present constituted, the College
was unable to afford the necessary facilities. They were of opinion
that if the College were in a position to enable the students to obtain
the science degrees of the University of London its usefulness would be
considerably increased, and the wider curriculum might be expected to
result in an augmentation of the yearly entry. The Council, on the whole,
were not indisposed to consider the suggestion benevolently, but they
regretted they were unable to take any action from lack of funds. The
matter, however, was not allowed to drop. At that time Mr. Stuart and
his syndicate at Cambridge were busy in their attempts to spread culture
among the hives of industry, and their missionaries were at work in Leeds
under the auspices of a committee of which the late Bishop of Truro (Dr.
Gott), then Vicar of Leeds, and the late Sir Edward Baines, one of the
truest and most zealous friends the College ever possessed, were active
members. These gentlemen approached the governing body with a view of
ascertaining whether some arrangement might not be possible whereby the
work initiated by the University Extension Movement could be conducted
by the College in a more systematic and permanent manner than hitherto,
and they undertook on behalf of the Committee to be responsible, for a
term of years, for a considerable proportion of the money that would be
required to give effect to the suggestion. The result of the negotiation
was the establishment of Chairs of Classical Literature and History,
and Modern Literature and History, which were filled, respectively, by
the appointment of Professor John Marshall, M.A., of Balliol College,
Oxford, afterwards Rector of the High School, Edinburgh, a distinguished
classic, and author of an English rendering of the “Odes and Epodes of
Horace,” “Xenophon Memorabilia,” and other works; and Professor F. S.
Pulling, B.A. (Oxon). This enlargement of the educational work of the
College necessitated a slight but significant change in its designation:
henceforward it became known simply as the Yorkshire College until it was
raised to the rank of a university, when it took the name of the town in
which it was situated.

The executive of the College now publicly expressed their conviction that
there is no good reason against grouping in one institution the studies
belonging to liberal culture, and systematic instruction in scientific
and artistic principles and methods as applied to staple industries.

An event of hardly less importance in public estimation at this period
was the purchase of a considerable fraction of the site upon which
the handsome and extensive buildings of the University now stand. The
decision to take this step was one of the most momentous departures
in the history of the institution, and the writer well remembers how
seriously and with what anxiety it was discussed by the small body which
assembled in the office of the legal adviser to the College to confer
with the Chairman of its Finance Committee on the subject. Mr. Francis
Lupton, who at that period held the office, was an ideal custodian of
its financial affairs. No man could be more prudent in their management:
at the same time no one realized more fully that an ill-judged parsimony
might be the worst form of economy, and that a timely expenditure might
be the wisest investment. The two members of the Staff who were present
at this interview, with the courage of faith and the enthusiasm of
conviction, used their best endeavours to incline him to sanction what
everybody who had knowledge of the financial condition of the institution
could not but regard as a most onerous obligation. But in the end there
was practical unanimity among those present as to the expediency and
opportuneness of the step, and the event proved its wisdom.

The foundation-stone of the new College buildings was laid on October 23,
1877, by the Archbishop of York. As architect the Council had secured
the services of the late Mr. Alfred Waterhouse, R.A., whose experience
and success in the erection of Owens College seemed to them the highest
possible qualification. By the generosity of the Clothworkers’ Company,
who had voted the sum of £10,000 for the purpose, the authorities were
enabled to take in hand without further delay the buildings designed for
the Textile Industries Department.

The publicity given to these proceedings greatly strengthened the
position of the College in the county, and especially in the West
Riding. These events were no doubt such as must have come naturally and
in the fullness of time, but their advent at this particular juncture
was possibly accelerated by the action of Owens College in seeking
for university powers. This movement on the part of Manchester had
already engaged the attention of the Council of the Yorkshire College
and was watched by them with no little apprehension. They realized
that it was certain to have an important bearing upon the question of
higher education in Yorkshire, both directly and indirectly, and that
the future of the Yorkshire College was intimately bound up with it.
It was therefore all the more necessary to prove to the world that
Yorkshire men, in their own interests, were very much in earnest about
their young institution; that they were determined to secure for it the
fullest possible freedom of development and to extend and consolidate
its position, unhampered by limitations to which it might conceivably be
subjected by the presence of a relatively rich and powerful university
close to its own area.

In the next chapter we purpose to indicate briefly the steps which led
immediately to the foundation of the new university in Manchester and to
show how the action of the Yorkshire College resulted in modifying its
Constitution as originally contemplated.




CHAPTER V

THE VICTORIA UNIVERSITY


At the time of this movement in favour of the creation of a university
in Manchester the writer of this memoir was, as already stated, a member
of the teaching staff of the Yorkshire College, and was then, as for
some years previously, in constant friendly communication with Roscoe. A
letter informing him of the feeling in Leeds and the district concerning
the action of Owens College, and the desire of the authorities of the
Yorkshire College that its interests should in some way be safeguarded,
brought the following reply under date January 31, 1877:

    Thanks for the leader, which I had seen. What does Leeds want?
    A peripatetic university? First in Manchester, then in Leeds,
    then in Bristol, next in Newcastle? Or will it be content
    with an affiliation scheme? Do you want to come in _now_,
    incomplete as you are, or will you be content to wait till you
    are developed into more of a two-or three-sided sort of thing?
    How can the _unity_ of an institution be kept up if all kinds
    and conditions of other institutions claim an equal voice in
    all the arrangements? In short, would it not be much better for
    Leeds, and Bristol and Newcastle, to have separate universities
    as well as Manchester, than to make a union in which there
    would not be strength? However, our proposed scheme will
    provide for the admission and representation of other places if
    they like to come in, but a university, like most other things,
    must not only have a name, but also a local habitation, and
    hence I do not see how the idea of a wandering minstrel kind
    of university could possibly answer, and this is what, I take
    it, the writer of the article (who was he?) means.… I will send
    you a copy of our proposals as soon as they are settled.

After the special meeting of the governors of the Owens College, at which
it was decided to take steps to obtain a university charter, Roscoe wrote
to the present writer as follows under date March 27, 1877:

    You may unofficially and on your own responsibility state to
    the Secretary of your College that you have reason to know
    that in the proposals to obtain a Charter to grant Degrees the
    authorities of this College have added a clause to enable other
    colleges, under certain conditions, to enter into union with
    the proposed University.

    We were unable to accede to the request to forward the
    documents officially, as the Committee on the subject had not
    met. But you may say (privately) that it is the wish of those
    who are interested in the movement to make this admission of
    other colleges an essential part of the scheme.

    This to show your Council that their claims will be properly
    and fairly considered.

The following letter, dated December 5, 1877, was received after the
Manchester deputation to the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, when the Lord
President of the Council suggested some alteration in the government of
the proposed university, which the memorialists considered and adopted.

    At a meeting yesterday of the University Sub-Committee a
    more detailed scheme for the proposed Constitution was
    considered. I think you may like to know unofficially a few of
    the particulars, bearing in mind that it is simply as yet a
    proposal.

        (1) The Charter to be granted to the Court of Governors
        of Owens College modified so as to give a somewhat
        larger representation of the Academical Element.

        (2) The representation on the Court, when sitting for
        University purposes, of any other qualified College
        in union with the University to be as follows: the
        President, the Treasurer or Chairman of the Council;
        the Principal of such College; such proportionate
        numbers of (_a_) the Senate, and (_b_) the Governing
        Body of such College as may be determined by the
        University Court with the sanction of the Lord
        President of the Council.

        (3) The Executive Body of the University to consist
        of members nominated by the Court and also, on the
        union of any other qualified College, the President,
        Treasurer, or Chairman, Principal and the members of
        the Senate of such Colleges nominated on the Court.

        (4) The Court to be summoned for University purposes
        as distinguished from Owens College purposes by the
        Executive Body of the University.

    Another point of importance to you is this: That power shall
    be given to the Court of the University, after considering the
    report of the Executive Body upon the subject, to accept the
    application of any other College for incorporation with the
    University, provided always that the Court should be satisfied:
    (1) that such College has established a reasonably complete
    curriculum and possesses a reasonably sufficient teaching staff
    in the Departments of Arts and Science at least; (2) that such
    College has furnished proofs of its means and appliances for
    teaching being established on a footing of permanent security;
    (3) that such College is under the independent control of its
    own Governing Body; and (4) that the admission shall receive
    the sanction of the Lord President of the Council.

    Again, power to be given to any such College to appeal for
    final decision to the Lord President.

    One other point. On incorporation the professors of such
    College shall take a proportionate share in all the
    examinations of the University as decided by the University
    Court.

    I hope that these proposals will be found to meet your views.

Meanwhile the Council of the Yorkshire College, acting in conjunction
with its Academic Board, had been carefully considering the situation.
Influenced to a large extent, no doubt, by the local Press, public
feeling in the district set strongly in the direction of immediate
action. Although the infant institution was barely three years old,
there could no longer be any doubt that it was already firmly implanted
in the estimation and regard of the community in which it was placed.
Indeed, nothing in its short career up to that time stimulated and
strengthened this regard more than this particular crisis in its
fortunes. The call for sympathy and support which now was spread
throughout the Ridings was the finest _réclame_ it could possibly have.
It served to deprive the College of the last semblance of being a
merely local foundation; henceforth it was in fact as in name a county
organization.

In the following May a deputation arranged by the Yorkshire College
waited upon the Lord President of the Council. The report of the Council
of the College pointed out that whilst the Owens College scheme admitted
of the admission of other colleges to the university, the provisions
that the charter should be granted to the Owens College, and that the
university should be named after the City of Manchester were very
generally considered incompatible with the future incorporation of
institutions in other towns. Lord Ripon, in introducing the deputation,
gave forcible expression to these views. The memorial was supported
by representatives of the municipalities of the large towns in the
West Riding and elsewhere in the county, by a number of scientific
organizations, and by many eminent educational authorities.

As the Owens College memorialists had already expressed their willingness
to consider favourably the inclusion of other colleges, under reasonable
conditions, there was little difficulty in opening friendly negotiations
between the two Colleges with the desire on both sides to arrive at a
satisfactory arrangement. The Duke of Devonshire, who was a liberal
supporter of both Colleges, and had shown great interest in their
welfare—Lord Frederick Cavendish being President of the Yorkshire
College—convened a conference at Devonshire House between representatives
of the two Colleges, when after full discussion the basis of a federal
scheme was devised. The details of this were worked out by committees of
the two Colleges. Eventually complete agreement was arrived at, and it
was decided to present a joint memorial from the two Colleges praying
that Her Majesty might be advised:

(1) To create a new university, in which the Owens College, Manchester,
and such other institutions as may now or hereafter be able to fulfil the
conditions of incorporation laid down in the Charter, may be incorporated
colleges.

(2) To grant to each of such incorporated colleges a share in the
government of the university, depending only upon its magnitude and
efficiency, in accordance with the suggested Constitution.

(3) To be graciously pleased to allow the said university to be called
the Victoria University.

In the various conferences needed to reach this solution the late Sir
Arthur Rücker, who acted as one of the representatives of the Yorkshire
College, took an active and leading share, and it was in no small degree
due to his tact, urbanity, and diplomatic skill that it was secured.

In reference to this matter the present Master of Peterhouse, Sir A. W.
Ward, who was at the time Principal of the Owens College, bears the
following testimony:

“I remember very well how admirably he conducted the case of the
Yorkshire College, which was at first adverse to our wishes at
Manchester, and afterwards was conjoined with our own application. He had
great difficulties to contend against; for the Yorkshire College seemed
to be opposing our application for a university charter without being
able to set up a similar claim for itself, and the federal principle to
which resort was ultimately had was by no means free from objections.
He had, if I remember right, very effective parliamentary support,
especially in the late Mr. W. E. Forster, and then, or afterwards, in the
late Lord Ripon. But he was the active representative of Leeds, and the
virtual success of the action of the College was very largely due to him.

“Personally he was a man of great charm of manner and a very pleasant as
well as effective speaker.”

The deputation presenting the joint memorials waited upon the Lord
President, who was accompanied by the Marquis of Salisbury, on May 5,
1879. It was headed by the Duke of Devonshire, as president of the Owens
College, and the Archbishop of York, as representing the Yorkshire
College, and consisted of noblemen and gentlemen of influence connected
with the two counties; representatives of different denominations,
municipalities, scientific and educational bodies, as well as other
gentlemen interested in higher education. It received the customary
promise “that the proposal should have the most attentive consideration
of Her Majesty’s Government.”

The various steps in the procedure needed to obtain a royal charter
are many and devious. They need only be indicated by stating that they
seem expressly designed to afford abundant occupation for lawyers. The
following letter from Roscoe, sent to the writer from the Athenæum Club,
and dated June 19, 1879, bears upon this point:

    It is most important that you should at once get a Petition to
    “The Queen in Council” drawn up and sent to the Parliamentary
    Agents for presentation. We are doing so. The Duke of
    Devonshire will sign our petition, and yours in identical terms
    should be signed by the Archbishop [of York] and Lord Frederick
    Cavendish.

    …

    The Council meets on the 26th June, and everything must be sent
    in before that date.

    I have seen Mr. [W. E.] Forster who has telegraphed to your
    secretary this evening.

    We have the draft of our petition at O[wens] College if you
    wish to consult it.

    It is most important to get this done and to get your
    Archbishop to sign.

The next letter, so far as regards the Victoria University, requires
some explanation. The then Chairman of the Council of the Yorkshire
College, the late Dr. Heaton, was not wholly friendly to the idea of a
new northern university, and ultimately he dissociated himself from his
colleagues on this particular question. He was never able to persuade
himself that another university was actually needed or was desirable. In
his judgment the interests of higher education, so far at least as the
creation of degree-granting bodies could serve them, were sufficiently
assured in England by the existence of the universities of Oxford,
Cambridge, and London. He viewed with considerable apprehension the
attempt to establish rival universities: he imagined that the stress of
competition for students might lower the standard of scholarship. Above
all he was strongly opposed, in what he thought the true interests of the
medical profession, to the increase in the number of possible avenues to
practice: in his opinion there were already too many for an efficient
standard of qualification to be maintained. It was perhaps characteristic
of him to suppose that the immediate, and indeed the ultimate, effect
of the establishment of the university in Manchester would be not to
hearten and rouse his colleagues to fresh exertions in order to make the
Leeds College worthy to be received as a member of the University: on
the contrary, he thought that, by force of circumstances, the enthusiasm
of the friends of that institution would be gradually damped, and their
energy proportionally weakened, as the neighbouring College grew in
power and prestige after being raised to the dignity of a university. He
was specially concerned about the future of the Leeds Medical School,
of which he had been a member for many years. It was well established
and had an excellent record, but its position would, he considered, be
undermined and its continued existence jeopardized by the proximity of
a school attached to a degree-giving body. He was not able to carry his
colleagues on the Council of the Yorkshire College with him in his view
of the probable influence of the new University on its fortunes. As the
sequel proved, he entirely misconceived its effect: so far from weakening
the energies of its friends, events showed that it acted as the most
powerful stimulus the Leeds College ever received. But Dr. Heaton’s
authority and influence with respect to the Medical School enabled him
to carry his point in regard to the proposed medical degrees, and the
Yorkshire representatives were instructed to disavow any wish that power
should be sought to grant them. A suggestion to send a private message to
the Lord President to this effect was made after it had been represented
by the legal agents that no observations on the draft chapter could be
received by the Privy Council. Under the circumstances the authorities of
Owens College were not without justification for their disappointment and
annoyance.

    In the first place I would propose to you that we should
    together do the atomic weight of Titanium. You and I both
    thought of doing it. You are busy with other things.… I will
    sketch a method out, prepare some more TiCl₄ and send the
    proposals to you. If you like, that is. So much for private
    affairs.

    Now with regard to the Victoria University. We all have been
    much annoyed and surprised to find that you at Leeds, having
    so far acquiesced in our proposals—see memorial, etc.—now
    at the last moment put in a _caveat_ about Medical Degrees!
    This appears to us rather too bad. If this move was intended
    we ought to have had previous information of it. If you have
    only now determined on this course it is more obviously unfair
    to us to start the hare now! Fancy what the University will
    be without such power. Think of Glasgow and Edinburgh thus
    emasculated. Is this what you wish us to come to?

    Then I think that R.’s proposal to send a private message
    through your President to the Duke of Richmond still more
    objectionable. “Openly we agree, but we come to inform
    you privately that you will please us by striking out the
    provision.” This is really what you propose to do! This,
    coupled with the petition from Liverpool and the opposition and
    jealousy of other Medical Schools, may suffice to so mutilate
    our Charter that it won’t be worth having.

    _Do_ see what can be done to dissuade your people from sending
    any such message to the Duke.

The private message above referred to was not sent. At the same time
Dr. Heaton’s views, backed up as they were by the action of the College
of Surgeons and British Medical Association, and a great number of
the leading hospital surgeons and teachers in London and elsewhere,
prevailed, and the application for power to grant degrees in medicine
and surgery was, for the time at least, withdrawn, in the expectation
that legislative action on the general question of medical education
and qualification was contemplated. As no such action was taken, a
supplementary charter removing the restriction was granted on April 20,
1883.

The next letter, under date February 14, 1880, shows a further stage in
the progress of the application. By a then recent Act it had to be laid
before both Houses of Parliament for thirty days before any report on the
subject could be submitted to the Sovereign.

    …

    By the way, you know, of course, that the Charter (unaltered)
    is now lying on the table of both Houses, and if we can only
    keep everybody quiet it will be law in less than thirty days!

    When are you coming over?

The Charter was granted by the Queen in Council on April 6th, and was
finally ratified on April 20, 1880.

The next letter (March 30, 1880) shows that this event was to be
celebrated, as a matter of course, in the customary British method.

    I am very sorry that you cannot dine with the P.C.S. [President
    of the Chemical Society—Roscoe himself] on the 16th. I intended
    you to have been there as Longstaff medallist! I am asking the
    officers and some of the Council.

    You must all reserve yourselves for July 14th or 15th. The
    opening of the V.U. [Victoria University] and a Banquet at the
    Town Hall!!

The following letter (January 16, 1881) shows how cordial the relations
between the sister Colleges had now become, thanks to the frank and
friendly discussion between their representatives, and how loyally those
in authority at Owens were prepared to carry out the compact:

    Accept my sincere though tardy thanks for your beautiful
    photograph, which is a marvellous study of volcanic action.

    I have lately heard that P⸺ has been making a statement (on
    whose authority I cannot think) that the Yorkshire College
    would not be allowed to join the V.U. Though I know that you
    would take this for what it is worth, I think that others may
    misunderstand, and I think that you should inform any one who
    reports such a statement that it is wholly without foundation.
    In the first place, the V.U. cannot refuse even if they desired
    to do so. In the second, I for one, and many with me if not
    _all_, will cordially welcome any addition to ourselves, for
    those who have to work the new University desire to have other
    competent persons to help to share their great responsibility.

Roscoe, in fact, from the very beginning of its career had always
shown a sympathetic interest in the fortunes of the Yorkshire College.
Badly housed and poorly endowed at its start, its early struggles
and difficulties were watched by him with a kindly regard, based, no
doubt, to some extent on the memory of his own experiences. He was
not unfrequently in Leeds in those days, and his breezy optimism and
cheerful confidence that things would come right, in spite of checks and
disappointments, were at once stimulating and encouraging to the small
band of young professors who were striving to mould the institution
according to the pattern of that which he had himself done so much to
fashion. An indication of that interest was manifested by his presence,
in December 1880, at the formal opening of the new buildings which the
College owes to the wise liberality of the Clothworkers’ Company. At
the banquet which followed he responded to the toast of “The Victoria
University,” and expressed, on behalf of the authorities of Owens
College, the hope that before long the Yorkshire College would become one
of the incorporated Colleges, and would help the Owens College to uphold
the dignity and usefulness of the new University.

Roscoe took a leading part in shaping the curriculum of the new
University, and at the meeting of the Court which settled its general
lines he might be said to have been the mouthpiece of the party which
succeeded in impressing upon it its characteristic features. What had
to be considered were the needs of great industrial communities. What
sort of knowledge do they desire, and what should they be encouraged to
pursue? The discussion mainly turned upon the place which the classical
languages should hold in the university courses. “Compulsory” Greek was
no longer regarded as a practical question. Should “compulsory” Latin
also be eliminated? Are these ancient languages, or either of them, still
to be regarded as an indispensable part of a liberal education and an
indispensable requisite for a degree? The claims of the Classics were
not without defenders, but as a local newspaper pointed out in a leading
article, curiously enough it would seem that among the stoutest of these
were to be found some of the very men who might have been supposed to
be the natural champions of the newer learning, and if orthodox academic
traditions received a rude blow, it was because they were deserted by
the very men who had been nursed in them. With two exceptions, the
professorial members of the Court were unanimous in recommending that
Latin should not be made obligatory for a degree. The Chancellor and Lord
Derby supported the contention that whatever may be the value as mental
food and training of the Classics when thoroughly mastered, the wretched
minimum of ill-learnt Latin and soon-forgotten Greek prescribed in
university examinations as preliminary to more serious studies possesses
no educational value whatever. Perhaps the argument most decisive
with the Court was that given by Roscoe. He said they had to consider
the large number of persons who came to the Owens College for special
instruction, and more particularly for engineering and mathematics, but
who had never been at any school where Latin was taught. Those were the
men who carried off the best engineering prizes, and for them it was that
this door had wisely been kept open. They must not be guided by what
Oxford or Cambridge had done, but by what was good for their own district
and what was advisable at the present moment. Let them remember what a
number of men such as he had mentioned there were in their neighbourhood,
and how flourishing were the mathematical schools, and then let them
say whether they could cut off those schools and men from university
education. The “innovators” won the day by a majority of 2 to 1, and thus
effected “the dethronement, never to rise again, of this mischievous
idol.”

It was amusing to notice the perturbation which this departure from a
time-honoured tradition caused in certain scholastic circles and among
the self-styled “friends of culture.” But on the whole the action was
favourably commented upon by the more influential newspapers and leading
educational journals. It was regarded as the inevitable consequence of
modern necessity, and of the gradual recognition that the traditions of
mediæval schoolmen were not sacrosanct or necessarily the best adapted to
new requirements.

In drafting the Constitution of the new University power was of course
taken in accordance with established procedure, and in deference to the
democratic tendencies of British seats of learning, to form the body
known as Convocation, and those of the former students of Owens College
who came within certain definitions were made its first members.

It would seem to be the inevitable tendency of all Convocations to play
the part of a Parliamentary Opposition. Their primary duty, as they
conceive it, is to criticize and to take an independent view of the
policy of the university, as determined by the governing or executive
powers. No doubt such criticism is salutary if wisely directed, but
experience has shown that it is sometimes factious and occasionally
obstructive. Much, therefore, depends upon the chairman. It was felt
by many of the members that it was specially important at the outset
to make a prudent selection if Convocation was to secure from the
beginning its proper influence and dignity as a deliberative assembly.
The Extreme Left—there is always such a group in such a gathering—had
promptly proposed Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst, a student of the College
in the Quay Street days, and now mainly remembered as the husband and
father of certain ladies who have distinguished themselves in the cause
of Woman Suffrage. Dr. Pankhurst was never regarded quite seriously in
College circles—least of all by his former associates, who on a dull
evening at the Union would occasionally put him up to make a political
harangue in the style of the Convention, when he would declaim the most
blood-curdling sentiments in a highly pitched falsetto, with all the
fiery eloquence and fervid passion of a Danton or a Hebert. But however
powerful the appeals to a youthful enthusiasm, the stones of Quay Street
remained unmoved, nor was Deansgate at any time blocked with barricades.

Later on Dr. Pankhurst went to the Bar, when he followed in the footsteps
and sought to better the example of a once well-known Chartist orator
whose name is well-nigh forgotten, became an active local politician,
and made one or two futile attempts to gain a parliamentary seat as the
most extreme of advanced Radicals. It was possible, of course, that when
weighted with the responsibilities of office Dr. Pankhurst’s conduct of
the chair might have been irreproachable. But the majority of Convocation
were not disposed to take the risk. Accordingly an “influentially signed”
memorial was issued suggesting Roscoe as first chairman. The advantage
of securing at this early period a chairman well acquainted with the
work of the other co-ordinate bodies of the University was obvious. But
there was another reason, as the terms of the memorial indicated. The
general body of the members were anxious to testify their appreciation of
the services of the man who had been so largely instrumental in making a
Convocation at all possible.

    By knowledge and experience no man was more qualified to
    promote administrative accord than Dr. Roscoe. From him came
    the first proposal of the new University; and no one worked
    with greater zeal and devotion in the movement, which after
    a long struggle was so happily successful. No sacrifice of
    time and labour was too great for him, and his forethought
    and knowledge of business were of untold advantage during the
    negotiations.

The suggestion that he should be the first chairman was made without
Roscoe’s knowledge, but it was so well received that he consented to be
nominated and was elected by a large majority. The _Intransigeants_, of
course, affirmed that they were fighting solely for a principle, and “as
a protest that those who teach and train ought not to govern and examine
and fill all the positions in the University.” They next proceeded to
move “a kind of vote of censure on the Executive Council for anticipating
the jurisdiction of Convocation in arranging for degrees, examinations,
and so forth.” This was met by “the previous question” and lost,
whereupon the meeting proceeded to discuss the absorbingly interesting
subject of academic costume, and the dissident minority melted away.

At this first meeting the clerk informed Convocation that at the next
ordinary meeting of the Court the Council proposed to report as to the
University making use of its power to grant degrees to persons being at
the date of the University Charter associates of the Owens College. The
first graduation ceremony of the University took place in the autumn of
1882, when Professor Ward in presenting the Associates said:

    The Associates of the Owens College, whom it is my privilege to
    present to you to-day, are spontaneously linking their names
    and reputations with the name and fame of our University, and
    it seems a twice-blessed relationship which on both sides is
    founded on goodwill. Many of those whom I am about to lead to
    you are men distinguished in letters and science, and in the
    several learned professions and other occupations to which
    their lives are devoted. Some are members of the governing and
    teaching bodies of our own University. A great number hold
    the degrees of other Universities—of those older Universities
    from which our own has received so many signs of kindly
    and ready sympathy, or of that great examining University
    without which much of the educational progress of the last
    half-century—without which such progress as was made within
    the walls of Owens College, would itself have lacked its
    trustworthiest tests.

The following letters from Roscoe to the writer have reference to this
function, which took place in the Manchester Town Hall—with, as the
descriptive reporter stated, “all the ceremony and pageantry that help to
cast a glamour over the older seats of learning.”


                                                        MANCHESTER,
                                                _October 14, 1882_.

    I write a line to say how much we all hope that you will run
    over on November 1st to have the degree of the V.U. conferred
    upon you. It is of importance that our best Associates should
    show up on the occasion, and I am particularly anxious that
    you should not be wanting. The ceremony is to be held in the
    Town Hall, and we hope that Lord Derby and Mr. Mundella will be
    present.

    How are you getting on? We are full in our laboratories and
    hard at it.

Unfortunately, the recipient of these letters (and of the degree) was
unable to be present. He had just succeeded by effluxion of time to
a position formerly held by Roscoe himself in “that great examining
University” which had in the past so efficiently tested the educational
progress of Owens College, and his official duties kept him in London.

                                                _October 22, 1882._

    I think in spite of Mrs. A. B. B.Sc. it would be as well if you
    would come to have the V.U. degree granted. If you do not come,
    unpleasant remarks may be made as to the cause of your absence.

    I never supposed you did care for the degree as a degree: it
    is simply an enrolment of yourself as a _bona-fide_ member
    of the University.… My feeling is that all those who have an
    interest in the University and who have taken active steps in
    its foundation should not hold aloof on this occasion, but show
    that they are willing and anxious to support the new University
    to the best of their power.

    You took an active part in modifying the original lines on
    which we had decided to lay our University, and I think that
    therefore you are, perhaps, more bound than other people to
    help now to make it a success on its present footing.…

    I am very glad you are coming to open our Chemical Society’s
    Session here on Friday. I fear I may be away as my Commission
    [Technical Instruction Commission] meets on Wednesday for some
    consecutive days. If I can get back I will.

The time, perhaps, has not yet arrived to attempt to assess the effect
on the higher education of the country which has followed from the
establishment of these modern universities, but that it has already
been very great there can be no question. Since they are free, for the
most part, from the influence of the schoolmen, and are unhampered by
mediæval traditions and the prepossessions of the past, they are the
more readily able to shape their course in accordance with the demands
of industrial progress and the necessities of modern life. From the
circumstance that they are nearly all situated in large towns and in the
midst of industrial communities, the study of science is, as a rule, a
prominent feature in their scheme of instruction, and accordingly their
science faculties are usually strongly developed. A spirit of emulation
makes them all active centres of research, especially in physical
science and in its technical applications, and their aggregate output of
original scientific inquiry is now very considerable, and in extent and
quality compares most favourably with that of continental nations. Their
influence upon the conduct of those industries which ultimately depend
upon science is already very marked, and as the number of scientifically
trained men becomes larger, as the result of their instruction, that
influence is bound to become still greater. With the diffusion of a
knowledge of scientific principles new applications of science to
practice will follow, and these in their turn will react upon the
instruction in the schools of science. The ultimate effect of all this
will be a still clearer recognition by the community that the permanence
and eventual success of our manufacturing industries depends upon the
intelligent application of science.

We are thus able to perceive how Roscoe’s action in helping on the
development of Owens College on modern lines and in raising it eventually
to the status of a university has reacted, and is bound still further
to react, upon the intellectual and material welfare of this country.
It was the great success of the Manchester College as a centre for the
diffusion of knowledge in its own district that incited other towns
to seek to emulate its example, and when Owens College sought for the
position as a university to which she was entitled, the same spirit of
emulation quickened the efforts of her friendly rivals to make themselves
not less worthy of such a dignity.

Of course it is not claimed for Roscoe that he actually initiated this
remarkable movement—a movement which must be regarded as one of the most
significant features of our times; he shares the credit with others. But
he certainly was one of the mainsprings of it. It may be said the time
was ripe for the step. Nevertheless, it is due to him to affirm that
he was one of the earliest to perceive that fact, and to take occasion
boldly by the hand. If he cannot justly be said to have actually started
the action, he was at least one of its most powerful prime movers.




CHAPTER VI

ROSCOE AS A TEACHER


Some years before Owens College attained to the position of a university,
several attempts were made to induce Roscoe to sever his connection
with it. In 1870 he was offered the lectureship on Chemistry at St.
Bartholomew’s Hospital in succession to Dr. Matthiessen.

The following letter under date October 14, 1870, refers to this
circumstance:

    …

    I have just refused to go to London again! They wanted me at
    St. Bartholomew’s.

    Miller is to be succeeded by ⸺ ⸺, and it appears that this
    gentleman has made a compromise with the New School, and is
    to adopt O = 12! Is not this rich? Originality at King’s was
    always at a discount, but then Orthodoxy reigns supreme, and
    this is the “Wahre Jakob,” as they say in German!

    Lockyer is down here visiting Stewart, and I had a physical
    and astronomical party here last night (my wife being away),
    at which a large number of interesting new observations on the
    heavenly bodies and on science in general were made, which did
    not conclude until the small hours.

    I cannot buckle to the new book—but I have arranged the order
    of things to my tolerable satisfaction. Whether it will ever
    see the daylight remains a mystery.…

Two years later he was invited to become a candidate for the vacant chair
of Chemistry at Oxford, with the promise of a fellowship if elected.
That he might be Brodie’s successor was, he says, a tempting suggestion,
but on consideration he felt he had a wider scope, and the possibility of
greater usefulness in building up the chemical school of Owens College—a
decision which he had the satisfaction of knowing met with the warm
approval of Huxley and other friends.

Roscoe’s method of working his department was wholly modelled on that of
Bunsen, as those of his pupils who subsequently repaired to Heidelberg
could testify. _A bove majori discit arare minor._ He gave his lectures
at the beginning of the working day, after which, and whilst the
laboratory men were settling to work, he would retire to his sitting-room
to glance at his correspondence. He would then go round to each in turn,
see what had been done since the previous visit, and give such directions
and advice as were necessary. Although the students worked independently,
and were at different stages of progress, he knew precisely how each was
occupied. With the men engaged on research work, or with preparations,
or on any matter out of the usual routine, he would frequently spend a
considerable amount of time. He always seemed to be as much interested
in the work as the workers themselves, and was unaffectedly pleased
with a good analytical result, a well-constructed apparatus, or a neat
preparation. His boyish love of manipulation, simply as such, remained
with him to the end, and he somehow managed to convey something of his
own feeling of delight in handling apparatus to those he taught. In this
lay the secret of his power and success as the director of a laboratory.
Although his students never forgot that he was the professor—he was
always “Doctor” Roscoe to them—they realized that he was quite on an
approachable plane, and a bond of sympathy and of mutual understanding
was quickly established which strengthened into friendship and esteem.

As a teacher, tolerant of the imperfection of human nature in youth, he
might pardon stupidity or condone carelessness, but he had no patience
with anything that savoured of pretension or deceit. Nothing angered
him more than to find that an analytical result had been “trimmed” or
“cooked.” He once summarily expelled a young man from his laboratory who,
under pretence of making a re-determination of an atomic weight, was
caught hatching out a series of wholly fictitious numbers. And he was
amazed at the mentality of a minister of religion who failed to perceive
the heinousness of such a crime, the fact being the good easy man thought
the procedure was on a par with any other mathematical exercise, and
therefore liable to error. That young man, it may be added, in after
years came to a violent end, for he was lynched for horse-stealing; the
descent to Avernus, as Roscoe would point out, is easy and inevitable
to one of the moral obliquity that can juggle with the sanctity of
experimental figures.

The ingenuous youth of Owens in the writer’s time were not a particularly
lamb-like lot, and occasional _émeutes_ were not unknown, but
disturbances in Roscoe’s class-room were absolutely unheard of. Indeed,
such was his personal ascendancy that at times his assistance was
invoked to quell an uproar in a neighbouring territory. As he stepped
into the room and began, “Now, boys, etc.,” he would be received with a
round of cheers, and order would once more reign in Warsaw. A word of
expostulation from him would suffice to ensure it.

Of course, as the number of his pupils increased, and the laboratories
became larger and more numerous, it became impossible to give so
great a share of individual attention, and much had to be delegated
to demonstrators, for the most part chosen from among senior students
who were preparing for an academic career, and who had themselves been
trained by him. At the same time he was quite alive to the value of “new
blood,” and any promising young man who had shown aptitude for teaching
or ability in research was sympathetically considered on the occasion of
a vacancy.

He next visited his private laboratory to consult with his assistants,
and to learn how their work was progressing. As his engagements
multiplied, and the calls upon his time increased, he gradually ceased
to take any active part in the operations when assured of the competence
of those to whom he had entrusted the execution of his plan of research.
Indeed, he allowed his chosen helpers considerable latitude, if, as
usually happened, they were genuinely interested in their work. He had
a strong belief in the wisdom of giving the ’prentice hand “his head,”
as the surest way of strengthening any latent faculty for original
inquiry he might possess. He had himself been trained in this way, and he
employed the same methods in turn.

Roscoe, like Bunsen, set no very great value on lecture-room teaching,
although he recognized that with the majority of students no other system
is practicable. It no doubt serves to afford an _aperçu_ of the subject,
which is what the average attendant at lectures presumably wants. At
the same time he spared no pains to make his lectures interesting, and
they were always admirably illustrated by experiments. Luckily he had in
his _famulus_ Heywood, a remarkably able lecture-assistant, a skilful
glass-blower, and a good mechanician, with a talent for devising striking
and original illustrations. Roscoe had a good voice, clear enunciation,
and a pleasant, easy mode of delivery, but he had none of the arts of
the orator—nothing of the fiery, impulsive manner of his contemporary,
Hofmann, or the command of polished speech that characterized Kekulé. In
the lecture-room his language was simple and direct; he was an excellent
expositor, always lucid, occasionally humorous, and never dull.

Although organic chemistry at his most active period as an investigator
was experiencing an extraordinary development, and offering limitless
opportunities of discovery, its problems then, and, it may be added,
at no subsequent time, had more than an academic interest for him. The
only communication dealing with organic chemistry with which his name is
associated is a short note on the Spontaneous Polymerisation of Volatile
Hydrocarbons contributed to the Chemical Society in 1885.[4]

The paper had its origin in a chance observation brought to his notice
by a tar-distiller, who had noticed the formation, on standing, of a
white crystalline mass among the volatile hydrocarbons resulting from
the decomposition of phenolic substances at a red heat. The crystalline
substance was found to have a molecular formula C₁₀H₁₂, but its real
nature and the mode of its genesis were not established.

Organic chemistry was hardly taught at Heidelberg in Roscoe’s time,
and then only by subordinate professors and _privat-docenten_, mainly
to pharmacists. The effect of this training was seen in the subsequent
character of his teaching. The lectures on organic chemistry that he
was necessarily required to give at Owens College, with their limited
possibilities of experimental illustration, simply bored him. Happily he
found in Schorlemmer a colleague who was glad to relieve him of the duty.
Schorlemmer was not a fluent speaker, and although he wrote our language
with ease and accuracy, he never acquired familiarity with the mysteries
of its pronunciation. But he was an excellent teacher, remarkably
well-read, and had an astonishingly retentive memory, and his lectures
were thoroughly appreciated by the discerning student.

Roscoe continued to direct the Chemical Department of Owens College
until his election as Member of Parliament for the Southern Division of
Manchester in the autumn of 1885, when he resigned the Professorship of
Chemistry. On his retirement the Council recorded its strong sense of
the eminent services he had rendered to the College through a period of
thirty years, and its conviction that to his great attainments as a
man of science, his skill and success as a teacher and organizer, his
widespread reputation, and his high personal qualities, it was in great
measure due both that the College enjoyed so high a rank as a place of
education, and that its Chemistry Department in particular had long held
a position second to that of no other academic institution in the United
Kingdom.

Similar testimony was borne by his colleagues when placing his portrait
by Burgess in their Common Room, and by his pupils when offering another
portrait by Herkomer to Lady Roscoe. The address accompanying this latter
gift, and signed by upwards of two hundred old pupils, was as follows:

    _To Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, M.P., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.,
    etc., Emeritus Professor of Chemistry in the Owens College,
    Manchester, February 16, 1889._

    We, the undersigned students of the Owens College, who have
    had the privilege of being your pupils, desire at the close of
    your active work as a teacher to offer you some recognition of
    the value of the services you have rendered to your College
    during the time you have laboured as one of its professors. For
    upwards of thirty years you have had the control and direction
    of the chemical department of the Owens College. You leave
    it the best organized and best equipped school of chemistry
    in the kingdom, numbering its students by hundreds, and the
    acknowledged model of the many similar institutions which
    the success of your own school has called into existence. No
    place of chemical instruction in the country has exercised so
    profound an influence as that of which you have been the moving
    and directing force, and with which your name will always be
    connected. Its influence on the industrial welfare of the
    community is seen from the number of responsible positions held
    by your students in the district. Its influence on educational
    progress may be judged from the number of your pupils who hold
    important positions as teachers of chemistry. As a centre of
    chemical research you have made the Owens College known all
    over the world, and your books on chemical science form the
    standard works, not only in this country, but in many others.
    The genial and sympathetic interest which you always showed in
    the lives and work of your students is gratefully remembered by
    all of us, and it has bound us to you by a personal tie such as
    rarely unites a teacher and his students. Whilst we have viewed
    with regret the severance of your active connection with the
    institution for which you have done so much, both in moulding
    its academical organization and in consolidating its work, we
    trust you may long be spared to continue in the wider sphere
    of political and public life those efforts which have already
    contributed so largely to the intellectual advancement of the
    people of this country. We beg your acceptance of the portrait
    which accompanies this address as a token of our affectionate
    respect, and in grateful recollection of many kindly acts which
    have endeared you to us all.

In a short account which Roscoe compiled for private circulation, he
recorded, with pardonable pride, the rise and progress of the Chemical
Department of the Owens College during the thirty years he directed it;
and he indicated the leading principles which had guided him in its
development. He recalled the position of the College in 1857, when the
workers in the chemical laboratory were fifteen in number. It was only
very slowly realized that Science could be made an efficient instrument
of education, and that such an education was not only compatible
with, but was absolutely necessary for, a successful manufacturing
and industrial career. The fact that the stipend of the Professor of
Chemistry was fixed at one-half of that given to the other chairs showed
how the Governing Body at that time regarded the relative importance of
that subject, as compared with classics and mathematics.

From the outset he was firmly convinced that the great blot in English
industrial life was a singular want of appreciation of one of the
essential conditions of success, namely, a sound training in the
scientific principles which underlie all practice. The fact that the
intimate connection which ought to exist between science and practice
was more clearly recognized by our continental rivals, was bound in the
long run to tell against our own manufacturing industries. He then shows
how he had sought to establish a sound and thorough course of systematic
theoretical and practical instruction in chemistry to meet the gradual
recognition of this fact which he was certain would arise under the
stress of necessity. But, as he points out, the success of any such
scheme must ultimately depend upon its director.

    The personal and individual attention of the professor is the
    true secret of success; it is absolutely essential that he
    should know, and take an interest in, the work of every man in
    his laboratory, whether beginning or finishing his course.…
    It is in the laboratory, and there alone, that chemistry can
    be properly learnt, and it is by the peripatetic teaching of
    the professor and his demonstrators that the student benefits
    most. Laboratory teaching must inculcate method and accuracy;
    the student must be made to understand what he is doing and
    why he does it, and must gradually acquire the power of exact
    observation and of logical inference. All these faculties are
    exercised and developed by a properly organized and thorough
    course of qualitative chemical analysis, and no elementary
    course of practical scientific work is more useful, either in
    training the hand or the head.

    This, however, presupposes that an explanation of the theory
    accompanies the practice of qualitative analysis, and that the
    student attends a course of instruction in which the reactions
    and methods of separation are systematically explained and
    discussed, as well as a general course on theoretical chemistry.

    Having thus obtained a knowledge of the principles of the
    science, facility in manipulation, and reliance on his own
    powers of observation, the student should begin quantitative
    analytical work, in which he learns by degrees what scientific
    accuracy means, and how exact results are to be obtained by
    careful work. Constant personal supervision of the student
    is absolutely requisite, as everything depends on the care
    with which the various operations are carried on, working
    from recipes without superintendence being really valueless.
    One main object of this course is so to teach the pupil as to
    give him reliance on his own power of exact work; to inculcate
    habits of neatness and order; to make him aware of sources of
    error, and to teach him either to estimate their amount, or
    how, if possible, to obviate them.

On this firm foundation of a competent theoretical knowledge of inorganic
and organic chemistry, and of a thorough practical acquaintance with
analysis, can alone the proper and higher education of the chemist,
whether for purely scientific or for technical purposes, be based. It
was upon this view Roscoe consistently acted. He steadily set his face
against any practising of rough-and-ready works-methods until the student
had learnt to appreciate the exacter processes. It is only when he has
gained the capacity for judging as to the particular applicability of a
method that he should be permitted to compromise between efficiency and
speed. When confidence is based upon knowledge and practice, the special
circumstances of his position and his sense of responsibility, when
engaged in technical work, will enable him to determine rightly when such
compromise is justifiable.

As regards instruction in applied chemistry, Roscoe always held that the
application can only be properly learnt in the factory or works, just as
a trade cannot be taught in a school—unless, indeed, the school becomes a
shop. But there is no reason why the scientific principles and details of
the various industrial processes should not be brought to the knowledge
of the pupil who is intended afterwards to conduct such processes.
Provided a sound scientific basis is secured, such instruction, given by
a teacher who has had practical as well as theoretical experience, is of
great value to the technical student.

Thanks mainly to Roscoe’s example, these principles are nowadays among
the commonplaces of chemical instruction, and are adopted substantially
by all teachers of experience. That they commended themselves to lay
minds capable of appreciating and judging them, and that the practical
results of working the Owens College Chemical Department by means of
them proved satisfactory, was proved by the steady increase in the
number of Roscoe’s pupils, session after session, and by the variety of
responsible and important positions many of these pupils subsequently
filled. Another significant feature was the increasing public recognition
of the meaning and value of a sound chemical education as shown by the
growing willingness of parents and of young men themselves to devote
such an amount of time to their studies as would enable them to obtain
real benefit. He found in the earlier years of his experience that the
prevailing notion of the majority of manufacturers (though there were
notable exceptions) was that if the son stayed at College for six months
he could be “put up” to all the necessary information to enable him to
apply chemistry to his business.

    The fathers (he said) frequently used to come with a story of
    this kind: “I am a calico-printer, or a dyer, or a brewer,
    and I want you to teach my son chemistry so far, and only
    so far, as it is at once applicable to my trade,” and when
    informed that chemistry as a science must be taught before
    its applications could be understood, and that his son could
    not for two or three years at least begin to work upon the
    subjects directly bearing on his trade, he too often replied
    that if that were the system he could not afford time for his
    son to learn on this plan, and that if he could not be taught
    at once to test his drugs he should prefer to leave him in the
    works, where he and his father before him had made a great
    many commercial successes with no scientific knowledge, and
    where he saw no reason to doubt that his son would do the
    same. The change that has come over our manufacturers during
    the last five and twenty years [this was written in 1887] has
    been remarkable, and now all are, I believe, fully awake to
    the necessities of their position, and are most desirous of
    improving the scientific knowledge not only of themselves and
    their sons, but of their managers, foremen, and workpeople.
    That this is so may be proved by the fact that whereas formerly
    it was difficult to keep our students for more than one
    session, we now find our senior laboratory well stocked with
    men in their third, fourth, and even fifth years, working at
    advanced subjects and becoming “chemists” in the highest and
    best sense of the word.

When he laid down his office he could point to the fact that his
laboratories, spacious as they were thought to have been when first
erected, had been more than full during the previous half-dozen years. It
was calculated that upwards of two thousand men had passed through his
courses. Among them were many teachers, technologists, and professional
chemists occupying responsible and important positions. In the list of
the Dalton Chemical Scholars, and of the Berkeley Fellows, were to be
found names known in the literature of science for their scientific
investigations. Indeed, no similar place in the kingdom could show such a
record of contributions to chemical knowledge. Under Roscoe’s government
the Owens College Chemical Laboratory furnished, from first to last, two
hundred and thirty-five original communications, mainly to the _Journal
of the Chemical Society_, or the _Proceedings_ and _Transactions of the
Royal Society_.

The laboratories which Roscoe designed, and which are known under
his name, have long since proved inadequate to accommodate the
numbers which now flock to the Manchester School of Chemistry. After
Schorlemmer’s death it was found necessary to add to their number, and
the new Schorlemmer laboratories, of eighty-nine working benches, were
built for the special study of organic chemistry. These were in their
turn overcrowded, when Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the well-known American
multi-millionaire, who never forgets he was born on British soil,
presented the University with £10,000 to erect buildings, on condition
that they should be called the John Morley Laboratories, in honour of his
friend Viscount Morley of Blackburn, the eminent historian and statesman,
and now Chancellor of the Victoria University.

On October 4, 1909, Roscoe was requested to open formally the new
laboratories, when he remarked: “It was very gratifying to know that Mr.
Carnegie, who has spent millions of money on founding public libraries
all over the English-speaking countries, seemed to be turning his
attention to the foundation of laboratories which, in my opinion, was of
still greater consequence.” A characteristic remark which those who knew
the speaker would be quite prepared to hear.




CHAPTER VII

ROSCOE AS AN INVESTIGATOR


The character of Roscoe’s scientific work may also be said to have been
entirely moulded by his Heidelberg training, and Bunsen’s influence may
be traced through it to the last. So completely was this the case that
consciously or unconsciously he seemed never to contemplate attacking any
problem that would not have appealed to, or have been appreciated by,
Bunsen.

His first research was undoubtedly suggested by Bunsen. As already
stated, it resulted in the classical investigation on the laws
regulating photochemical action. It was already known that a mixture of
equal volumes of hydrogen and chlorine on exposure to light lost its
characteristic colour, and was converted into hydrochloric acid, readily
soluble in water; and Bunsen conceived the idea of making this reaction
the basis of a method of measuring the relative amount and activity of
those light-vibrations which are mainly concerned in effecting chemical
change. As a matter of fact the idea was not new, for, unknown to Bunsen,
it had already been adopted by Draper, of New York, who had, as he states
in his paper in the _Philosophical Magazine_ for December 1843:

    invented an instrument [based upon the same reaction] for
    measuring the chemical force of the tithonic rays, which are
    found at a maximum in the indigo space, and which from that
    point gradually fade away to each end of the spectrum.

It perhaps says little for the assiduity with which young Roscoe read
the original chemical literature of his time that he should only have
knowledge of Draper’s remarkable papers some thirteen years after they
were published in the English journals. But it is only due to him to say
the chemical students of University College in those far-off days had
fewer opportunities of access to original literature than they now enjoy.

Be this as it may, Roscoe’s discomfiture at being thus anticipated was of
no long duration.

    Do not (wrote Bunsen) let your discovery of Draper’s work
    disconcert you.… It appears to me that the value of an
    investigation is not to be measured by whether something is
    described in it for the first time, but rather by what means
    and methods a fact is proved beyond doubt or cavil, and in this
    respect I think that Draper has left plenty for us to do.

After many fruitless attempts they succeeded in constructing an apparatus
in which the defects of Draper’s “tithonometer” were obviated, and by
which not only accurate comparative determinations could be made, but
which enabled them to reduce the chemical action of light to absolute
measure. They showed by means of it that the amount of chemical action
produced by light from a constant source varied inversely as the
square of the distance. They studied more accurately the phenomena of
photochemical induction, discovered by Draper, the causes which determine
its occurrence, and the laws which regulate the chemical action of
light after the induction is completed. They proved that the absorption
of the chemical rays in passing through a medium varies directly as
the intensity of the light, and that the amount transmitted varies
proportionately with the density of the absorbing medium. It was found
that for a given amount of chemical action effected in the mixture of
chlorine and hydrogen an equivalent quantity of light is absorbed, and
that the coefficients of extinction of pure chlorine for chemical rays
from various sources of light are very different. They established a
general and absolute standard of comparison for the chemical action of
light, and sought to determine the quantitative relations of the chemical
action effected by direct and diffused sunlight, and to investigate
the laws which regulate the distribution on the earth’s surface of the
chemical activity emanating from the sun. They also measured the chemical
action of the constituent parts of the solar spectrum. The action on
the sensitive gas showed the existence of several maxima of chemical
intensity in the spectrum. The greatest action was observed between
the lines G in the indigo and H in the violet, whilst another maximum
was found to be near the line I in the ultra violet. Towards the least
refrangible end of the spectrum the action became imperceptible about the
line D in the orange, but at the other end of the spectrum the action was
found to extend as far as Stokes’s line U, or to a distance from the line
H greater than the total length of the ordinary visible spectrum.

By investigating the conditions under which it was possible to
prepare a photographic paper of uniform and constant sensitiveness,
and ascertaining the means by which the darkening of the paper on
insolation could be accurately compared with a standard tint, it was
found comparatively easy to construct an instrument capable of measuring
the chemical action of light effected at any point on the earth’s surface
by the total sunlight and diffuse daylight under the most widely varying
circumstances of climate and atmospheric condition.

This joint research, begun in 1855, occupied its authors until 1862.
Roscoe did the greater part of the experimental work, and after his
election to the professorship in Owens College in 1857 he spent his
long vacations in Heidelberg in continuing the inquiry. The results
were communicated in a series of memoirs to the Royal Society and are
published in the _Philosophical Transactions_.[5]

Subsequently he pursued the subject alone or in conjunction with others.
In a short paper published in 1863 he gave the results of a series of
measurements of the chemical brightness of various portions of the solar
disc made by means of standard photographic paper according to the method
described by Bunsen and himself in their last communication;[6] and in
1864 he described a method of meteorological registration of the chemical
action of total daylight based on a modification of that originally used
by Bunsen and himself. The account of this method was made the Bakerian
Lecture in 1865, and is published in the _Philosophical Transactions_ of
that year.[7]

In this paper he gives the results of consecutive observations on each
day for nearly a month at about midsummer, and compares the chemical
action of light at Manchester at the winter and summer solstices, and the
vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The wide variation in the chemical action
of light at different periods of the year was illustrated by the fact
that if the integral of that on the shortest day be taken as the unit,
that upon the equinox will be represented by 7, and that upon the longest
day by 25.

In 1866 he and Mr. Baxendell contributed a joint note to the Royal
Society on the relative chemical intensities of direct sunlight and
diffuse daylight at different altitudes of the sun. They showed from
observations made at Manchester and at Heidelberg that the ratio of the
chemical intensity of direct to diffuse sunlight for a given altitude at
different localities is not constant, but varies with the transparency
of the atmosphere, and that this ratio does not in the least correspond
with the value of visible intensity as estimated by the eye, the action
of the atmosphere being 17·4 times greater upon the chemical than on the
luminous rays when the sun’s altitude is about 25° and 26·4 times greater
when it is 12°.[8]

With a view to the introduction of the instrument into meteorology, and
as part of the routine work of an observatory, he caused a regular series
of measurements to be made during two years at the Kew Observatory,
under the direction of Dr. Balfour Stewart; and in order to gain further
knowledge of the variation in the chemical action of light in different
areas of the earth’s surface, he sent the writer in 1866 to Pará, on
the river Amazon, 1° 28´ south of the Equator. The selection of this
particular place arose from the circumstance that his cousin, now the
Right Hon. Charles Booth, was proceeding to the Brazils in connection
with the establishment of a new line of steamers, and it was arranged
that the writer should accompany him, in order that he might make
photometric observations _en route_, going and returning, and at the same
time make a series of determinations of the amount of carbon dioxide in
sea air, night and day, with a view of testing the truth of an allegation
by a French chemist, that it was subject to a diurnal variation,
depending upon the intensity of sunlight.

The special form of apparatus arranged for making photometric
observations at sea proved to be ill-adapted to the purpose. But even
if its performance had been good, the conditions under which it had to
be employed were incapable of furnishing valid results. Accordingly
the writer elected to remain at Pará in order to obtain the required
observations at that place, until such time as he could return by the
succeeding steamer. He was thus enabled to make a much more extensive set
of observations than was originally contemplated, and under conditions
which ensured trustworthy measurements.

The following letter, dated May 12, 1866, and received at Pará, refers to
these matters. The allusion to Agassiz arose from the circumstance that
the great naturalist was at the time engaged in work on the Amazons and
its tributaries under the auspices of the Emperor Dom Pedro.

Roscoe himself was busily engaged with his vanadium researches.

    Although I was disappointed to find that the _Augustine_
    returned without you, yet I think that you acted quite rightly
    in staying until the _Jerome_ returns, as you could not get any
    results whilst on board. I only hope that your health will have
    been good, and that you will have enjoyed your stay at Pará,
    and that when you return in August we may have to work out
    plenty of interesting results.

    I send per the _Jerome_ a second bottle of silver solution, and
    some more salted paper, as you may possibly be out of both. I
    also enclose two or three fixed strips, but _not calibrated_.
    These, in case you are out, may be used, _carefully preserved_
    and calibrated, on your return. They must be carefully marked
    before using and notice taken in the book of the marks on each
    strip when employed.

    …

    Your carbonic acid observations are _very_ interesting: you
    seem to have settled Lewy completely, and I hope you will get
    some more experiments made on your return voyage.

    Could you not manage to make several series of _daily_
    observations (photochemical) on your return voyage? It would
    not much matter if the surface was not perfectly horizontal
    always, and you could use your pendulum concern to steady the
    exposed paper to a certain extent. Perhaps your ship does not
    give you a sufficiently free horizon. However, you will do what
    is possible.

    Your meeting with Agassiz was very fortunate, and I was glad to
    hear that the other friends whom you found were likely to prove
    agreeable.

    We have not much news to send you. The book [“Lessons in
    Elementary Chemistry”] is not yet out. I have this day,
    however, corrected the last proofs of the Index, and I fully
    expect that it will be ready (and I hope a great number sold!)
    before you arrive here.

    My new assistant [Mr. Francis Jones] is a very careful and
    accurate worker. He has with great care determined the atomic
    weight of vanadium by the loss of weight of VO₃ in hydrogen,
    and curiously enough gets _exactly_ Berzelius’s number of
    68·5! This in two experiments on large quantities. We are now
    preparing pure chloride to try again whether we get 67·4 (your
    number), and we have got hold of some very queer reactions,
    which I can only understand either by the presence of another
    metal having the same (or nearly) atomic weight as Va, or else
    by the existence of an isomeric (solid) modification of the
    chloride. However, time, I hope, will show.

    My lecture on June 1st at the Royal Institution will, of
    course, be shorn of some of its interest as I cannot tell them
    how much chemical light there is in the tropics, but I hope to
    have enough to make an interesting hour, and have got some nice
    experiments to illustrate the opalescence of the atmosphere.

    My wife tells me to remind you to be so good as to bring her
    something tropical—some birds’ skins would do or anything you
    see or fancy. Only no monkeys, if you please, for me! I hate
    the animals.

    Your father will doubtless send you all the news of the times,
    as well as local information, and so I will only add that the
    Laboratory [rowing] crew were again beaten last week. The races
    were very good—better as regards equality than last year. The
    umpire, poor R⸺, got upset and nearly suffocated in the Irwell
    mud!

    Hoping to see you safe back at the end of July or beginning of
    August.

The day after this letter was written Roscoe received some of the
preliminary results of the photometric observations, so that he was
enabled to give his Royal Institution audience some idea of the amount
of chemical light in the tropics. He made this matter one of the chief
features of his lecture.

    I have only just time to send what you want over to Liverpool
    this afternoon, and to acknowledge your letter of April 14th
    with enclosures, which are all very welcome.

    …

    The diffused and direct sun experiments are very interesting.
    They differ _in toto_ from the Heidelberg results. Pray get
    some more at low elevations of the sun.

    I must now close … as the _Jerome_ sails early in the morning.

    P.S.—I hope you may be able to get _one_ cloudless day before
    you leave, as the clouds evidently much modify the result. It
    is almost a pity that you did not go out in the vacation for
    September and October, but it cannot be helped now.

    If you get a cloudless day begin early, take four or six sets
    of observations (one at noon, of course) until late in the
    evening, so as to get the _low_ elevations.

The Kew observations showed that the mean chemical intensity for hours
equidistant from noon is practically the same on the same day, and that
the daily maximum of chemical intensity corresponds with the maximum of
solar altitude. Measurements showing the daily rise and fall of chemical
intensity for each of the twenty-four months were obtained, as well as of
the biennial variation for the same period. It was pointed out that the
curve of yearly chemical intensity is not symmetrical about the vernal
and autumnal equinoxes. Thus for 100 chemically active rays falling at
the spring equinox at Kew, there fell at the autumnal equinox 167 rays,
the sun’s mean altitude being the same, the difference being probably due
to the greater atmospheric opalescence in the spring.

The Pará observations were interesting from the fact that they were the
first measurements of photometric intensity made within the tropics, and
that they served to dispel certain fallacies about photographic effects
in very hot climates at that time current. The observations showed that
the relation between the sun’s altitude and chemical intensity may be
represented by the equation:

                   C I _a_ = C I₀ + const. _a_,

where C I _a_ represents the chemical intensity at a given altitude _a_
in circular measure, C I₀ the chemical intensity at the altitude 0, and
const. _a_ a number to be calculated from the measurements. Comparisons
between the observations at Kew and at Pará on the same days in April
showed that the daily mean chemical intensity at the latter place was
from ten to fifty times greater than at Kew, the wide differences being
due to the enormous and rapid variations in intensity from hour to hour
which the chemically active rays experience in the tropics during the
rainy season of the year.[9]

The relation between the sun’s altitude and the chemical intensity of
daylight was more accurately determined by the writer from a long series
of observations made by Roscoe’s method under a cloudless sky near
Lisbon in the autumn of 1867. The fact was confirmed that the direct
sunlight is robbed of almost all its chemically active rays at altitudes
below 10°, and that although the chemical intensity for the same altitude
at different places and at different times of the year varies according
to the varying transparency of the atmosphere, yet the relation at
the same place between altitude and intensity is always represented
by a straight line. The differences in the observed actions for equal
altitudes, which may amount to more than 100 per cent. at different
places, and to nearly as much at the same place at different times of
the year, serve as exact measurements of the varying transparency of the
atmosphere. As illustrating the wide differences in the daily march of
chemical intensity at various places, it was found that, when light of
unit intensity acting for 24 hours is taken as 1,000, the value of the
mean chemical intensity at Kew is represented by the number 94·5, that at
Lisbon by 110, and that at Pará by 313·3.[10]

Roscoe’s hope that measurements of the chemical intensity of daylight
might become part of the regular work of meteorological observations has,
unfortunately, not been realized. Observations of the kind, no doubt,
consume much time, and if properly conducted require the whole service
of a skilled assistant. But considering the enormously important part
played by chemically active light in the economy of nature, and more
particularly in the phenomena of vegetable life, it cannot be doubted
that a sufficiently long-continued series of observations, systematically
carried out on a well-considered plan, at observatories distributed over
the earth’s surface, would afford most valuable information concerning
the facts of solar energy, and incidentally serve to elucidate many
important collateral questions. With the assistance of Mr. Horace Darwin,
Roscoe made attempts to devise an automatic arrangement which should
minimize the labour of observation, but in the absence of any certain
assurance that such an instrument would be utilized, the trials were
discontinued.[11]

It has been thought desirable, for the sake of continuity, to describe
Roscoe’s work on chemical photometry, arising out of his association with
Bunsen, so long as he continued to pursue that subject. A subsequent
paper will, however, be mentioned later.

We must now revert to his work when he returned from Germany.

On leaving Heidelberg to settle again in London, as already stated he
engaged Dittmar as research assistant, and they jointly studied, by
Bunsen’s methods, the absorption of hydrochloric acid and ammonia in
water,[12] proving that these gases do not obey Dalton and Henry’s law.

He next attacked, first with Dittmar’s and then with Schorlemmer’s
assistance, the nature of the aqueous solutions of the common volatile
acids of constant boiling-point, and showed that although the ratio of
acid to water is constant for a definite boiling-point under a particular
pressure, this does not necessarily indicate the existence of definite
hydrates. The composition of the hydrated acid on boiling is entirely
dependent on the pressure under which it is heated—a strong solution
losing acid, and a weak solution losing water until the residue in each
case acquires a constant composition, depending upon the pressure under
which it is boiled.[13]

In those days Gmelin’s “Handbuch” was the chief repository of chemical
knowledge—or the want of it—and many suggestions as to possible
profitable fields of inquiry were to be gleaned from its pages. One such
subject was perchloric acid and its compounds, concerning which but
little was then known beyond the composition of potassium perchlorate,
established by Stadion as far back as 1816. Roscoe, with Schorlemmer’s
assistance, made a fairly complete investigation of perchloric acid and
its hydrates, and a number of its salts.[14]

He narrowly escaped a serious accident when working with ethyl
perchlorate, first prepared in 1840 by the American chemists Hare and
Boye, and known to be extremely unstable. He was engaged in filtering a
few cubic centimetres of the liquid into a test-tube, when the compound
exploded with great violence, and a deep hole was bored into the base
of the filter-stand, and many hundreds of fragments of glass were driven
into his hand. That filter-stand was long an object of interest to
visitors in the private laboratory of the old Owens College.[15]

The writer subsequently prepared thallium perchlorate for him in a pure
state, determined its composition, and established its isomorphism with
the alkaline perchlorates, the crystallographic characters of which had
been previously ascertained by Kopp.[16]

But Roscoe’s most important contribution to inorganic chemistry was
unquestionably his research upon vanadium and its compounds, which
occupied him for the greater part of five years. About 1865 his attention
was drawn to the occurrence of vanadium in some of the copper-bearing
beds of the Lower Keuper Sandstone of the Trias which were then being
worked at Alderley Edge and Mottram St. Andrews in Cheshire. He
obtained possession of a large quantity of a lime precipitate, which
was found to contain about 2 per cent. of vanadic acid. It was a most
unpromising material, but eventually a method was worked out by which
the vanadium was extracted as an ammonium vanadate: this on heating
yielded vanadic acid. Great difficulty was met with in freeing the
vanadic acid from accompanying phosphoric acid. Even small quantities of
phosphoric acid cause the vanadic acid after fusion to solidify as a
pitch-like amorphous mass. It was the writer’s privilege to assist in
the early stages of this investigation, and it fell to his lot to carry
out the various experiments which eventually served to establish the
composition of the oxides of vanadium, the true nature of its volatile
chloride, the existence of hitherto unknown oxychlorides, and of the
mononitride which Berzelius had regarded as the metal, and lastly to
fix its real atomic weight and to show that it was approximately 16
below that assumed by Berzelius. It was only very gradually that the
true chemical relationships of vanadium revealed themselves. For a time
the indications were contradictory and perplexing. The first clue was
given by Rammelsberg’s observation that vanadinite is isomorphous with
pyromorphite and mimetesite—analogously constituted minerals containing
phosphorus and arsenic. The next significant fact to be discovered
was that by the action of a reducing agent it was possible to obtain
a solution of a vanadium oxide which on reoxidation to vanadic acid
appeared to require as much oxygen as Berzelius’s vanadium, regarded
as metal, would have needed. When it was discovered that the volatile
chloride which Berzelius had considered was a trichloride and free from
oxygen, in reality contained oxygen, and was analogous in constitution
to phosphoryl chloride, the whole matter was rapidly cleared up, and
the chemical affinities of vanadium to phosphorus, arsenic, and the
other members of the trivalent group were established. This, of course,
necessitated altering the formulæ of the vanadium compounds hitherto
described.

At the close of the College Session 1866-1867, Roscoe took away with him
the laboratory journals containing the results of the inquiry as far as
it had progressed, and worked at them at Roddam Hall, near Alnwick, which
he had taken for the Long Vacation.

The following letters have reference to this matter:

                                              RODDAM, NEAR ALNWICK,
                                                 _August 26, 1867_.

    I write a line to say that I hope you are getting on well and
    that I shall soon hear from you.… I want you very much to stay
    with me till April to settle the vanadium and light matters
    and help me in London with my lectures.… I have at last found
    out about vanadium. The acid is V₂O₅ like P₂O₅. The chloride
    VOCl₃ like POCl₃ and the solid chlorides VOCl₂, VOCl, etc.
    This explains the isomorphism of the vanadate of lead and the
    corresponding phosphate and lots of other points. It becomes
    very interesting now.

    Pray write a line and say whether you will stay till April, and
    when you will be back.

The first paragraph in the next letter alludes to the circumstance that
the present writer had just returned from Lisbon, where he had carried
out the photometric measurements already referred to.

                                         RODDAM HALL, NEAR ALNWICK,
                                              _September 12, 1867_.

    I was very glad to hear by your note received to-day of your
    safe arrival and the success of your observations.… You did
    quite right in returning home rather than wait indefinitely for
    the _Jerome_. The working out of your Pará and of the Lisbon
    direct and diffuse-light experiments will take some time and
    labour, but I believe the results will repay the trouble.…

    I have been up to the Dundee [British Association] meeting for
    a few days, but I now, in all probability, shall stop here, so
    that I can at once answer your letter.

    Please ask Joseph [Heywood] to send me per book-post _Pogg.
    Ann._, vol. 98, in which volume is Rammelsberg’s paper on the
    isomorphism of vanadates and phosphates. There is no doubt in
    my mind that vanadic acid is V₂O₅, and it will be _exceedingly_
    interesting to work out the vanadates which must all be
    explained as phosphates. The ordinary white NH₃ salt is NH₄VO₃
    (like NaPO₃) and is a meta-vanadate. The bi-vanadates can also
    be explained, but all need re-preparation and analysis. Did I
    tell you that we have now got

    V₂O₅, V₂O₄, V₂O₃, V₂O₂ (I wish we had V also!)
    V₂O₂Cl₆, V₂O₂Cl₄, V₂O₂Cl₂, and V₂O₂Cl₆, or VOCl₃, VOCl₂, VOCl

    At St. Andrews I saw Professor Heddle; he has a crystal half
    apatite and half vanadinite, and he threw out the suggestion
    long ago that vanadic acid is V₂O₅.… I hope you will write soon
    and let me hear what you have to say about my plan. I will then
    write what I think of your ideas.

       *       *       *       *       *

                                                            RODDAM,
                                     _Tuesday, September 17, 1867_.

    I have now edited the atomic weight determinations by
    oxidation, and also the various oxides of vanadium. I have
    now to do the chlorides. Many points still remain requiring
    clearing up.

        (1) As regards the slow oxidation of the V₂O₃
        (Berzelius’s suboxide); a sample made on November
        13, 1866, weighing 0·7507, weighed on June 12, 1867,
        0·8733. This corresponds to an oxide higher than V₂O₄
        (V = 51·4). Now I want this oxide and tube drying under
        the air-pump and weighing carefully and keeping for
        further examination (the weight of tube and oxide was
        3·6066 on June 12th last).

        (2) When a neutral solution of V₂O₂ in SO₄H₂, got by
        zinc reduction, and neutralized by excess of zinc, is
        exposed to a current of air, it goes brown, and this
        brown colour does not alter. Analysed by permanganate
        it would seem to contain V₂O₄. I want this confirming.

        (3) Try to get sight of a copy of Greg and Lettsom’s
        “British Mineralogy” (you can go and call on Mr. Robt.
        P. Greg, Greg Bros., Chancery Lane, and ask him to lend
        you the book for me). Under “Vanadinite” you will see
        some mention of Heddle and his observations. I find
        nothing about him in Rammelsberg’s paper.

        (4) Has V₂O₄ been prepared by heating the suboxide V₂O₃
        in the air at low temperatures? Is it green?

    The thing above all others necessary for us now is to get the
    _metal_. We must set about this at the beginning of the session.

    If you have time before you go away to clear up these four
    preliminary points I shall be glad.

       *       *       *       *       *

                                                            RODDAM,
                                              _September 26, 1867_.

    The first thing to do when we begin will be to try to get the
    metal V = 51·3 by forming the ammonio-chloride and reducing
    the nitride in ammonia.… If we only can get 0·5 of metal the
    question of atomic weight is settled beyond dispute.

    I have now collated all the experiments: (1) On the oxides
    of vanadium; (2) on the determination of atomic weight
    by reduction of V₂O₅ to V₂O₃; (3) on the oxychlorides
    and determination of atomic weight from the chlorine
    determinations. These latter require re-calculation as I do not
    know how much should be allowed for as impurity in the silver.
    Still, I see already that this alteration can be but very
    slight, and the numbers agree very well, viz. (1) mean at. wt.
    from reduction expts. 51·362 (probable error 0·068); (2) mean
    of 9 volumetric chlorine determinations of the oxytrichloride
    61·28; (3) mean of 8 weight determinations of chlorine 61·21,
    so that as far as I yet see the true atomic weight is 51·30.

    I am obliged by your extract from Greg and Lettsom. When in St.
    Andrews I saw Professor Heddle, and he promised to send me some
    crystallized specimens of vanadinite and pyromorphite existing
    in one crystal.

    I think I have got quite matter enough for one paper, but I
    should like to have the metal if only in sufficient quantity to
    oxidize up to V₂O₅ and determine the increase. Everything can
    be very nicely used, and all fits in well; but, of course, such
    a first paper must in some points be imperfect.

    I think it is perhaps best that ⸺ should give the lectures, as
    I am sure to want you in London several Saturdays—otherwise I
    should have been very glad for you to have taken the course.

    You will be back on Saturday, October 5th, I suppose. We must
    re-calculate all the analyses with the exact atomic weight.
    This can soon be done, and I should like to get this first
    part off my hands before long.

    I hope you are enjoying this splendid autumn weather.

    …

    As regards the blue oxide got by gradual oxidation of V₂O₃
    (suboxide) we have analyses proving it to be V₂O₄—by oxidation.
    It is very possible that the further increase in weight is due
    to the hydration of this oxide. We must wait until the green
    substance remains constant, and we must then determine the
    water and the V₂O₅.

Roscoe’s first memoir on the subject was read to the Royal Society on
December 19, 1867, and was made the Bakerian Lecture of that session.[17]
On February 14, 1868, he gave a Friday evening discourse at the Royal
Institution “On Vanadium, one of the Trivalent Groups of Elements,”
when the writer acted as his lecture-assistant. Having arranged the
experimental illustrations, the assistant spent a spare half-hour in
wandering through the old laboratories in the cellars of the Institution,
sacred to the genius and labours of Davy and Faraday. In looking over
some specimens in a cupboard he came upon a small bottle containing
ammonium vanadate, labelled “Sent to me by Berzelius. 1831,” and on it
Faraday’s well-known monogram by way of signature. A portion of the
substance was afterwards placed at Roscoe’s disposal by the late Sir
Edward Frankland, at the time Fullerian Professor of Chemistry. On
examination it was found to contain considerable quantities of phosphoric
acid, thus serving to indicate the probable cause of the discrepancy
between the numbers obtained by Berzelius and Roscoe in the course of the
atomic weight determinations. It had been observed that the presence of
even traces of phosphorus prevents the complete reduction in hydrogen of
the vanadium pentoxide to vanadous oxide.

Some little time after the appearance of the first memoir on vanadium,
the writer proceeded to Heidelberg to study under Bunsen, to whom at that
time practically all Roscoe’s senior students who were in a position to
go to Germany were sent. It had been reported in a French periodical on
popular science that Roscoe had been awarded the Copley medal for his
work on vanadium, and of course his former assistant had hastened to
congratulate him on that event.

                                   CAMFIELD PLACE, HATFIELD, HERTS,
                                              _September 13, 1868_.

    In the first place let me thank you for your letter and
    congratulations upon the great French discovery! Many of these
    Parisian wonders have after all turned out myths—and this last
    is, I believe, no exception—the expression “Medaille de Copley”
    is, so far as I am aware, the French (and bad French too!) for
    the “Bakerian Lecture.” I am, however, none the less obliged
    to you for your good wishes on this occasion, and for all the
    valuable help which in many ways you gave me.

    …

    Thanks for your news of my dear friend. I have been very remiss
    in not writing to him. Tell him so, please; and ask him to send
    me the first proof-sheets of his “Filtration” paper for me to
    translate; unless, indeed, you do it yourself, as I am sure you
    can perfectly well. Give B[unsen] my kindest regards, and say
    that I will write to him soon.

Part II of “Researches on Vanadium,” dealing with the chlorides VCl₄,
VCl₃, and VCl₂, and metallic vanadium, which he obtained by heating the
dichloride in hydrogen, was presented to the Royal Society on June 16,
1869,[18] and his last memoir, treating of the bromides, and of certain
of the metallic vanadates, including vanadinite which he prepared
artificially, on April 7, 1870.[19]

With the mention of a short communication, “On Two New Vanadium
Minerals,” to the _Proceedings of the Royal Society_ for 1876,[20]
and of a lecture on “Recent Discoveries about Vanadium” at the Royal
Institution, the foregoing statement includes all Roscoe’s published
contributions to the history of vanadium. As regards original work, he
handed over the subject to his senior students, and under his inspiration
and direction a considerable number of communications from the Owens
College Laboratory were made to the Chemical Society from Crow (1876),
Bedson (1876), H. Baker (1878), Kay (1880), Brierley (1886), Hall (1887),
and published in the _Transactions of the Chemical Society_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Other noteworthy contributions by Roscoe to inorganic chemistry are his
study of tungsten compounds, in which he describes for the first time the
existence of the pentachloride WCl₅ and the corresponding pentabromide
WBr₅,[21] and his discovery of uranium pentachloride, UCl₅.[22]

These compounds are of considerable theoretical interest on account of
their “anomalous” character. He also discovered columbium trichloride,
CbCl₃, which he found to have the remarkable property of decomposing
carbon dioxide when heated in that gas with the formation of columbium
oxychloride, CbOCl₃, and carbon monoxide—a reaction not exhibited by
any other metallic chloride (_Chem. Soc. Abstracts_, 1878, 272), and he
determined the vapour densities of the chlorides of lead and thallium
which he showed to be normal.[23]

An examination of the earth metals contained in samarskite proved
that the rare earth-metal announced by Delafontaine under the name of
“philippium” was a mixture of yttrium and terbium.[24]

The spark spectrum of terbium was at the same time mapped by him and
Schuster. An examination of a specimen of oxide which ought to contain
“philippium” in large quantities if that chemical element existed showed
no conclusive evidence of any other metals than yttrium or terbium.[25]

In 1882 he sent to the French Academy a note on a re-determination of
the atomic weight of carbon by the method of Dumas and Stas, using Cape
diamonds, and obtained the value 12·002 (O = 16) as the mean of six
experiments (_Chem. Soc. Abstracts_, 1882, 724). He also showed, with
the assistance of Schuster, that the spectrum of the carbon dioxide
furnished by the South African diamond was identical with that furnished
by other forms of carbon.

So long as he remained in Manchester Roscoe was in the habit of
making occasional contributions to the meetings of the Literary
and Philosophical Society on general or local interest. Among
these communications were papers on arsenic-eating in Styria; on a
crystallizable carbon compound in the Alais meteorite; on the amount of
carbonic acid in Manchester air; on the corrosion of leaden hot-water
cisterns; Dalton’s first table of Atomic Weights, etc.—all of which are
printed in the _Proceedings_ or _Memoirs_ of the Society.

Roscoe was largely instrumental in making spectrum analysis first known
to British men of science and the British public generally. Almost
immediately after the publication of Bunsen and Kirchhoff’s classical
paper in _Poggendorff’s Annalen_, he translated it for the _Philosophical
Magazine_. He also gave many public lectures on the subject, beginning
with that at the Royal Institution on March 1, 1861—one of the most
successful of the many he delivered there. Indeed, there were few of our
larger towns in which he was not invited at one time or other during the
sixties and early seventies to lecture on that astonishing development
of nineteenth-century science. These lectures involved no inconsiderable
effort. They necessitated much bulky and fragile apparatus difficult
to transport. Some of the illustrations could only be shown to a large
audience by means of the electric lantern, and this, in those days,
needed the provision of a large battery of Groves’s cells; electricity
“laid-on” by a public authority was not then, as now, almost everywhere
available.

One of these courses of six lectures given to the Society of Apothecaries
of London in 1868 was subsequently published, with additions, in an
admirably illustrated volume which had a considerable measure of
success—a second edition, still more largely augmented owing to the
extraordinary rapidity with which knowledge on celestial chemistry
increased, being called for within a year. In the preparation of a third
and fourth edition he was assisted by his friend Dr. Schuster. As the
successive editions show, the rate at which literature accumulated round
the subject was altogether unprecedented in the history of scientific
discovery.

Roscoe made an attempt to apply the spectroscope to the Bessemer process
of steel manufacture, and for this purpose caused a long series of
observations to be made, first at Brown’s Atlas works in Sheffield,
and then at the Crewe works of the L. & N.W. Railway Company, when a
considerable amount of information concerning the peculiarities of the
spectrum of the converter-flame was gained, mainly by the observations of
Dr. W. Marshall Watts, a former student and one of his assistants, who
took over the subsequent conduct of the inquiry.

Considering his interest in the subject, comparatively little original
work on spectroscopy was published by Roscoe.

The following is a list of the inquiries with which he was concerned:

    “On the Effect of Increased Temperature upon the Nature of
    the Light Emitted by the Vapour of Certain Metals on Metallic
    Compounds.” By H. E. Roscoe and R. B. Clifton. _Manchester
    Phil. Soc. Proc._ II. (1860-1862), pp. 227-230.

    “Note on the Absorption-spectra of Potassium and Sodium at Low
    Temperatures.” By H. E. Roscoe and A. Schuster. _Roy. Soc.
    Proc._ XXII. (1874), pp. 362-364.

    “On the Absorption-spectra of Bromine and Iodine Monochloride.”
    By H. E. Roscoe and T. E. Thorpe. _Phil. Trans._ CLXVII.
    (1878), pp. 207-212.

    “Note on the Identity of the Spectra Obtained from the
    Different Allotropic Forms of Carbon.” By H. E. Roscoe and A.
    Schuster. _Manchester Lit. Phil. Soc. Proc._ XIX. (1880), pp.
    46-49.

    “The Spectrum of Terbium.” By H. E. Roscoe and A. Schuster.
    _Chem. Soc. Jour._ XLI. (1882), pp. 283-287.

The only attempt he was able to make to contribute to our knowledge of
the chemistry of the sun by spectroscopic observations had an unlucky
ending. He formed one of the members of the Government expedition sent
to Sicily to observe the total solar eclipse of December 22, 1870. The
following letters refer to this subject:

                                         VICTORIA PARK, MANCHESTER,
                                                _November 2, 1870_.

    Lockyer has asked me to go with him in the American Eclipse
    Expedition. I have a good mind to do so, but I have written
    to say that I was not sure that I could make the observations
    alone (!), and that it would be very desirable that you should
    go too! So we shall see what comes of it.

    I am unfortunately laid up with an attack of gout, which quite
    disables me and reduces me to the level of the beasts that
    perish. However, I hope soon to be all right again.

    I will write to Francis about the Lisbon paper, which ought
    certainly to be out.…

    Did Schorlemmer write to you about your attacking the Germans
    for attacking the French? He was quite wild, and came up to me
    in such a state of excitement that I could scarcely understand
    what he said. However, under the influence of cigars and a
    bottle of sherry he cooled down again and perhaps has buried
    his resentment.

    Huxley comes for the first of the Science Lectures on Friday.

    I am delighted to hear of your numbers of evening students, and
    was much pleased by your Introductory. I have no doubt that the
    laboratory will fill too. You must have patience.

       *       *       *       *       *

                                         OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER,
                                               _November 19, 1870_.

    _Of course_ you come to Sicily.… Lockyer thinks of going on
    December 8th. Perhaps I may go a day earlier—with you if you
    can come—and spend twenty-four hours in Heidelberg.

    I send box, stand, papers, and all I can find—except insolation
    affairs which cannot yet be got out of H⸺’s hands. He shall
    have no peace till they are ready, and they shall then be
    sent at once to you. _You_ will be responsible for the whole
    apparatus being in order. Look them over carefully.… You know
    what is wanted.

Unfortunately H.M.S. _Psyche_, the vessel conveying the party from
Naples, was wrecked off Aci Reale, about a couple of miles to the north
of the classic Cyclops rocks, and under the shadow of Etna, by striking a
submerged and uncharted rock. The ship was badly holed, and rapidly began
to fill, but fortunately the weather was fine and the sea calm, and all
were got safely on shore. The cliffs were scarcely 200 yards away, but
the landing was difficult, the jagged reefs of lava seeming to afford no
sure footing. Eventually all the instrumental equipment was also landed,
in a more or less damaged condition, but much of the personal baggage
was lost. A letter written by one of the members of the expedition which
found its way into a Manchester newspaper thus describes the event:

    We formed ourselves into a line to pass the things along the
    rocks to the prominence which we had mounted.… Everybody
    worked with a will, and laboured like galley-slaves. The ship
    had now settled down considerably; the water was up to her
    quarter, and the boats pushed off in the expectation that she
    would roll off the reef. By this time we had almost stripped
    the ship of everything easily movable, and we prepared to get
    it to a secure place. The nearest point habitable was Catania,
    seven miles to the south, and we got the boats ready to take
    ourselves and our things thither.… Roscoe assumed command of
    our expedition. Everybody seemed to look to him instinctively.
    I shall never forget the sight of him, standing, with his
    legs apart to steady himself on a narrow piece of the lava
    rock, with his arm stretched out, giving his orders with the
    authority of one who seemed born to command. As the gig was
    about to push off I saw him look round, and when he saw me he
    motioned for me to get into it.… In a few hours the remainder
    of the party arrived, and shortly afterwards the luggage and
    apparatus.

It was arranged that Roscoe, assisted by the late Sir George Darwin and
Mr. Bowen of Harrow School, should make observations on the spectrum
of the corona from a position on Mount Etna as high as the snow would
permit. On the day before that of the eclipse the party had toiled up
more than 5,000 feet of the mountain with their instruments strapped
on the backs of half a dozen mules, to a deserted hut on the side of
the volcano. The night was spent in a storm of rain and snow, and next
morning, in a piercing wind, the instruments were put together with
benumbed fingers. As the sun was gradually covered, the sky became
clouded over and the upper part of Etna was completely enveloped in fog,
and during the minute of totality a violent hailstorm broke over the
party, rendering all observations impossible.

A number of measurements of the chemical intensity of daylight during the
progress of the eclipse were, however, made by the writer at Catania,
some little distance away, by the method described by Roscoe in the
Bakerian Lecture for 1865. These showed that the diminution in the total
chemical intensity of the sun’s light during an eclipse is directly
proportional to the magnitude of the obscuration of the solar disc.[26]

This matter is referred to in the following letter.

                                                   _June 11, 1871._

    The results are very interesting, and you have worked them out
    in an _admirable_ manner. I had no idea that so much could be
    made out.

    I am writing at once to Airy and Lockyer to ask them whether
    we may not send the paper to the Royal Society (last meeting
    on _Thursday next_) so as to have it in series with our other
    papers.

    I have just heard from Wild, the director of all the Russian
    observatories, that he is anxious to adopt the plan over all
    the Russias, and wants an automatic arrangement. So I am going
    in for it and hope to get a machine made before long. It is
    really too important to be delayed.

    You deserve great credit for your labours, and by rights the
    paper should be _yours alone_, but perhaps we [had] better keep
    together. We can do the automatic affair also together if you
    like.

The automatic arrangement alluded to has already been mentioned. It was
not proceeded with.




CHAPTER VIII

ROSCOE AND CHEMICAL LITERATURE


Roscoe’s services to chemistry are to be measured as much by his
contributions to its educational literature as by his efforts to enlarge
its boundaries by original inquiry. For there can be no question that his
various text-books, ranging from the most elementary “first-steps” and
primers, through different grades to the most comprehensive of treatises,
have proved of the greatest service to the teacher, and have exercised a
profound influence in the diffusion of chemical knowledge in this country
and abroad.

His “Lessons in Elementary Chemistry,” one of the earliest of Macmillan’s
series of class text-books, was first published in 1866, the fair copy
for the press being written out with characteristic neatness by his
wife. Its appearance so soon after the remarkable report of the Duke of
Devonshire’s Commission which had awakened widespread attention to the
almost universal neglect of all science teaching in our public schools
was most timely. The book went through edition after edition, and
despite the competition of dozens of similar works is still a favourite
class-book.

At the suggestion of his friend Lothar Meyer it was translated into
German by Schorlemmer, and published by Vieweg & Son, and has been
largely used in German schools and colleges. Translations have also
appeared in Russian, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Swedish, in modern
Greek, Japanese, and in one of the Indian vernaculars, Urdu. Concerning
this last translation, Roscoe used to tell an amusing story. The Urdu
work was lithographed, not printed, the page being nearly twice the
size of that of the English original, which was a small octavo. The
illustrations were also proportionately magnified, including that showing
the length of a decimetre and its sub-divisions of centimetres and
millimetres!

Still more successful, as regards its sale, was his “Chemistry Primer,”
published in 1870, and intended to serve as the first step in chemistry
in schools. It also was widely translated, editions having appeared
in Icelandic, Polish, German, Italian, Japanese, Bengali, Turkish,
Malayalam, and Tamil.

He also published two text-books on “Inorganic Chemistry,” one for
beginners, in conjunction with Dr. Lunt; and a larger one for advanced
students, in association with Dr. Harden, each of which has reached a
second edition.

A far more ambitious undertaking was the preparation and publication
of the large “Treatise on Chemistry,” in the writing of which he had
the invaluable co-operation of his colleague Schorlemmer. The first
volume appeared in 1877. It is so well known that no description of it
is necessary. It is an eminently readable work, admirably printed and
beautifully illustrated. Indeed, in style and appearance it is hardly
approached by anything of the kind in the language. It was translated
into German by Schorlemmer, and published by Vieweg & Son, and has now
largely replaced the time-honoured Graham-Otto as a text-book in German
colleges and technical schools. Unfortunately, owing to Schorlemmer’s
death in 1892, the organic section in the English edition was never
finished. It has, however, been completed in the German edition under the
direction of the late Professor Brühl of Heidelberg—a circumstance which
would seem to throw some light on the comparative position of organic
chemistry in this country and in Germany. It ought, however, to be stated
that if the whole of the organic section were compiled with the same
attention to historical detail, and the same fullness of information that
characterizes the inorganic portion, the work would become practically
unsaleable on account of its size. At the time the treatise was planned
the extraordinary expansion of organic chemistry which has occurred
during the past forty years could hardly have been anticipated. It may
be, as old Thomas Fuller wrote, that “learning hath gained most by those
books by which the printers have lost.” But philanthropy is not the first
business of publishers.

The inorganic section of the English work has passed through several
editions, and was thoroughly revised and largely re-written from time to
time with the help of numerous collaborators. The fifth edition on “The
Metals and their Compounds” made its appearance in the autumn of 1913—and
is a goodly volume of nearly 1,500 pages. Roscoe, then in his eightieth
year, worked hard at the revision and read the proofs with all the care
and diligence he expended on the original work.

Some time prior to 1895 he was induced by his friend, the late Sir Wemyss
Reid, to undertake the editorship of the Century Series of Biographies
of Scientific Men, projected by Cassell & Co. To this he contributed a
popular account of the life and work of Dalton under the title of “John
Dalton and the Rise of Modern Chemistry”—a little work which he wrote
with much zest and a thorough appreciation of the fine character of the
grand old Cumbrian Quaker.

Mention has already been made of the “New View of Dalton’s Atomic
Theory,” which Roscoe published in collaboration with Dr. Harden. This
book is of considerable interest and value in regard to the genesis of
a conception which marks a turning-point in the history of chemistry.
From a careful study of Dalton’s manuscripts and note-books which had
been discovered in the rooms of the Literary and Philosophical Society
of Manchester, the authors were led to conclusions concerning the origin
of the atomic theory of chemistry which differ fundamentally from
those which had been generally accepted. It had hitherto been supposed
that it was the experimental discovery of the law of combination in
multiple proportions which, in his search for an explanation of this
fact, led Dalton to the idea that chemical combination consists in the
approximation of atoms of definite and characteristic weight, the theory
of atoms being adopted to explain the facts discovered by chemical
analysis. In reality the exact opposite was the case. It was the theory
of the existence of atoms of different weights that led Dalton to the
discovery of the facts of combination in multiple proportions.

The late Dr. Debus, some two years previously in a pamphlet published
at Cassell, had reached a similar conclusion from a study of Dalton’s
published works, but by a different line of argument. As a matter of
priority there is no doubt that to Debus belongs the credit of first
pointing out that the commonly accepted view of the genesis of Dalton’s
atomic theory is erroneous, but it is no less true that the method of
reasoning by which he came to that conclusion cannot be substantiated
even if it is not actually disproved by the evidence from Dalton’s
note-books. Of course the idea of atoms, that is, of small indivisible
particles, did not, as is popularly supposed, originate with Dalton:
it is older than Science itself. How and where it first arose cannot
be exactly stated. Dr. Debus attributes it to Moschus, a Phœnician
philosopher living at Sidon about 1100 B.C. It was resuscitated by
Gassendi in the middle of the seventeenth century, and applied by Boyle,
who speaks of it as the Phœnician philosophy, to the explanation of
chemical phenomena. Newton made use of it to explain Boyle’s law and
the “spring of air.” Dalton almost certainly derived it from Newton,
with whose corpuscular notions he was quite familiar, and employed it
to explain the phenomena of diffusion and absorption. He was therefore
quite ready to extend it to all gaseous phenomena, and indeed to chemical
phenomena in general, to the extent that it seemed applicable.

It has been held that Dalton anticipated Avogadro in assuming that all
gases contain equal numbers of “atoms” (molecules). Dr. Debus adopts
this view, and assumes that Dalton in 1801 made use of it to explain
the phenomena of the diffusion of gases, and that this idea, along with
his early experiments on nitric oxide and oxygen, led to his atomic
theory. Roscoe and Harden, on the other hand, held that Dalton never
definitely held the view that equal volumes of gases contain an equal
number of atoms (molecules), nor had such a conception any bearing upon
his explanation of the facts of diffusion. Dissatisfied with the theory
which he did hold (viz. the repulsion exerted by an atom on all others of
its kind, but not on atoms of a different kind), he was led to consider
the behaviour of atoms of unequal size, and finding an agreement with
the observed facts, he then sought for means of determining whether
or not the atoms were actually of unequal size, and so was led to the
further developments of the theory. The weight of the evidence goes to
show that Dalton arrived at his theory in the latter half of 1803, and
that assumption on which it turned was “that no two species [of pure
elastic fluids] agree in the size of their particles.” There is no
clear indication that Dalton ever imagined that the simple gases were
diatomic in structure, which, of course, is the main point in Avogadro’s
hypothesis. It seems necessary to set out this matter in some detail
as misapprehension appears to exist, especially in Germany, as to the
merits of the controversy which arose after the appearance of Roscoe and
Harden’s work.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some years after he had reached the allotted span, Roscoe was induced
to think of putting his reminiscences on paper. It was at no time easy
to get him to talk about himself, and the effort of recalling his
recollections with a view to printing them was irksome to him. The
autobiography consequently made no very rapid progress; it ultimately
got into something like a tangle, and was more than once on the point
of being committed to the flames. However, during a particularly stormy
winter at the seaside, when he was confined to the house, a sustained
effort on the part of a determined coadjutor got it into shape, and
under the title of “The Life and Experiences of Sir Henry Enfield
Roscoe, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S. Written by Himself,” it was published
by Macmillans in the spring of 1906. The book was well received. It
was recognized as possessing at least two of the main essentials of a
successful autobiography—something worth writing about and the faculty
of narration. It is written with sincerity and directness, and with, as
one critic said, “a charming simplicity of style and thought, illumined
throughout by a soft glow of kindly humour” eminently characteristic
of its author, and is of interest as a record of a singularly full and
varied career. The gospel of work never had a more strenuous disciple.
It has historical value also as the story of the educational changes,
particularly in science, which he helped to secure or lived to witness.
It reflects many of his noteworthy features: his strong common sense;
his straightforwardness and honesty of purpose; his liberality and
invincible optimism; his geniality and sense of humour. His enjoyment of
a good story makes him tell it even if he is the victim of it. The whole
is a pleasing picture of a uniformly calm, contented, and successful
life—of the life of one who was what the Romans called “a man of good
fortune,” that is, of one whose prosperity was not the result of chance
or accident, but of wisdom and the capacity to bring its aims and efforts
to a successful ending.




CHAPTER IX

ROSCOE AND THE ORGANIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES


Roscoe was elected into the Royal Society in 1863, and served on its
Council from 1872 to 1877, and again during two subsequent periods, viz.
1881-1883 and 1888-1890. He was a Vice-President in 1881-1882, and again
in 1888-1890. He gave two Bakerian Lectures, viz. in 1865 and 1868, and
was awarded a Royal Medal in 1873 “for his various Chemical Researches,
more especially for his Investigations of the Chemical Action of Light,
and of the Combinations of Vanadium.”

He joined the Chemical Society in 1855, and was a member of its
Council in 1860-1864, and again in 1871-1873. He was a Vice-President
in 1873-1875, and again in 1877-1880, and was President from 1880 to
1882. His two presidential addresses, “abstracts and brief chronicles
of the time,” dealt mainly with the results of chemical inquiry during
the preceding year, especially in relation to the inorganic section of
the science. On the first occasion it fell to his duty to refer to the
death of Sir Benjamin C. Brodie, a former secretary and president of the
Society, whose friendship, as his autobiography testifies, he valued “as
that of a true, generous, and noble-hearted man.”

Roscoe was the Mæcenas of the Chemical Society. Indeed, he may be said
to have resembled that grand seigneur in the simplicity and cordiality
which, as the poet tells us, characterized his relations to the men of
his circle. Certainly no Fellow of the Society ever showed himself a more
beneficent or more generous patron. The walls of its rooms bear witness
to his kindly thought and constant remembrance. Its library has been
augmented by gifts from him of close upon a thousand volumes, including
rare alchemical and early chemical works, and of complete sets of some of
the most valuable of the serial publications of the science.

It was in grateful recognition of this liberal and warm-hearted
encouragement of the objects for which the Society was instituted that
his old pupils resolved to commemorate his connection with it by placing,
on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, his bust in the library which
he had done so much to enrich, and at the same time to offer a replica of
Mr. Drury’s admirable work to his family.

Roscoe was one of the original members of the Society of Chemical
Industry, and took a leading part in establishing it on its present basis
as a national institution, with local sections in many of our principal
towns, and branches in certain of our colonies, and in America. How it
originated may be gleaned from the following letter. There had been a
previous attempt to establish a local society with special reference
to the South Lancashire district. But Roscoe, with others of its
projectors, had conceived the idea of placing it on a wider plane, and
the meeting referred to was called to ascertain the general feeling as to
the expediency of the action.

                                     THE OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER,
                                                   _April 13, ’80_.

    We are going to have a meeting _here_ on Monday next, at 7
    p.m., of chemical manufacturers and others, to consider the
    question of the establishment of a Lancashire Chemical Society,
    or of a more General Institute or Society of Chemical Engineers.

    If you can come over I should be very glad, as it is likely to
    be an important meeting and your opinion would be of value.

    I congratulate you (and Mrs. Thorpe) on your completion of the
    paper. We are to decide, or begin to decide, about the Chemical
    Society Medal on Thursday, and I hope it will be settled to
    your satisfaction.

At this gathering it was decided to attempt to establish a society to
subserve the general interests of chemical industry and not merely those
of the South Lancashire district, and to call a meeting in London to
discuss the project. He presided at this meeting in the rooms of the
Chemical Society when the Society was formally inaugurated. He served
as its first President, and was the first chairman of its Manchester
section. He opened the proceedings of its first annual general meeting in
1881 with an account of the reasons for the formation of such a society;
he indicated its proposed scope, and dwelt upon the many advantages to
science and industry that might be expected to follow its creation. What
he said then is not less pertinent now. Perhaps, indeed, it is even more
so. His words were words of wisdom and of warning. Read in the fierce
light of current events, and of present disabilities, we may well
inquire whether the generation that has passed has been as mindful as
he had hoped it would be of its opportunities. If it had quickened its
energies and marshalled its forces as he encouraged it to do, we should
have been better able to meet the strenuous times that are now in store
for us. For upwards of a century—ever since, indeed, the renascence
of chemical science which originated with Lavoisier—far-sighted men
have been preaching the same story. But to the great majority in this
country it has been as seed fallen by the wayside. Not so abroad. Thanks
mainly to a clearer recognition of the part that science plays under the
changing and progressive conditions of modern life, other nations have
been more heedful: the seed with them fell upon more receptive soil. The
catastrophe which has overtaken us has brought a rude awakening. We are
beginning to realize the imperfection of a system of national education
which has no adequate relation to present-day necessities.

Roscoe, one is consoled to think, lived to see the evidence of this
quickening. The doctrine which he preached with an insistency and
pertinacity that never flagged, during more than half a century, is now,
under the stress of necessity, coming home to men’s business and bosoms
as it never did before.

One proof of the Society’s recognition of its indebtedness to its first
President may be seen in the award to him of its medal on the occasion of
the Nottingham meeting in 1914.

In 1909 he was Honorary President of the Seventh International Congress
of Applied Chemistry which met in London in that year. It was his wish
that his friend, Dr. Ludwig Mond, as an eminent industrial chemist,
should be appointed to that office, but Mond declined the position and
proposed Roscoe’s name instead at the preceding meeting in Rome.

To Roscoe, therefore, fell the honour of introducing the Prince and
Princess of Wales—our present King and Queen—to the meeting of three
thousand industrial chemists assembled in the Albert Hall, when the
Prince welcomed the gathering in a felicitous speech. The foreign
delegates were afterwards received in private audience by King Edward
VII, when Roscoe, as Honorary President, had the honour of presenting
them.

Roscoe’s first introduction to the British Association was at the Glasgow
meeting in 1855, when the late Lord Playfair was President of the
Chemical Section, and when he himself acted as the secretary. At this
meeting he read a paper on the results of a joint investigation with
Bunsen on the action of light upon chlorine water, an examination and
extension of Wittwer’s work on the same subject. This was subsequently
published in the _Journal of the Chemical Society_ and in _Liebig’s
Annalen_. As already stated, he acted as one of the local secretaries
at the Manchester meeting of 1861, when he presented a report jointly
with the late Drs. Schunck and R. Angus Smith, “On the Condition of
Manufacturing Chemistry in the South Lancashire District” (_Brit. Assoc.
Rep._ 1861, pp. 108-128). At the Bath meeting in 1864 he gave one of
the evening lectures on the chemical action of light. At the Liverpool
meeting of 1870 he presided over the Chemistry Section.

Then, as now, France and Germany were at war, and that fact naturally
called for reference. But, _Eheu!_ neither the cosmopolitan character
of Science to which he then alluded, nor upwards of forty years of that
comity among those interested in Science and its applications which he
confidently hoped would “render impossible the breaking out of disasters
so fatal to the progress of Science and to the welfare of humanity!” as
he then witnessed, have served to avert an even more fearful disaster.
The small but living fire which he contended would in the end surely
serve to melt down national animosities has been now almost wholly
extinguished by the arrogant pride and lust of power which has obsessed a
nation claiming to be the most enlightened in the world.

In 1884 he again served as President of the Chemical Section at the
meeting in Montreal. In 1887 he was President of the Association at the
Manchester meeting in that year—an honour he prized all the more on
account of his long association with that city. The meeting was notable
as being the largest held since the foundation of the Association, and
was specially characterized by the number of foreign chemists who were
present. He continued to take an active interest in the affairs of the
Association up to the time of his death, and was a constant attendant at
the meetings of its Council.




CHAPTER X

PUBLIC SERVICES—POLITICAL AND PROFESSIONAL WORK


Roscoe’s position in the educational world, and in scientific circles,
coupled with his well-known business capacity and sound judgment,
frequently led to his being invited to place his knowledge and experience
at the service of the State in connection with Royal Commissions and
Departmental Committees. During his tenure of his professorship at
Manchester he served on two important Royal Commissions; the first in
1876, when Mr. Cross, then Home Secretary, nominated him as a member
of Lord Aberdare’s Commission on Noxious Vapours, which led to the
amended Alkali Acts of 1891 and 1892; the second in 1881, when Mr. A.
J. Mundella, then Vice-President of the Education Council, appointed
him a member of Sir Bernhard Samuelson’s Commission on Technical
Instruction—one of the most important Commissions ever issued by reason
of its influence on the industrial history of this country. Roscoe threw
himself heart and soul into its work. The task was thoroughly congenial
to him, for he was profoundly convinced of its importance. It required
long and frequent visits abroad in order to inquire into the methods of
the continental trade-schools and polytechnics, and to judge by direct
observation of their results. The preparation of the Report was a tedious
and complicated business, but with the help of his colleagues, whom he
invited to his holiday-home in the Lakes, it was gradually, as he says,
“licked into shape,” the last touches to its recommendations being made
at the Chairman’s country house in Devonshire.

During the ten years that followed the publication of the Report, Roscoe,
in common with several of his colleagues, addressed innumerable public
meetings throughout the country in order to make its lessons as widely
known as possible. The work of the Commission bore fruit in the Technical
Instruction Act of 1889, and still later and to a greater extent in
the Education Act of 1902. This last measure was preceded by the Royal
Commission on Secondary Education, of which Roscoe was a member under the
chairmanship of the present Lord Bryce. In 1896 he introduced a strong
and representative deputation to urge upon the Lord President of the
Council the desirability of taking steps to enforce its recommendations.
It was then intimated that it was the intention of the Government to
introduce legislation dealing with the organization of our secondary
schools—thus foreshadowing the Act of 1902.

Although more than thirty years have passed since the Report of the
Technical Instruction Commission was issued, it may still be read with
profit. Indeed, the lessons it teaches are singularly applicable to the
present juncture. In spite of what has been accomplished, Roscoe was far
from being satisfied with our national position. In 1906 he wrote:

    Much remains for us in England to accomplish in the
    organization of our secondary and scientific training, in which
    our competitors are before us, and of which the importance and
    the effects are well summed up in the following opinion of an
    eminent German manufacturer: “We in Germany do not care whether
    you in England are Free-traders or Protectionists, but what
    we are afraid of is that some day your people will wake up to
    the necessity of having a complete system of technical and
    scientific education, and then with your energetic population,
    with your insular position, and with your stores of raw
    material it will be difficult, or it may be impossible, for us
    to compete.”

In 1884 a knighthood was conferred on him, as stated in Mr. Gladstone’s
letter when intimating the Queen’s pleasure, “in acknowledgment of his
distinguished service on the Technical Education Commission.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Roscoe has recorded in his autobiography the circumstances, altogether
unexpected by him, which led to his introduction to active political
life. He was elected for South Manchester—a constituency largely composed
of the upper and middle class—in 1885, the first Member of Parliament for
the division in which the University is situated and the only Liberal
then returned for the city. He held his seat during two succeeding
elections (1886 and 1892), but lost it in 1895, by a narrow majority,
to the Marquis of Lorne. Although frequently solicited to re-enter
Parliament he felt, to use his own phrase, that he “had had enough.”

Roscoe was a strong and consistent Liberal, a member of the Manchester
School of Economists, and a devoted adherent of Mr. Gladstone, whom
he followed in the Home Rule split. During the greater part of
his parliamentary career, that is from 1886 to 1892, he sat on the
Opposition benches, and had therefore comparatively little opportunity of
accomplishing much in the way of legislative achievement. On questions
involving scientific matters he could always secure the ear of the House,
especially when these related to the comfort and well-being of its
members, as when he took in hand the ventilation, lighting, and drainage
of the Palace of Westminster. In 1888, and again in 1889, he introduced
a Technical Education Bill, but it failed to reach the statute-book.
In the latter year, however, the Government passed the Technical
Instruction Act already referred to; this, although not wholly in accord
with the views he had put forward, he gladly accepted as a satisfactory
instalment. His efforts to pass an amending Bill in the following year
met with no success. In 1891 the National Association for the Promotion
of Technical Education, which was founded as a result of the Report of
the Royal Commission of 1881, entrusted him with a Bill to remove certain
disabilities which had been found to attend the working of the Act of
1889, and this he succeeded in carrying. It was one of the few private
Bills of the session of 1891 that became law.

He was frequently called upon to serve upon select committees, and in
his last session he was Chairman of the Select Committee on Weights and
Measures which led to Mr. Balfour’s Bill for legalizing the use of the
metrical system in this country.

Roscoe was a Vice-President of the Decimal Association, and lost no
opportunity of advocating the use of a system of weights and measures
which practically every other civilized community has found it expedient
to adopt. The reform of the method of holding parliamentary elections,
continuation schools, opening museums on Sundays, the housing of the
science collections at South Kensington, grants to University colleges,
industrial employment in Ireland, limitation of moisture in weaving
sheds, river pollution—were all questions upon which he was able to
exercise his influence and knowledge, and most of which he lived
to see satisfactorily settled. But, on the whole, he found little
satisfaction in his parliamentary life. There was much in it that was
irksome and distasteful to a man of his active and independent mind. It
was unfortunate for him that the greater part of his political career
should have to be spent in opposition, thus affording him only limited
opportunities of initiating legislative action. Owing to the political
circumstances of the time many questions with which he was specially
qualified to deal never came up for consideration. Others were only
discussed for the purpose of “marking time,” and he deplored the loss
of opportunity and waste of effort thereby involved. His rejection in
1895, therefore, occasioned him no very great concern. Whatever feeling
of disappointment he may have felt soon passed away, and he quickly went
back to his old occupations, and to pursuits more congenial to him than
haunting the precincts of the House of Commons. The following letter from
Woodcote, under date July 20, 1895, affords some indication of the way in
which he regarded the loss of his seat.

    Many thanks for your kind note. As you surmise, I do not feel
    personally much regret at my own defeat. I could tell you
    something of the way the thing was worked.

    Now I feel an “old freeman,” and able to do much more what I
    like. But this not always—for I do not see my way just now
    to accept your invitation. I have been worked up with the
    election, and have to be careful, so that with this, and with
    the present uncertainty of weather, I think I am safer on
    entire dry land.

    We are thankful for rain which loveth the thirsty land and
    makes things green again.

    Is it true that the “burning bush” manufactures C₂H₅OH
    [alcohol]? If so, that is really interesting.[27]

    Harden and I have found some most interesting results as
    regards the genesis of the atomic theory, and I am going to
    work them up.

    How about Davy?… The editor asks for more, and I should be
    pleased to satisfy his maw by giving him a lump of Davy.
    Kindest regards.

Shortly after his removal to London he became interested in the sewage
problem of the Metropolis, and was called upon to advise the Metropolitan
Board of Works with respect to methods for improving the condition of the
river Thames. In connection with this work he established a laboratory,
specially equipped for studying its problems, in the Earl’s Court Road,
not far from his London residence. During the year 1887 he was engaged,
with the assistance of his former pupil Mr. Harry Baker, in reporting
to Lord Magheramorne, the Chairman of the Metropolitan Board of Works,
on the chemical methods employed for the deodorization of sewage (_a_)
in the metropolitan sewers, and (_b_) at the outfalls. Early in 1888
much larger problems were submitted to him: viz. the purification of the
sewage, the disposal of the sludge, and the effect of the discharge of
sewage sludge at sea on the foreshores of the estuary of the Thames. In
connection with these subjects he became impressed with the importance of
obtaining accurate scientific methods for determining the changes which
polluted water experiences during its natural purification. Some of the
results of his inquiries he published in conjunction with his pupil Mr.
Joseph Lunt in two memoirs, one “On Schützenberger’s Process for the
Estimation of Dissolved Oxygen in Water,” communicated to the Chemical
Society in 1889, and published in the _Transactions_,[28] and the other
entitled “Contributions to the Chemical Bacteriology of Sewage,” which
appeared in the _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society_.[29]
The former paper contained the results of a careful investigation of the
conditions under which this method is alone trustworthy, and served to
explain the causes of the discrepancy between the statements of previous
observers who had critically examined it. The latter paper gave the
results of a protracted examination of the chemical and bacteriological
phenomena of crude sewage with the object of ascertaining the species of
organisms present, both pathogenic and saprophytic, and of determining
their chemical characteristics.

These investigations were carried on for more than two years,
concurrently with the technical and outside work required. During this
time purification works had been established at Crossness and Barking
outfalls, a sludge ship had been provided for the disposal of the sewage
sludge at sea, and the effect of the discharge had been studied in the
lower reaches and estuary of the Thames, and a chemical survey of the
condition of the foreshores had been completed. But the formation of the
London County Council, with Lord Rosebery as the first Chairman, involved
new arrangements. This circumstance, combined with the death of Sir
Joseph Bazalgette, the Chief Engineer, and the opposition of the Labour
Party, resulted in Roscoe resigning his post as Scientific Adviser.

Mr. Lunt transferred his services to the British Institute of Preventive
Medicine, but Roscoe continued to carry on his laboratory with the
assistance of Mr. Frank Scudder until 1898. During this period he acted
as chemical adviser to sanitary authorities all over the country on
questions of sewage purification and water-supply; and was frequently
consulted by manufacturers on works-processes, and on legal, patent,
and trade-mark cases, and in connection with parliamentary inquiries,
e.g. humidity and purity of air in textile mills, flashpoint of paraffin
oils, etc. He was further concerned in the promotion of Bills for the
creation of rivers boards, as, for example, those of the Mersey and
Irwell and West Riding. He gave considerable attention to the question
of the manufacture and use of water gas (“carburetted” and “blue” gas),
and inspected most of the water-gas plants then in operation in England
and on the Continent, sending Mr. Scudder to visit and report on the
installations in the principal cities of America. In 1898 they both gave
evidence before a Parliamentary Committee on the question of restricting
the amount of the poisonous carbonic oxide in town gas.

In 1891 Roscoe’s services were retained by the Mersey and Irwell Joint
Committee to report on the influence of the various manufacturing works
in the Mersey and Irwell basins in polluting the streams, and as to the
best means of preventing it. In 1893 the Committee made the position of
Scientific Adviser a permanent appointment, and established a properly
equipped laboratory in Manchester in connection with its work. Roscoe
retained the appointment until 1905, when the frequent journeys to attend
the meetings of the Joint Committee began to tell upon his health, and
at his suggestion Mr. Scudder was appointed to succeed him. The London
laboratory was given up in 1908.




CHAPTER XI

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON—ETON COLLEGE—UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF DUNDEE—SCOTTISH
UNIVERSITIES COMMISSION—ROYAL COMMISSION OF THE 1851 EXHIBITION—CARNEGIE
TRUST: SCOTTISH UNIVERSITIES—SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT: SCIENCE
MUSEUMS—LISTER INSTITUTE OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE


Roscoe was long and honourably connected with the University of London.
A graduate in 1853, he acted as examiner in chemistry from 1874 to 1878.
It was largely through his action that practical laboratory work was
included in the curriculum in chemistry for science degrees. This not
only greatly enhanced their status, but reacted beneficially upon the
general character of laboratory instruction throughout the country. On
relinquishing parliamentary work he became a member of the Senate, and
took part in the movement for the reform of the University which led
incidentally to the formation of an association of teachers and others
for the promotion of a so-called Professorial University, of which Huxley
was President. The following letter refers to this circumstance:

                                                        MANCHESTER,
                                                   _June 26, 1892_.

    I am delighted to hear that Huxley has joined and is to be
    President of the Association. It will give me pleasure to act
    as a Vice-President with Jebb.

    Things look very well, and our views must greatly influence the
    Royal Commission.

    I will try to secure names here. My wife sends a list per
    parcel post.

He made proposals with the idea of uniting what have come to be called
the Internal and External sides of the University, and in his evidence
before Lord Cowper’s Commission he suggested a machinery of a less
cumbrous and, as he hoped, of a more satisfactory character than that
which became law in 1898. In 1896 he succeeded Sir Julian Goldsmid
as Vice-Chancellor. It was during his term of office that the Act of
1898, which reconstituted the University as the result of Earl Cowper’s
Commission, was passed. As Vice-Chancellor it became his duty to watch
the progress of the measure, and to use his influence in promoting its
passage through Parliament.

Unfortunately the University was as a house divided against itself. One
section of its Senate, numerically not very strong, was avowedly hostile
to its reconstitution as a teaching body. Some members of Convocation
acted as if their conception of the sole purpose of a University was
the holding of examinations and the giving of degrees. Their object,
apparently, was to strengthen by all possible means the influence
of Convocation; to make it, in fact, the main controlling power.
Accordingly, they used such parliamentary support as they could command
to wreck the Bill, or failing that, so to modify its provisions as to
preserve as far as possible the existing constitution of the institution,
and to perpetuate its restricted functions. Thanks, however, to the
action and alertness of Lord Bryce, Lord Haldane, Sir W. Priestley, and
Sir John Gorst, and the firmness of the Government, the measure was
steered safely through Parliament and received the Royal Assent.

The statutory commission which followed the University of London Act of
1898 reported in 1900; its provisions were approved by Parliament in June
of that year, and the new Senate held its first meeting in the following
October. Roscoe took an active share in the rearrangements consequent on
the reconstitution of the University, and in the changes necessitated
by its removal from Burlington Gardens to the buildings of the Imperial
Institute at South Kensington.

This last step was a somewhat delicate matter. As housed in Burlington
Gardens the University was only moderately well provided for as regards
examination-rooms and administrative offices, but such laboratories and
store-rooms as it possessed were wholly inadequate for the practical
work required in the examinations for science and medical degrees. The
pressure on the limited space grew more severe each session, and for
some time previous to 1898 the necessity of making fresh provision had
forced itself upon the notice of the authorities. The wants of the
University in this respect had been freely ventilated in the course
of the discussion on the Bill. Accordingly, overtures were made to
the Senate to take over some portion of the building of the Imperial
Institute as a home for the reconstituted University. The offer was
not received with any great enthusiasm. The Imperial Institute had not
fulfilled the anticipations of its projectors; its associations, to say
the least, were not altogether academic, and this circumstance naturally
created a prejudice against it. Moreover, the building itself, although
grandiose in design, and possessing an admirable façade, was rather like
the geometrical definition of a line—length without breadth; and when
that portion of it intended to be assigned to the University was measured
up, it was actually not much, if any, larger in superficial area than was
available in Burlington Gardens. There was, however, more space in the
neighbourhood, and a certain amount of rearrangement and new construction
was possible. Moreover, the authorities of the Science and Art Department
were projecting new laboratories for chemistry and physics, and it was
hoped that facilities might be granted to the University to enable them,
under certain conditions, to use them, or some portion of them, for their
practical examinations in those sciences. But objections were raised in
regard to the geographical position of the building, its distance from
the main-line stations, etc. Its possible association with what was
styled “the South Kensington clique” was another rock of offence.

There were possible difficulties also with the Council of the Institute
as to the partition of the structure, use of the main entrance, etc.
But all these matters were adjusted eventually by the skill, tact, and
firmness of the Vice-Chancellor, with the concurrence of the Treasury and
of the Office of Works; and the University entered into the possession
of the eastern half of the building.

Not the least of the services which Roscoe rendered to the University was
his action with regard to the selection of the late Sir Arthur Rücker
as its first Principal. It was entirely through his efforts that the
appointment was made. Its success, he says in his “Life and Experiences,”
more than justified those efforts, and he always spoke of it as the best
day’s work he ever did for the University.

Roscoe resigned the Vice-Chancellorship in 1902, when he presented to
the University the handsome mace which now lies on the table during the
meetings of the Senate, and which is used on ceremonial occasions. It was
so employed, draped in crape, at the memorial service held in Rosslyn
Hill Chapel at his death.

He remained a member of the Senate until 1910, when age and increasing
deafness necessitated his retirement. In the resolution of condolence
which the Senate passed at its first meeting after his death, they
recalled with gratitude and admiration the great services he had rendered
to the University during the twenty-one years of his membership of the
Senate, at first as Fellow and later as one of the representatives of His
Majesty in Council; and especially the wisdom, born of long experience in
academic administration, with which he guided the University during the
six years of his Vice-Chancellorship, which witnessed its reconstitution
under the Act of 1898.

       *       *       *       *       *

Roscoe was a Fellow of Eton College, as a representative of the
Royal Society, from 1889 to 1912, and did what he could during the
twenty-three years he served on the Governing Body to overcome what
he terms “the enormous inertia of this ancient machine.” He sought to
further the teaching of physical science in the School by himself giving
lectures, and through his efforts it is the richer by no less than one
large and one small physical laboratory, a physics lecture-room, a
workshop, and two more chemical laboratories, with store-rooms, etc.
He also reorganized the system of teaching, and introduced graduated
courses, which have resulted in an all-round improvement. Nevertheless,
the results have not been commensurate with all the hard work and
enthusiasm he put into his efforts. They have been largely discounted by
factors over which he had no control. No one realized this more clearly
than himself, and he felt keenly the disappointment of his hopes, so much
so that more than once he considered the advisability of resigning his
Fellowship as a protest. He earned the gratitude of the science staff by
his uniform kindness and sympathy, and by the readiness with which he
would discuss their difficulties with them and help them with advice and
encouragement.

As the representative of the Royal Society, his chief interests lay
with the teaching of physical science, but they did not rest there. No
Fellow worked harder for the general welfare of the School. In order
to make himself acquainted first-hand with facts connected with the
subjects to be discussed at the meetings of the Provost and Fellows,
he constantly visited Eton. His opinion and advice on all sorts of
questions were sought and respected, and he has left behind him a record
of whole-hearted service to the School that will long be remembered with
appreciation and gratitude.

Roscoe’s experience as an educationist, and his success in furthering the
development of Owens College, naturally caused him to be consulted when
institutions of a similar type were projected, and he was occasionally
induced to take part in their foundation and government. Thus he had
a large share in the arrangement of the curriculum of the University
College of Dundee in 1881, and he was afterwards concerned, as a member
of the Scottish Universities Commission, in establishing the connection
of that College with the University of St. Andrews. He was appointed
by the Duke of Devonshire to a governorship of University College,
Liverpool, a position particularly gratifying to him as a member of a
distinguished Liverpool family. He represented the University of London
on the Council of Firth College, Sheffield, which has since risen to the
dignity of a university, and was of service with respect to its science
curriculum.

In 1888 Roscoe acted as a member of an Executive Commission appointed to
carry out the provisions of the Scottish Universities Act. The Commission
succeeded in devising ordinances which in many respects revolutionized
the systems of the Scottish Universities, and by providing new avenues to
degrees are destined, it may be hoped, to have an important effect upon
the character of scientific education in Scotland.

       *       *       *       *       *

In 1890 he was appointed a member of a Committee along with Lord
Playfair, Lord Kelvin, Professor Huxley, Mr. Mundella, Sir Norman
Lockyer, and Dr. William Garnett, to advise the Commissioners of the
1851 Exhibition on the question of establishing scholarships to aid the
development of scientific education in the manufacturing districts of the
country.

Roscoe remained a member of that body after it had presented its Report
and had been entrusted with the duty of putting into operation the
scheme which had been devised for the distribution and regulation of
the scholarships. The character of these scholarships cannot be better
described than in his own words:—

    It was decided that these should be of a higher order than most
    of those existing; in fact, that their functions should begin
    where the ordinary educational curriculum ends, this system
    having been adopted with excellent effect in the French _École
    Pratique des Hautes Études_. In other words, the scholarships
    were to be entirely confined to research, and strict conditions
    were laid down as to the capability of the candidate to carry
    out original investigation. The scholarships were to be £150
    a year in value, tenable for two years, and to be limited to
    those branches of science the knowledge of which is specially
    important for our national industries. The Commissioners
    from time to time were to select a number of institutions
    throughout the Empire in which high scientific instruction is
    given. Each university or college was to have the power of
    nominating a student to a scholarship on the condition that he
    exhibited a capacity for advancing science or its applications;
    these scholarships, when awarded, were to be tenable in any
    university, either at home or abroad, or other approved
    institutions.…

    The fact that a large number of the nominating institutions
    are situated in the colonies, and that the scholars from
    these institutions come to the mother-country to carry out
    their scientific work, must exert an important influence in
    strengthening the relations between different parts of the
    Empire. The value of this system is fully appreciated by the
    authorities at home and abroad, and many are the instances in
    which men of ability, who would otherwise have been unable
    to follow a scientific career, or to assist the progress of
    our national industries, are now coming to the front in both
    respects. It has been well remarked that if, in the course of a
    century, even one Faraday should have been discovered, the sum
    spent would have been amply repaid.

The policy laid down by the original committee has since been pursued
without essential variation, and what was at first regarded as an
educational experiment has proved itself by the test of time an entirely
successful undertaking, and one which has served as a model for the
institution of similar foundations, both in this country and abroad.

In recognition of the services rendered on this committee, Roscoe was
elected, in 1891, a member of the Royal Commission, and five years
afterwards, in 1896, he became a member of the Board of Management, and
at the same time succeeded Lord Playfair as Chairman of the Scholarships’
Committee.

As Chairman, the control and direction of the Committee’s work was very
largely in his hands, and the care he devoted to every detail of the
scholarship work undoubtedly contributed to the successful operation of
the scheme.

    But there was something more to value (says Mr. Evelyn Shaw,
    who contributes the above particulars) than the part he played
    in the proceedings of the Committee. The charm and sympathy of
    his personality were felt by so many scholars who had occasion
    to consult him upon their work, and who often afterwards
    remembered and were grateful for some kind and helpful advice.
    He never failed to watch with interest the careers of past
    scholars, as he regarded their record as the most convincing
    proof of the value of the Commissioners’ Endowment.

In 1901 he consented, on the invitation of Lord Elgin, the Chairman, to
join the executive committee of the trustees appointed to carry out the
administration of Mr. Andrew Carnegie’s munificent gift to the Scottish
Universities for the benefit of scientific education; and he assisted in
the inauguration of a system of Carnegie Scholarships and Fellowships for
the encouragement of original investigation, resembling that of the Royal
Commissioners of the 1851 Exhibition.

       *       *       *       *       *

Roscoe acted as chief examiner in chemistry of the Science and Art
Department in succession to the late Sir Edward Frankland, but resigned
the appointment on his election to Parliament. He took a great
interest in the aims of the department, and worked cordially with its
administrative officers, especially in the abolition of the old system of
“payment on results” for the elementary stage of science subjects, and in
remodelling organized science schools.

The importance of properly housing the valuable science collections
at South Kensington was constantly being pressed by him upon the
Government. In 1909 he accompanied a strong deputation, and presented
an influentially signed memorial to the Board of Education, pleading
for larger and better accommodation for the unique and almost priceless
exhibits of historically important objects which the museum possesses,
some of which are absolutely irreplaceable. He pointed out how valuable
such a collection was as an adjunct to the systematic teaching of
science and technology. Each model, or piece of apparatus, or specimen
of historic interest, was selected to bring into prominence underlying
principles, or to illustrate various stages of industrial progress. In
the temporary buildings in which the collections were placed, there was
not only no room for the necessary expansion, but the objects were so
crowded together that proper arrangement and inspection were impossible.
What was needed was a building adequate to the proper exhibition of
the present collection, and one worthy of British Science. He pointed
out that one consequence of storing the collections in so haphazard
and unsatisfactory a manner was that persons possessing objects of
interest naturally felt indisposed to present them to the nation, and
some of these when offered had to be refused through want of space.
Land sufficient for the purpose was in the hands of the Government, and
the Royal Commissioners for the 1851 Exhibition, so long ago as 1878,
offered to contribute £100,000 towards a building for the Science Museum.
Roscoe’s arguments were strongly supported by other members of the
deputation, and Mr. Runciman, who was then at the Board of Education,
expressed himself as convinced by their weight, and as wholly in sympathy
with the object of the speakers. A gratifying result of this action is to
be seen in the new buildings now in course of erection.

       *       *       *       *       *

Roscoe’s high appreciation of Pasteur’s work as a chemist was, we may
presume, the immediate cause of the great interest with which he had
followed his remarkable discoveries concerning the causes and cure of
chicken cholera, anthrax, and the silkworm disease—an interest quickened,
no doubt, by the fact that he had made the personal acquaintance of
that distinguished man as far back as the early ’sixties. He had
specially informed himself of the working of the Institut Pasteur in
Paris, and of the anti-rabic treatment, and had borne his share in
combating the mischievous prejudices of those in this country who sought
to misrepresent the character and objects of Pasteur’s work. In 1886
he had used his parliamentary influence to induce Mr. Chamberlain,
who was then President of the Local Government Board, to appoint a
Government Commission, consisting of the late Lord Lister, Sir James
Paget, Professor Ray Lankester, and himself, with Sir Victor Horsley as
secretary, to inquire and report on the efficacy of Pasteur’s treatment
of hydrophobia. The Commission came to the conclusion, based upon
irrefragable proof, that this treatment had been the means of saving a
large number of lives that otherwise would have been sacrificed to a
dreadful and torturing death. Their report induced Sir James Whitehead,
when Lord Mayor of London, to call a Mansion House meeting for the
purpose of raising a fund partly to defray the cost of sending poor
persons, who may need treatment, to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and
partly to repay some of our indebtedness to Pasteur and his co-workers
for having treated some two hundred of our countrymen gratuitously.
The Royal Society requested Roscoe, with Sir James Paget and Professor
Lankester, to represent them at the Lord Mayor’s meeting, and they
supported the action by a formal letter from the President. Roscoe seized
the opportunity of having to respond for “Science” at a Royal Academy
banquet to direct further attention to the subject, and he subsequently
spoke in the House of Commons of the great value of experiments on
living animals in opposition to an amendment designed to impede the
working of the Vivisection Acts. By memorials, popular lectures, and
articles in the periodical press, he kept the subject continually before
the public eye. Nor were his colleagues less active in instructing
and forming public opinion. Their efforts eventually resulted in the
establishment of an institute in London with aims similar to those of
that in Paris. Thanks to the munificent action of Lord Iveagh, it has
been housed and equipped not less worthily than its sister foundation.
The London Institute of Preventive Medicine now bears the honoured name
of Lord Lister, its first President.

Roscoe was its Treasurer from 1891 to 1904 and Chairman from 1904 to
1912, and again from 1914 to the time of his death. The building has now
been completed at a cost of £28,000, entirely paid out of income, and
there has been a gradual and considerable increase in the scientific
staff and in the volume of work done. The formation of the Medical
Research Committee was thought by Roscoe to affect the interests of the
Institute, and he considered that it might be better to bring about a
working arrangement between the two bodies. He felt that the independent
existence of two such schemes of research might lead to rivalry rather
than to co-operation, and that the superior resources of the Government
Committee might operate to the disadvantage of the Institute. It was also
thought that the addition of the resources of the Institute to those
at the disposal of the Committee together with the union of the two
scientific staffs would prove a great advantage to each and contribute
largely to the success of both. Another more practical point was that
the amalgamation scheme would remove from the Institute the burdensome
necessity of having to earn money by routine diagnosis work in order to
provide a sufficient income to support the scientific work, and to permit
of its increase. This contemplated action gave rise to a considerable
difference of opinion. As a question of policy it obviously admitted of
two sides, and when the matter came up for decision the preponderating
feeling was to let well alone and to allow the Institute to continue to
develop along independent lines.




CHAPTER XII

DIGNITIES AND HONOURS—THE _DEUTSCHE REVUE_—GERMANY AND ENGLAND—WORLD
SUPREMACY OR WAR


Roscoe’s services to science and to the cause of education were widely
recognized. He was an honorary graduate of many universities at home
and abroad, and an honorary or corresponding member of many foreign
scientific societies. He was a D.C.L. of Oxford; and LL.D. of Cambridge
(1883), Dublin (1878), Glasgow (1901), and Montreal (1884); and D.Sc. of
Aberdeen, Liverpool, and Victoria. On the occasion of the eighth jubilee
of the foundation of Heidelberg University he was made an honorary M.D.

He served as a member of the jury for chemical products of the English
section of the French Exhibition of 1878, and was made an officer of
the Legion of Honour, and in 1889 a corresponding member of the French
Institute of the Academy of Sciences. He was an honorary member of the
American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia and of the New York
Academy of Sciences; of the Chemical Society of Berlin; of the Bunsen
Gesellschaft, of the Verein für Naturwissenschaft of Brunswick, and of
the Physikalische Verein of Frankfort; a corresponding member of the
Bavarian Academy of Sciences of Munich, of the Royal Society of Sciences
of Göttingen, of the Royal Accad. Lincei of Rome, and of the Academy
of Natural Science of Catania; a member of the Leop. Carol. Akad. of
Halle, and of the Physiogr. Sällsk of Lund. He was an honorary member of
the Royal Irish Academy, and of the Literary and Philosophical Society
of Manchester. In 1912 the Franklin Institute awarded him the Elliott
Cresson Gold Medal.

He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1909—an honour which he accepted
not only as a personal distinction but as a recognition of the claims of
Science.

But of all the distinctions and marks of appreciation he received in
the course of his long and busy life, none afforded him a truer or
more heart-felt gratification than the action taken by his old pupils
in celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the date—March 25, 1854—on
which he took his Heidelberg degree. The warmth and cordiality with
which the idea of commemorating his jubilee was received, not only by
his former students but by every teaching institution, academic body,
and scientific society with which he was or had been connected, was a
striking testimony to the regard and esteem in which he was universally
held. The University of Heidelberg renewed its diploma of Doctor
Philosophiæ Naturalis, and accompanied it by an address from the Grand
Duke of Baden, Rector of the University, the Pro-Rector, Senior Dean, and
the other professors of the Philosophical Faculty. Addresses were also
sent by University College, London, the Victoria University, and the
Universities of London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Wales, Scotland, Montreal,
Melbourne, New Zealand, and Tokyo; King’s College, London, the Yorkshire
College, and the University Colleges of Sheffield, Newcastle, and Dundee;
the Royal and Chemical Societies, the Society of Chemical Industry,
British Association, the Lister and Pasteur Institutes, and a number
of the academies and scientific societies of Germany, Italy, Holland,
and America. In addition a large number of congratulatory letters
and messages were received from distinguished friends, chemists, and
physicists throughout Europe, America, and the British Dominions beyond
the Seas.

The celebration was held on April 22, 1904, in the beautiful Whitworth
Hall of the Victoria University in the presence of a large and
enthusiastic gathering of former students and colleagues, and of friends
who had journeyed to Manchester to present addresses.

Of all these addresses, the one, he says in his autobiography, that
touched him most nearly was that from his former pupils. It ran as
follows:

    We, the undersigned, all of whom have the honour to number
    ourselves among your pupils, desire on the occasion of the
    celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the date of your
    graduation as a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of
    Heidelberg to offer you our hearty congratulations, and to
    express our pleasure that you are able to be with us in health
    and strength to receive this testimony of our gratitude and
    esteem.

    The half-century which has elapsed since the day of your Doctor
    promotion _summa-cum-laude_, has witnessed an extraordinary
    development in that branch of natural knowledge to which you
    have particularly devoted yourself. We recall with pride in
    how large a measure your own labours have contributed to that
    growth—by your work as an original investigator, by your
    literary productions, by your remarkable and almost unexampled
    success as a teacher, by the influence you have exerted in
    the organization and direction of societies concerned with
    Science, by your unceasing and well-directed efforts to
    secure for Science its due position in the scheme of National
    Education and the fuller recognition of its relations to the
    well-being of civilized communities. It was your good fortune
    at the outset of your career to come under the influence of
    illustrious chemical philosophers—Graham, Williamson, Bunsen.
    Your good fortune has been our great gain. You have not only
    worthily upheld the traditions associated with such names, but
    you have inspired others by your example. Your influence is
    to be seen in the creation of the great School of Chemistry
    in which you have laboured for thirty years, and in which you
    taught hundreds of pupils; it is equally felt in the many
    similar places throughout this kingdom which are modelled upon
    the lines you indicated, and which are to-day actuated by your
    method and example.

    We gratefully recall the obligations that we are under to
    you as our teacher, and we cherish the memory of the signal
    services you have rendered to the Institution of which we
    are proud to be members. You came to it in the days of its
    precarious infancy, you assisted to rear it into a vigorous
    youth, sharing its aspirations, and stimulating its endeavours;
    you behold it now of age, and entering upon a great career.

    That you should have lived to see and enjoy this fruition of
    your labours is a matter of special gratification to us, as it
    must be to you. Blessed with continuing health and happiness
    may you long be spared to witness its growth in prosperity and
    usefulness.

To this address he replied:

    Of all gratifying and far too flattering addresses which I am
    to-day receiving, none come so near my heart as that signed by
    three hundred of my former students.

    What can a teacher value more than the sympathy and good
    opinion of his pupils, and this you have given me in full
    measure.

    If I succeeded in forming a School of Chemistry at Owens, it
    was because, in the first place, I learnt from Bunsen how the
    foundations of such a school must be laid; secondly, because I
    fortunately secured the co-operation in the task of good men
    and true, like Schorlemmer and Dittmar; and last but not least
    because I was surrounded by an ever-increasing band of young
    men imbued with the true scientific spirit, able and anxious to
    devote themselves to the study and to the advancement of their
    science.

    Well aware of my own deficiencies, and recognizing the gulf
    which lies between promise and performance, I yield to none
    in the personal interest which I take in your progress and
    welfare, and in the affectionate remembrance in which I hold
    each and all of you. Many, many thanks.

In his later years, and when the physical disabilities of age kept him
more and more indoors, Roscoe occupied himself in contributing short
articles to the _Deutsche Revue_ on academic or educational subjects.
Thus in his first article he recalls his Heidelberg experiences, and
dwells upon his friendly relations with German men of science, dating
from the early ’fifties of the last century. In a second article he
describes the rise of the English Universities—ancient and modern—their
characteristics and the differences in constitution and methods between
them and the German Universities. In 1908 an article entitled “An English
Man of Science on the Friendship of the German Emperor for England and
upon the relations of England and Germany,” indicates a certain feeling
of anxiety at the growing unrest he perceives in reference to Germany’s
intentions in so rapidly increasing the strength of her fleet. He follows
this up with a longer article on “The Peace Mission of the Sciences,” in
which he expands a favourite theme to which, to our grief, circumstances
have now given the lie direct. In quick succession he writes letters
to the editor on “A few words concerning England and Germany”;
“International Understanding”; “No more War in Europe”—in which he
strives to remove misapprehension, and to make clear to German readers
that there is no widespread feeling of animosity in this country towards
the Fatherland.

The following letter to the writer refers to this matter:—

    … Has Anschütz sent you his pamphlet on Couper? It is very
    interesting, and places C. on a level with Kekulé.… I am
    languishing for some scientific converse. I fear no chance of
    seeing you at present. But I should like to!

    As a _Zeitvertreib_ I have written a political diatribe
    entitled “Es soll in Europa kein mehr Krieg seyn” for the
    _Deutsche Revue_. The Powers will tremble when they read
    it—which they won’t! But the editor is pleased and calls me—or
    rather, I fancy, his daughter does—“Dearest Sir Henry”!

Under the title of “King Edward VII the Peacemaker” he contributed to
the same review a short article written a few weeks after the King’s
death, in which he dilated on his high personal qualities, his merits
as a ruler, and his love of order and peace. His last communication on
“Germany and England” the editor declined to print, but it was published
in _Nord und Sud_, an old-established and well-known fortnightly review
of good repute. The article is so characteristic of the good sense and
right feeling of its author that it is well worthy of reproduction, apart
from its interest in relation to the one supreme topic of the time.


    GERMANY AND ENGLAND.

    I write neither from the point of view of a diplomatist nor
    of a politician, but simply as a scientific man who, being
    a _Menschenfreund_ and _Deutsch-gesinnt_ and anxious to
    see differences between the nations as between individuals
    disappear, asks himself the questions, who are the people who
    are stirring up all this discord; what do they mean; what do
    they want; what is their power? We in England call these men
    Jingoes. In Germany, I believe, they are termed Pan-Germans or
    All-Deutschen. In France they are “Revanchistes,” and in Italy
    “Irredentisti.”

    What they mean is clear enough; they mean mischief. What
    they want is not so plain, for they do not tell us in simple
    language; indeed, I doubt whether they know themselves. That
    their language, whether spoken or written, is more or less
    dangerous to the peace of the world everybody admits. What is
    their power, and how far that danger goes, is another question.
    Nobody believes that their wish to set the nations by the ears
    is shared by the mass of mankind. The general good sense and
    honesty of the people of every nationality is a strong bulwark
    against Chauvinism. And if the true opinion of the British and
    of the German peoples could be obtained who can doubt that
    it would be in favour of peace and good feeling rather than
    of hostility and war? But to err is human, and to be misled
    is easy, so that it behoves those who love progress and hate
    all that opposes progress to use all efforts to denounce
    and destroy Chauvinism in every country and in every form.
    In England Jingoism has practically no power. In Parliament
    certainly none—witness the speeches lately delivered in both
    Houses—not one note of ill-feeling towards Germany was heard.
    On the contrary, the warmest expressions of appreciation of
    goodwill and friendship fell from the lips not only of the
    members of the present Government in Lords and Commons, but
    also from the leaders of the Opposition in both Houses, and
    the wish for an understanding with Germany was universal and
    emphatic.

    In the British Press, with a few dishonourable and unimportant
    exceptions, the same thing may truthfully be said. The working
    classes have never been infected by anti-Germanism. Our
    commercial men, who are brought into intimate trading relations
    with the Germans, desire an Anglo-German understanding beyond
    all other aspirations in the sphere of foreign policy.

    To believe that England now wishes, or is likely ever to
    wish, to go to war with Germany is a delusion in which only
    the insane can indulge. What on earth, may well be asked, can
    England gain by commencing war with Germany? Suppose, for
    instance, the British fleet could bombard and destroy Hamburg;
    in what way would such an act of vandalism benefit us? In no
    possible way; on the contrary, we should be cutting our own
    throats, for is not Hamburg one of our best customers, merely
    to look at the transaction from a monetary point of view?

    Let me pull down another idol. It has been said, and is still
    believed by many persons who ought to know better, that England
    is jealous of the rising, or risen, world-wide trade of
    Germany, and is determined to stop it in defence of her own.
    That such a view has been expressed by certain of my countrymen
    is, of course, a fact. But surely this is a totally false view.
    Imagine, if you can, Germany reduced to the condition of half
    a century ago, poor, disunited, with little or no world-wide
    trade. Would English commerce be more flourishing than when, as
    now, Germany is rich, united, and trading the wide world over?
    Certainly not. The richer our neighbours and competitors become
    the more will our own trade benefit. A man with sixpence in his
    pocket is not much good as a buyer. With a handful of gold he
    is a welcome customer! What the trade between the two countries
    was worth fifty years ago I don’t know, but it must have been
    a mere fraction of what it now amounts to, namely, over 100
    millions sterling a year.

    Is there any other point of view from which the notion that
    England can personally gain by making war on Germany can be
    urged? I do not know of one, and perhaps our Jingoes may even
    admit this. But say they: “If we do not declare war Germany
    is certain to do so. Is it not better for us to choose our
    own time and occasion rather than allow our enemy to take the
    step when the conditions are most favourable to them?” This
    conclusion is sound provided the premises are also sound. Does
    Germany intend to declare war or so to act as to bring about
    a war with this country? What is the evidence? Certainly if
    we are to accept the statements of the All-Deutschen party
    as representing the opinion of the nation at large there are
    good grounds for believing that war is inevitable. But surely
    every one who knows anything of Germany and German opinion is
    certain that the All-Deutschen have even less power to bring
    about war than our own Jingoes have, and that their utterances
    represent public opinion in Germany to a less extent than those
    of our Jingoes represent the English opinion. The debates in
    the Reichstag, the speeches of your Ministers, the expressions
    in the more responsible organs of the German Press, and the
    outspoken opinion of the German working classes, all tell the
    same tale, “We do not want war.”

    Still there remains in Germany a strong and widespread feeling
    of animosity—not to use a harsher term—towards England.
    Upon what is this feeling based? What has England done, is
    doing, or is going to do that should create such a feeling of
    mistrust and enmity? I have never been able to answer this
    question, and I believe it arises out of a misunderstanding
    and misconception; a sort of revival of the old French cry of
    “_Perfide Albion_.” Can these All-Germans point to any one of
    the many Anglo-German agreements which have been arrived at
    from the time when Germany began to expand down to the present
    moment which has not given Germany every opportunity to take
    her place in the sun?

    Let me come to the point. Has England interfered with German
    trade? If she has, she has failed egregiously, for in spite
    of England’s supposed efforts German trade has increased
    and is increasing by leaps and bounds. But what signs of
    interference has England shown? Can your Pan-Germans point to
    a single instance? It is easy to write fiery articles, and to
    attribute ill-feeling or jealousy, to say Germany cannot come
    out in the sun because Britain “rules the waves,” to assert
    that Englishmen dislike and despise the Germans, and that we
    are jealous of German prosperity. This is not only foolish
    and unfriendly talk, but it is false from beginning to end.
    Instead of endeavouring to limit German trade our policy of
    the open door has had the effect of expanding it enormously.
    All our ports at home and in foreign waters, all our offices,
    shops, and industries are open, and educated Germans have
    taken great advantage of our policy both to their own and to
    our immense benefit. Wherever British industry or commerce
    flourishes there German merchants or manufacturers are found,
    and there they remain. In our own great cities, in those of our
    oversea dominions, as well as in our most distant settlements,
    the ubiquitous German flourishes, and is a welcome strength
    to the community. What more can England do to assist German
    trade and industry than she has done and is doing? How can it
    with any truth be said that England stops Germany from coming
    out into the sun? “Yes,” these Pan-Germans may say, “we grant
    that you are very kind, and give us a helping hand. That is,
    however, not good enough for Germany. We must stand alone. We
    insist upon having a Colonial Empire, an Oversea Dominion, a
    _Deutschland über See_, as you have in Australasia, Canada, and
    South Africa.”

    Well, if these views were those of the German nation instead of
    that of a somewhat insignificant clique, and if Germany were
    to determine that at all hazards this wish must be fulfilled,
    the question would at once become of grave importance, because
    that would mean certain war with Britain, and probably with
    the United States. And for this reason England being a long
    consolidated great Power (_Welt Macht_), and having had the
    command of the sea, and her people having the faculty of
    successful colonization, has, for the last four hundred years
    at least, sent forth peaceful armies to annex and dwell in the
    most fruitful and habitable—but uncivilized—parts of the world.
    To such an extent has this movement been successful that nearly
    all the areas of land not already occupied by civilized man,
    and capable of being made a permanent home by Europeans, have
    been taken over by Englishmen or Americans, so that little
    space of the kind is left for the young and aspiring German
    nation to annex. Whether for good or for evil she has come too
    late for this game of grab, unless, indeed, she is so rash
    as to try to take land from those now in possession. This,
    of course, entails war, and war the damage of which—even if
    victorious on her side—no amount of land or gold could even
    in a small degree repay. As to the truth of this statement,
    consult the Credit Bankers of Berlin, and ask them what would
    be the condition of the Berlin Exchange the day after war was
    declared between Germany and England. I, for my part, do not
    believe that Germany or its people are gone mad, or likely to
    become so, and therefore I do not believe that Germany will
    ever try to wrest from England her Oversea Dominions or to
    invade the New World with the millions of armed men necessary
    to establish a Fatherland in the West.

    Much has lately been said about Germany being over-populated.
    Her people increase by nearly one million souls yearly. “Some
    outlet for these millions must be found,” say the All-Deutsch.
    Is this so clear? The population of Germany is not nearly
    so dense as that of our own country or that of Belgium, and
    in both these countries the conditions of life are quite as
    favourable as those in the Fatherland. Moreover, is it not true
    that to-day thousands of workers from other lands are flocking
    to fill new posts created by the ever-increasing demand for
    labour in the German industries?

    No! the high and glorious aim and true function of the German
    nation is not to try to conquer by the “mailed fist” either
    on land or sea, but to show how the world may be dominated
    by proving to mankind the grand results which accrue to
    civilization when a nation has both the power and the
    determination to carry out its high ideals. No other nation
    in either the Old or the New World possesses these ideals in
    such high degree, and is, therefore, so fully able and so well
    fitted to take the lead in this new departure as the German.

    The old game of war is played out. It has become a disgraceful
    instead of a glorious one in the eyes of twentieth-century
    men. We look to Germany to show how a modern state is to be
    carried on for the greatest good of its own people so as to
    become an example to the rest. Take the opinions of your great
    men of Science—men of the stamp of Helmholtz—men who looked
    forward instead of backwards, and be guided by them. Ask them
    in what is national glory to consist in the coming centuries.
    Do not pin your faith on those who, like Treitschke, argue that
    because war has been, it must continue to be, men who preach
    the false doctrine that its influence is a purifying one, and
    a saving grace. These views are those of the past. They do not
    represent the present, still less the future opinion of mankind.

    The time is now ripe, for has not Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg
    said on the part of the German people that the national slate
    is clean? It will be the greatest wickedness and folly of both
    nations if this appeal to the better feelings of the peoples is
    not welcomed and acted upon.

    Let Germany pursue her ideals, and her actions will rule the
    world, because those ideals and actions make for peace and
    progress.

That there was a section—and a not inconsiderable section—of the German
public to whom this appeal was not in vain was manifested by the
publication in Stuttgart of a remarkable article on “World Supremacy
or War,” written under the _nom-de-plume_ of “Nostradamus.” This so
impressed Roscoe that he translated it for the British-German Friendship
Society—a society of influential persons who strove to stem the rising
tide which broke down all barriers on that fateful day of August 1914.
The purport of the article was to point out that the true policy of
Germany was to seek an alliance with England. The writer admitted that we
were the first to offer the hand of friendship, but that under Bülow’s
_régime_ it was declined. He further shows it was this circumstance
that led England to seek alliances elsewhere—an action that was not
only natural but essential to our well-being, and wholly due to the
short-sighted policy of Germany. The pamphlet is too long to be quoted in
full, but a few extracts, read in the light of what is happening, may be
of interest.


    WORLD SUPREMACY OR WAR.

    … We have often enough declared that we never mean to attack
    England. Does any one imagine that a prudent nation will
    trust to such words when it comes to a question for her of to
    be or not to be? What is it those Britons see who have been
    following with interest for twenty years the events which have
    taken place in our country? A steady and continuous increase
    of armaments; a fleet born and growing each year more and more
    rapidly; a ruler who is restlessly active—now in the saddle,
    now on the captain’s bridge; his palace only used for sleeping.
    Wherever the Kaiser goes his forces are in the forefront.
    Exercises, manœuvres, mobilization of the fleet, war games,
    conferences, and speeches quickly follow one another. His
    speeches refer oftener than needful to the grip of the sword,
    and at the same time he sedulously endeavours to negotiate
    personally with his neighbouring States. Such things as the
    Kruger telegram and the expedition to Tangiers look like froth,
    but they really hide personal wishes and inclinations. Thus do
    the English see us. What can they, what must they think of it
    all? We are grown to be neighbours and yet we arm and arm. Our
    trade is protected, and for offensive purposes a fleet will
    arouse little sympathy. Have not both Holland and Belgium a
    large trade and yet no one thinks of wresting it from them.

    Against what is Germany arming if not against England’s command
    of the sea? Must not every Englishman think so? Has not their
    mistrust been fostered by our policy, by the utterances of our
    men of mark, by the opinions of our Press, and last but not
    least by the propaganda of our Navy League?

    How can a clear-headed people like the English entertain
    friendly feelings for us in view of these evident proofs of our
    mistrust? We have driven England into the Double Alliance. “He
    who is not with me is against me.” Should we not do exactly the
    same? We carry on a sentimental policy, play the injured party,
    whilst suspicion prevents us from being open-minded.

    The German Empire ought therefore only to have a fleet
    sufficient for her real needs, able to defend her coasts, to
    act as maritime police in the areas of smaller States, and
    to perform convoy duty for our troop-ships to our colonies.
    A larger fleet is in fact either a luxury or it is directed
    against England. Such logic is inexorable. For our centre
    of gravity—otherwise than is the case with England—lies at
    home. We are not dependent on the importation of foodstuffs;
    the 5 per cent. of what is not grown on our own soil must be
    sacrificed in war.

    As to our commerce, there will be no dispute. In the countries
    where our goods are sold the German merchant is not only a
    necessity but valued as an indispensable friend and educator.
    The merchant who is not able to create such a position is not
    worth having battleships near him to back up his weaknesses.
    Only the excellence and tastefulness of the wares he has to
    sell and the tact and ingenuity of the seller, coupled with a
    full knowledge of local requirements, can ensure the prosperity
    of our commerce; never the mailed fist! This cannot be repeated
    too often or too emphatically.

    Up to now the agreement with France and Russia has guaranteed
    England’s safety. Now England sees that France, relying on the
    military convention with her two friends, is working seriously
    for war. She knows that in Russia the voice for war against
    Germany is increasing. Such a war would weaken England’s Navy;
    it would throw a hundred and fifty thousand Englishmen on the
    battlefield;[30] it would mean heavy demands on the country’s
    finance and her colonies might make threatening movements
    against her sovereignty. She would also lose her best buyer and
    seller. Europe’s predominance would be imperilled!

    These are the weighty reasons why the English Government are
    trying—even at the eleventh hour—to prevent this war.

    Many object that the psychological moment will not arrive for
    this war. Internal conditions will tend to promote it. Never
    have the opportunities been so favourable for the French
    and Russians to cross swords with us, and to endeavour to
    annihilate our position as a leading Power of the Continent.

    France sees her population going down year by year. In the same
    ratio the prospect is dwindling for France to regain Alsace
    Lorraine and thereby increase of dominion, population, and
    prestige. The hatred of the conqueror continues to blaze; they
    have long since lost all respect for us, and they are longing
    to measure their strength with ours. Newspapers and leaflets
    stir up the flame and preach _ceterum censeo_.

    The Republic undoubtedly binds the people together more
    closely, and will provide more means and men for their
    armaments than is the case with us. And the call will not be in
    vain, neither are Alliances nor Military Conventions. Russia’s
    Army and England’s fleet, plus 150,000 men, are guaranteed to
    France. Italy is tied up in Tripoli, the North Sea Canal is
    unusable, a third of the German voters have shown themselves as
    enemies of the State, and party disputes have demoralized the
    nation. When will such a concatenation be repeated?

    And what is the outlook for Germany?

    Do not let us fear to look the matter straight in the face. A
    war on three sides. Our Navy against three Navies, and a triple
    superiority. Victory at sea is impossible. However much we may
    harm our opponents we are certain to lose many colonies. On
    the mainland fighting on two flanks. Of course we cannot deny
    it and must look at the future coolly. It is idle to waste
    words about such a war; let us leave talk to others. Let us
    look at a favourable solution: the defeat of both opponents.
    What would peace bring us? Annexation of more French or Russian
    possessions? No rational being could think of such a poisoned
    gift.

    And what about overseas and colonies? In foreign parts we shall
    have nothing more to say, for our mercantile and naval fleet
    will be almost entirely destroyed. And as for money indemnity,
    even in case we conquered our opponents we cannot hope for
    heavy terms. We shall be glad after this blood-letting to
    embrace peace and to receive a portion of our war expenses. We
    should have to fight hard, and only through rivers of blood and
    by straining every nerve can we hope to keep our Empire intact.
    In the 1870 war against the French Empire in nearly every case
    our victories were bought with superior losses. And how dear
    these victories cost us!

    But not numbers, nor weapons, nor careful preparations in
    times of peace are going to conquer in the war of the future.
    _Esprit_ alone will turn the scale, and to quote the words
    of Frederick the Great, “The _esprit_ of an army lies in its
    officers.” Those officers will have the best influence on their
    men who have the most hardened physique and who are trained
    each one according to his particular bent, and are able to do
    without comforts and have the natural gift of comradeship with
    the common soldier combined with strict discipline. They must
    evoke the soldiers’ esteem and dependence and the blind trust
    which the unselfish care of their men will produce. This can
    be brought about only by placing the well-being of the troops
    in the forefront, and without the slightest consideration on
    the officers’ part for their own advantage, unselfishly sinking
    their personality, rising to every situation with courage, and
    bracing up every weakling or coward under their care by their
    example. That corps which possesses these qualities to the
    fullest extent will carry victory with their colours, and only
    such a set of officers can be our salvation.

    Do not let us underestimate our opponents.

    On the west we have the French Army with a lurking desire
    for revenge, its material intelligent and full of soldierly
    qualities. The sons of the Republic will fight with the same
    courage they did in the 1870-1871 campaign but under better
    generalship. The French have learnt a great deal; may we not
    admit this to-day?

    And how is it with us?

    An admission must be made at a critical moment. That moment has
    arrived. In the course of time the sober and earnest speech and
    thought of the old Prussians has become remote. Let us beware
    of overconfidence in ourselves. We have a forty years’ peace
    behind us, which is not very good for the German Army. So much
    for us.

    And what will victory bring us?

    The loss of our Navy and our Colonies, and our own destruction
    only avoided by a sea of blood. What will happen when the
    people return home, awakened as to their own character and
    chastened by a fruitless fight? We speak of a favourable
    result. And if this does not occur? If Germany does not win in
    the next war shall we be bled to death? Bismarck said this, and
    let us admit it openly: “In this war we have nothing to gain
    and everything to lose.”

    He who brings about this war and who does not try to obviate
    the danger is perpetrating the greatest outrage on the German
    nation. He is endangering the creation of Bismarck and his
    King; he is playing with loaded dice.

Here was a voice crying in the wilderness—a prophet without honour in his
own country! But how true are his words!




CHAPTER XIII

HOME LIFE—LADY ROSCOE—WOODCOTE LODGE—PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS—DEATH


In 1863 Roscoe married the lady whom he had first met in his aunt
Crompton’s drawing-room in Hyde Park Square—Lucy, the youngest member
of the family of Edmund Potter, Esq., M.P. for Carlisle, a well-known
Manchester merchant and a friend and co-worker of Bright and Cobden.

Lady Roscoe was a strong and sincere character, of wide sympathies and
generous impulses, with a rich fund of common sense, and a high standard
of duty and performance. She had many intellectual interests and a
cultivated taste; was well read, a good judge of literary work, and
an assiduous collector of old rare and beautiful prints. In the early
days of her married life, and at a time when she had to work with wet
collodion or to prepare her own dry plates, she was recognized by experts
as a clever photographer, and obtained medals from the Photographic
Society for the technical excellence and artistic merit of her exhibits.
She was an admirable hostess, and all who have had the privilege of
partaking of her hospitality cherish an unfading memory of her kindly
manner, her quiet dignity, and unfailing tact. Time dealt tenderly with
her; the additional years brought an added charm, a widened sympathy,
and a larger measure of gentleness and pity. With her healthful, smiling
face and beautiful white hair, her characteristically simple dress and
the rare lace she draped about her head and shoulders, no woman was
ever more successful in the art of growing old gracefully. She died in
1910. Of this union it was said by one who had the best opportunities
of judging: “Of the forty-seven years of married life one who looked on
can say there never were two more of one heart and mind.” The one sorrow
of their lives—and it was a profound sorrow, a grief that changed the
whole current of their aspirations—was the death of their only son when
an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, just as he was entering on
manhood. He was a young man of great charm of manner, of high ideals,
and a strong sense of duty and responsibility, and with the ambition to
serve in a career of public usefulness or in some position in which his
well-marked powers of literary expression might be turned to account. Two
daughters were also born of this marriage, the elder of whom married Mr.
Charles E. Mallet, formerly M.P. for Plymouth and Under-Secretary for War
in the last Liberal Government.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nowhere did Roscoe appear to greater advantage than in his home. His
domestic life was singularly unclouded save for the one great sorrow
“that failed the bright promise of an early day.” He had no great
anxieties and few cares—only the passing ones that attend the work of one
who strives to do with all his might whatsoever his hand findeth to do.
He was

    Blessed with a temper whose unclouded ray
    Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day.

This happy condition of mind was, no doubt, largely temperamental; it
was based upon a calm and equable disposition that would have taken
Fortune’s buffets and rewards with equal thanks. That there were more
rewards than buffets was due less to Fortune than to himself, for he was
the architect of his own career, and used his opportunities wisely. It is
true he started with advantages—a handsome presence, a well-knit, manly
frame, a frank, ingenuous manner, good social connections, and, after his
marriage, no anxieties as to the _res angusta domi_.

He was fond of the society of his fellows, hospitably disposed, and of
a warm, genial nature. Indeed he had a genius for friendship, and a
boundless capacity for sympathy and kindness—instinctive, spontaneous,
impulsive—the sort of sympathy where action follows hard upon the
heels of inclination, and the kind of kindness which is doubled
because it acts quickly. Innumerable instances of his little nameless,
but _not_ unremembered acts of kindness and of love might be culled
from a correspondence which stretches over half a century. But one
characteristic action must suffice:

                                                10 BRAMHAM GARDENS,
                                               _November 25, 1893_.

    I heard of you yesterday as having been out in a
    bath-chair—poor man!—so I came to two conclusions: (1) That you
    had been very ill. (2) That you were better. We have just come
    back from three hours at Woodcote, and I said, “I wish Thorpe
    was here.” “Why not ask him and his wife to stay here next
    week?” said my better-half. So this I now do, and I hope you
    will go there: the air is lovely: the house is warm. There is
    an old woman who can cook—and an old man who cannot. You could
    take one of your own maids to wait, and there is everything
    ready—beds and sitting-rooms, bread and meat—only no whisky.

    I shall be delighted if you will both go there on Tuesday.
    There is Judy the pony and its cart at your service, and I can
    order a closed carriage to take you up.

    You _must_ take care of yourself. This attack ought to be and
    will be a warning to you not to work on as you have done. It is
    serious, and I am, with many friends, anxious you should draw
    in your horns. Really your professional work is enough for one
    man, and what a pile you put on to the top of this!

    Let me know, if possible, to-morrow (Sunday) night whether you
    will go. I am sure you would enjoy yourselves, and I will let
    E⸺ know so that all shall be ready.

No man was more quick to recognize and to appreciate merit and worthy
motives. Of strong common sense, perfectly sincere, frank and direct of
speech, of an integrity of purpose which was perfectly obvious and which
admitted of no unworthy compromise, he was, as they say in the quaint
forceful Lancashire dialect he loved at times to recall as the speech
of his forerunners, his eminent grandfather included—“jannock”[31] to
the backbone—the very type we associate with the national character.
These marks of his personality constituted the source of his influence.
A broad-minded man, who thought spaciously and did things magnanimously,
nature intended him to be a leader. His example was infectious, and
nowhere was it more obvious than at Owens College, where the success of
his own department was a constant stimulus to his colleagues. Men valued
his counsel because they trusted his judgment.

He knew his limitations as a man of science. He was too honest and
sincere to cherish any illusions as to the position posterity would
assign to him as a leader in chemical inquiry. The profound respect,
amounting almost to reverence, he had for Faraday, Joule, Bunsen,
Helmholtz—all men he learned to know personally—was based upon the
knowledge that they had reached intellectual heights to which he
could not climb. He had not the studious, contemplative habit of his
master Graham. Contact with Williamson kindled no latent faculty
for speculation. The shibboleths of modern chemistry—types, bonds,
linkages, chains, etc., etc., had hardly more real meaning for him than
they had for Bunsen, to whom they were practically unintelligible. It
was characteristic of both that when, at Kekulé’s solicitation, they
jointly attended the chemical congress on nomenclature at Carlsruhe
in 1860, when Cannizzaro brought forward his memorable communication
concerning the rational basis of fixing atomic and molecular weights,
they should not have recognized its significance. Of course they were
not singular in this respect. The revolution did not come at once.
Avogadro’s hypothesis never affected Bunsen’s teaching; some years were
needed before it reached Manchester, and there are still survivals
who never have been clear why water should be HO one year and H₂O the
next. Bunsen, indeed, used to say that one new chemical fact, even an
unimportant one, accurately determined, was worth a whole congress of
discussion of matters of theory. The truth was Roscoe, in chemistry as
in other matters, was primarily a man of action: he was essentially an
“experimentarian philosopher,” as Hobbes sneeringly dubbed the whole of
the Fellows of the Royal Society. A fact absolutely ascertained was a
definite and permanent addition to knowledge; hypotheses and theories
were transitory and mutable; they have their day and cease to be.

But it would be unjust and untrue to assume that Roscoe set no value on
theory: he fully recognized that she was the handmaid of Science. He who
had so carefully studied Dalton’s papers and followed the workings of
his mind in the light of a century’s experience, could not be unmindful
of the worth of a fruitful conception. Mendelejeff’s generalization
when it was first promulgated at once attracted him, and he followed
its startling verifications with the greatest interest. It was always
a matter of gratification that his detection of the true relations of
vanadium to the other elements, just prior to the announcement of the Law
of Periodicity, should have removed at least what would have been one
apparent exception to the universality of its truth.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Roscoe first settled in Manchester he lived with his mother in the
house which had been occupied by his predecessor, the late Sir Edward
Frankland. On his marriage he moved to Victoria Park, and subsequently,
after the birth of his children, to a larger residence which was built
for him in the same neighbourhood. It was a charming, well-arranged
house surrounded by a good-sized garden, and with an excellent tennis
lawn, to which his colleagues and senior students were freely invited
on half-holidays during the summer months. In those days Roscoe was an
active player, his reach and length of stride making him a formidable
opponent. Both he and Lady Roscoe were fond of horses, and for some
years riding in company with her was his usual form of outdoor exercise.
Occasionally they would plan a driving tour together, and considerable
sections of England and Wales were explored in this way. Whilst his
children were young his long vacations were usually spent in the Lakes
or in Scotland, or at Mr. Edmund Potter’s country seat, Camfield Place,
near Hatfield. Roscoe’s long vacations usually meant to him either a
change of occupation, or the continuance of a piece of literary work in
new surroundings. Many of his memoirs were, in fact, put together during
his vacations: it was only at such periods, when, free from the routine
of lecturing, laboratory superintendence and College committees, that
he could count upon the necessary freedom from interruption to arrange
the results of an inquiry. The compilation of his smaller text-books
was usually done at such times. The large treatise which he wrote with
Schorlemmer, and which necessarily needed ready access to a library
rich in serial publications, was mainly composed in Manchester. At one
period of his career he was a frequent contributor to certain of the
quarterly reviews, and the early volumes of _Nature_ contain occasional
communications from his pen. It was a point of honour to translate any
paper of Bunsen’s for the _Philosophical Magazine_.

During the earlier portion of his Parliamentary career he lived in Mrs.
Potter’s town house in Queen’s Gate, until he moved to Bramham Gardens,
South Kensington, which continued to be his London house until a short
time before his death.

Although he always regarded his thirty years at Owens as his chief work,
the thirty years of his London life were hardly less busy than the time
he spent in Manchester. The occupation might not be so continuous, but it
was certainly more multifarious. Ten years of Parliamentary and active
political life had brought with them new activities and fresh demands
upon his time and energy, and except for occasional periods of enforced
idleness due to attacks of gout—the only constitutional weakness from
which he suffered, and which, as he used ruefully to observe, he had
done nothing to deserve—he was always busy. He had a serious attack of
pneumonia in the winter of 1902, which left him enfeebled for a time,
but eventually, after a summer in Mürren and Burgenstock and a winter
in Algiers and Sicily, he seemed to have completely shaken off its ill
effects. Otherwise his sound and vigorous constitution kept him free
from even passing ailments, and his fourscore years were passed with few
interruptions to his activity from illness.

Shortly after Roscoe took up his residence in London he sought for some
_pied-à-terre_ in the country for the sake of rest and change of scene,
and relief from the physical and mental strain of continuous life in
town. In 1892 he was able to obtain a delightful place on Lord Lovelace’s
property in Surrey, some two dozen miles from London. It was beautifully
situated on the North Downs, between Guildford and Dorking, amidst some
of the loveliest scenery in the South of England. He and Lady Roscoe
altered it to suit their requirements: he to build a spacious study and
to provide room for his many books, and she to house her own collection
which was even more numerous, and to accommodate the many works of art
with which she had surrounded herself. Roscoe has given a charming
word-picture in his autobiography of this ideal retreat, to which as the
years increased they became more and more attached. Here they had

    An elegant sufficiency, content,
    Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,
    Ease and alternate labour.

Here Lady Roscoe could indulge to the full her taste in gardening, and
the cultivation of flowers and flowering shrubs became her main outdoor
occupation. She worked at her hobby with all the enthusiasm and skill she
had formerly displayed in photography, and with equal success, for she
made Woodcote noted throughout the country-side for the choiceness and
richness of its floral wealth. One who knew her well wrote of her:

    Flowers were named after her not so much as a criterion of her
    horticultural knowledge, as a recognition of an almost lavish
    generosity to the seedsmen and nursery gardeners, many of whom
    were her personal friends.

Attached to the property was a home-farm of some seventy acres, which had
been allowed to get into a very backward state. Roscoe, with no previous
experience of farming, resolved to bring it into better condition, and
with the help of his Westmoreland bailiff he gradually succeeded in
doing so. The business was a constant interest to him. He was proud of
his cart-horses which gained commendation and prizes at the local shows;
of his well-bred Jersey cows; of his breed of Berkshire pigs—the little
pigs were a constant source of amusement—and of his poultry. He records
with much satisfaction that “our” field—(he always associated his bailiff
with these agricultural triumphs, as he always associated his co-workers
with his scientific achievements)—“our field of swedes on several
occasions received the first prize for the best show twenty miles round
Guildford.” He went round his farm as he used to go round his laboratory,
and seemed to be on the same genial terms with every animal on it as he
had been with his students. The affectionate regard with which he used to
contemplate an old sow—a most prolific creature by the way—was a source
of much fun to his friends. If she did not wholly succeed in “paying the
rint,” she doubtless did her best towards it, and so merited and received
commendation.

The hospitality of Woodcote is a treasured memory to numbers of Roscoe’s
friends. Few week-ends passed without one or more of them sharing its
pleasures with him. Sometimes it would be one of his old associates in
scientific work, or a political acquaintance, or a literary friend,
or some distinguished man of science from abroad. Indeed, few foreign
scientific men of any note passed through London without finding their
way to Roscoe’s hospitable board.

    My father (says Miss Roscoe) delighted to bring foreigners,
    and the more heterogeneous they were the more he was pleased.
    I remember one luncheon party of late years, consisting of a
    Chinaman, a Japanese, a Czech, a German, and our three selves,
    and the Occidentals were much the quietest of the party.

The visitors’ book at Woodcote is a possession of no little historical
interest.

In spite of their varied delights and restful charm there were times
when Roscoe was not wholly content to breathe his native air in his own
grounds: pigs, poultry, and potatoes, as he said, occasionally lost
their spell, and “the pathetic sadness of a garden in autumn” would
drive him and Lady Roscoe to a sunnier clime. Grasse, Italy, Egypt,
Sicily, Algiers, Tunis, Biskra were in turn visited by them during
different winters. Both he and his wife were fond of foreign travel, and
well-written books of travel were a constant source of interest to her.

And so the evening of their lives drew to its close. Her end came
swiftly—and with scarce a warning. His call was to come five years
afterwards, and was to be no less sudden and equally unlooked for.

In the meantime came the War, with all its horrors, griefs, and
anxieties—the crushed hopes for the Peace he had struggled to preserve so
far as in him lay—the unending enmity and bitterness he foresaw between
two nations that in his big heart he had fondly linked together as the
mightiest humanizing forces of the world. It was a real grief to him
that he should have lived to see it all. He frequently thought and spoke
of his old Heidelberg friends—most of whom had passed away—and tried to
realize their feeling of horror at the spectacle which now confronts
us. But his Germany was not the Germany of to-day, and gradually and
reluctantly he was compelled to admit it. He still continued to occupy
himself with his customary pursuits—so long as recurrent attacks of
his arch-enemy the gout would permit. He read assiduously and took an
active interest in current topics—the varying fortunes of the struggle,
politics, and scientific matters. He preserved, in fact, all the
interests of his life to the end. How mentally alert and vigorous he
remained will be evident from the following letters:

                                                    WOODCOTE LODGE,
                                         WEST HORSLEY, LEATHERHEAD,
                                              _September 20, 1914_.

    I have been laid up, more or less, since the war broke out
    with dyspepsia and gout, but now I am recovering. What are you
    doing, and when can we meet—which means when can you come here?

    What do you say to Ostwald! I enclose a cutting from the
    _Westminster_—which please return, as I am going to book it for
    future reference. I agree with you that his swelled head is
    cracked.

    What horrors! One can scarcely believe that the German, as
    you and I have known him, could have assumed such brutal
    characteristics as we read of. Here we are peaceful enough,
    but thirty young men, including Tom Huck, have gone from our
    village of 700 souls. Not bad!

    Our crops are in—hay poor; oats ditto; wheat fair. Pigs in
    plenty, but no sale during the summer. I find on totting up
    that during ten years—some very bad—of farming my average loss
    has been £58 per annum, which I don’t think is unsatisfactory,
    as I get quite that amount of value—beyond market price—in
    having good foodstuffs, and then pleasure in the processes and
    interest in the varying conditions, and in making things go in
    a bad situation for a farmer.

    The war is not bad for the only commercial undertaking I have
    ever been connected with, for the demand for K, or rather NaCy,
    is great owing to the disappearance of the Continental supply,
    and the C. K. Co. are increasing the production to fill up the
    void.

    Then I am again Chairman of the Lister, owing to B⸺ declining
    to have anything to do with a proposal to join the National
    Medical Research Committee—which the Governing Body suggest,
    and the question is to be settled in October by the vote of the
    members of the Lister Institute. So I am still awake, though
    lame and gouty.

    Give my love to your wife, and let me hear from you.…

    What is the name of the lame organic chemist who went from
    Heidelberg to the Badische?

       *       *       *       *       *

                                                    WOODCOTE LODGE,
                                               _February 19, 1915_.

    … The Government have been bamboozled by a want of scientific
    acumen at the head—a not unusual occurrence _chez nous_. Thanks
    for sending me the report.… I am at last downstairs, and more
    or less in my right mind as well. So I feel better, but I do
    not suppose I shall be able to go up to town and mix with the
    gay world, as was my wont, until the March winds are over. A
    chill with me means six weeks indoors, if not something more
    serious.

    What I need is to have some scientific gossip let loose at
    me, but you in your southern retirement are no use at all in
    that direction. Has your boat yet been requisitioned by the
    Admiralty, and if so, do you go out in charge, having, of
    course, previously joined the Navy?

    We have here received notice to be prepared to drive off
    somewhere or other all our living animals, horses, cows,
    calves, pigs, and fowls! I scarcely know where I come in. Also
    I believe we are to destroy all our crops, gathered or not
    gathered—hay, potatoes, corn, and garden vegetables—so that the
    Hun may be an hungred! Also I propose to empty my large cellar
    of wine either down the drain or into the duck-pond, like Sir
    Wilfrid Lawson.

    I await with anxiety the result of the R[oyal] S[ociety]
    election. If I were a betting man I should back G⸺ and M⸺,
    and perhaps my R⸺ ought to come in 15th. What about the 104
    necessarily rejected candidates! Is it not absurd!

       *       *       *       *       *

                                                    WOODCOTE LODGE,
                                              _September 21, 1915_.

    … My old friend Pattisson, our Treasurer at the Lister, is
    dead, and most of our men have joined the war in one or
    other capacity. So much lies on my shoulders, and though
    pretty broad, they are old, and I feel the responsibility of
    chairmanship.

He attended the meeting of the Lister Institute which has been referred
to in one of his previous letters. The result disappointed him, but as
it was not wholly unexpected, it but slightly, if at all, disturbed
his usual philosophic calm. The death of his friend Rücker, the first
Principal of the London University, a man whom he greatly respected and
admired, which occurred on November 1st, was a far more serious blow, and
affected him greatly.

He had retired to rest at his customary hour, in his usual serene and
happy condition of mind and health, after spending a couple of hours in
his daughter’s society in the drawing-room reading or amusing himself,
as was his wont, on the pianola with one of Beethoven’s sonatas or some
other classical piece. He had been thinking of his approaching birthday,
and had suggested a little gathering of a chosen few of his old students
whom he knew would be glad to celebrate it with him. But this was not
to be. _Diis aliter visum._ Shortly after daybreak on the morning of
December 18, 1915, he was seized with an attack of angina pectoris, and
passed away with scarcely a struggle. With

    No cold gradations of decay,
    Death broke at once the vital chain,
    And freed his soul the nearest way.

What was mortal of him was laid to rest in Brookwood Cemetery in the
grave which held the cherished partner of his life.




FOOTNOTES


[1]

    Johnnie Carnegie lais heer,
      Descendit of Adam and Eve;
    Gif ony con gang hieher,
      Ise willing give him leve.

[2] “Some Chemical Facts Respecting the Atmosphere of
Dwelling-houses.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Chem. Soc. Jour._ X. (1858),
pp. 251-268.

[3] “The Owens College: its Foundation and Growth.” By Joseph
Thompson. Manchester: J. E. Cornish.

[4] “Note on the Spontaneous Polymerisation of Volatile
Hydrocarbons at the Ordinary Atmospheric Temperature.” By H. E.
Roscoe. _Chem. Soc. Trans._ XLVII. (1885), pp. 669-671.

[5] “Photochemical Researches.” By R. W. Bunsen and H. E. Roscoe:

Part I. Measurement of the chemical action of light. (_Phil.
Trans._ (1857), pp. 355-380.)

Part II. Phenomena of photochemical induction. (_Phil. Trans._
(1857), pp. 381-402.)

Part III. Optical and chemical extinction of the chemical rays.
(_Phil. Trans._ (1857), pp. 601-620.)

Part IV. Comparative and absolute measurement of the chemical
rays. Chemical action of diffuse daylight. Chemical action of
direct sunlight. Photochemical action of the sun compared with
that of a terrestrial source of light. Chemical action of the
constituent parts of solar light. (_Phil. Trans._ (1859), pp.
879-926.)

Part V. On the direct measurement of the chemical action of
sunlight. (_Phil. Trans._ (1863), pp. 139-160.)

[6] “On the Measurement of the Chemical Brightness of Various
Portions of the Sun’s Disk.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Roy. Soc. Proc._
XII. (1862), pp. 648-650.

[7] “On a Method of Meteorological Registration of the Chemical
Action of Total Daylight.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Phil. Trans._ CLV.
(1865), pp. 605-632.

[8] “Note on the Relative Chemical Intensities of Direct Sunlight
and Diffuse Daylight at Different Altitudes of the Sun.” By H. E.
Roscoe and J. Baxendell. _Roy. Soc. Proc._ XV. (1867), pp. 20-24.

[9] “On the Chemical Intensity of Total Daylight at Kew and Pará,
1865-1867.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Phil. Trans._ CLVII. (1867), pp.
555-570.

[10] “On the Relation between the Sun’s Altitude and the Chemical
Intensity of Total Daylight in a Cloudless Sky.” By H. E. Roscoe
and T. E. Thorpe. _Phil. Trans._ CLX. (1870), pp. 209-316.

[11] “On a Self-recording Method of Measuring the Intensity of
the Chemical Action of Total Daylight.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Roy.
Soc. Proc._ XXII. (1874), pp. 158-159.

[12] “On the Absorption of Hydrochloric Acid and Ammonia in
Water.” _Chem. Soc. Jour._ XII. (1860), pp. 128-151.

[13] “On the Composition of the Aqueous Acids of Constant
Boiling-point.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Chem. Soc. Jour._ XIII. (1861),
pp. 146-164; XV. (1862), pp. 213-216.

[14] “On Perchloric Acid and its Hydrates.” By H. E. Roscoe.
_Roy. Soc. Proc._ II. (1861), pp. 493-503.

[15] “Note on Perchloric Ether.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Chem. Soc.
Jour._ XV. (1862), pp. 213-216.

[16] “On the Isomorphism of Thallium Perchlorate with the
Potassium and Ammonium Perchlorates.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Chem.
Soc. Jour._ IV. (1866), pp. 504-505.

[17] “Researches on Vanadium.” Part I. By H. E. Roscoe. _Phil.
Trans._ CLVIII. (1868), pp. 1-28.

[18] “Researches on Vanadium.” Part II. By H. E. Roscoe. _Phil.
Trans._ CLIX. (1869), pp. 679-692.

[19] “Researches on Vanadium.” Part III. By H. E. Roscoe. _Phil.
Trans._ CLX. (1870), pp. 317-332.

[20] “On Two New Vanadium Minerals.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Roy. Soc.
Proc._ XXV. (1877), pp. 109-112.

[21] “A Study of Certain Tungsten Compounds.” By H. E. Roscoe.
_Manchester Lit. Phil. Soc. Proc._ XI. (1872), pp. 79-90.

[22] “On a New Chloride of Uranium.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Chem. Soc.
Jour._ XII. (1874), pp. 933-935.

[23] “Note on the Specific Gravity of the Vapours of the
Chlorides of Thallium and Lead.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Roy. Soc.
Proc._ XXVII. (1878), pp. 426-428.

[24] “A Study of Some of the Earth-metals contained in
Samarskite.” By H. E. Roscoe. _Chem. Soc. Jour._ XLI. (1882), pp.
277-282.

[25] “The Spectrum of Terbium.” By H. E. Roscoe and A. Schuster.
_Chem. Soc. Jour._ XLI. (1882), pp. 283-287.

[26] “On the Measurement of the Chemical Intensity of Total
Daylight made at Catania during the Solar Eclipse of December 22,
1870.” By H. E. Roscoe and T. E. Thorpe. _Phil. Trans._ CLXI.
(1871), pp. 467-476.

[27] This query refers to the circumstance that at the time Lady
Roscoe was growing _Dictamnus Fraxinella_—the so-called “burning
bush”—for the writer, who had undertaken to investigate the cause
of the phenomenon which has given the plant its trivial name.
The ready inflammability was found to be due to the accumulation
in the vesicles on the flower-stems of small quantities of an
essential oil.

[28] “On Schützenberger’s Process for the Estimation of Dissolved
Oxygen in Water.” By H. E. Roscoe and Joseph Lunt. _Chem. Soc.
Trans._ (1889), LV. 552.

[29] “Contributions to the Chemical Bacteriology of Sewage.” By
H. E. Roscoe and Joseph Lunt. _Phil. Trans._ (1891), CLXXXII. pp.
633-664.

[30] It has thrown upwards of five millions.

[31] _Anglice_: “Fair, honest, straightforward, upright, genuine,
square.” Wright’s “English Dialect Dictionary.” Cf. Nodal and
Milner’s “Lancashire Glossary.”




INDEX


  Absorption of hydrochloric acid and ammonia in water, 121

  Agassiz, Louis, 116

  Alais meteorite, 132

  Allerton Hall, 6

  Arsenic-eating in Styria, 132

  Atomic weights, Dalton’s first table of, 132


  Baines, Sir Edward, 61, 73

  Bakerian Lectures, 114

  Balmain, William H., 17

  Barnes, Rev. Dr., 36

  Baxendell, Joseph, 114

  Bessemer process, application of spectroscope to, 133

  Brühl, Professor, 140

  Bryce, Lord, 43

  Bunsen, R. W., his characteristics, 24, 26

  Burning bush, 157


  Carbon dioxide in sea air, 115

  Carnegie, Mr. Andrew, 109

  Carnegie Scholarships and Fellowships, 169

  Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 55, 57, 61, 81

  Chemical action of light, 110

  “Chemistry Primer,” 139

  Chorley, Henry, his appreciation of Henry Roscoe, 14

  Clarke, William, 4, 6

  Clothworkers’ Company of London, 57, 75, 88

  Colonna, Vittoria, her life, by Maria Roscoe, 16

  Columbium trichloride, 181

  Conversation Club, Leeds, 55

  Crompton, Mr. Justice, 20


  Darwin, Sir George, 136

  Darwin, Horace, 121

  Debus, Dr. Heinrich, 142

  Delafontaine, Philippe, 131

  _Deutsche Revue_, 179

  Devonshire, Duke of, 44, 61, 81, 82

  Dittmar, Wilhelm, 27-35, 121

  Draper (of New York), 110


  Eclipse expedition to Sicily, 134

  Enfield, Dr. William, 15

  Ethyl perchlorate, 122

  Eton College, 165


  Fairbairn, Sir Andrew, 55

  Fairfax, Henry, 46

  Fairfax, Lord, 46

  Faulkner, George, 29

  Firth College, Sheffield, 167

  Forster, W. E., 61, 66, 82

  Frankland, Sir Edward, 128


  Germany and England, 180

  Gibson, John, sculptor, 6

  Goldsmid, Sir Julian, 162

  Gott, Rev. Dr., Bishop of Truro, 73

  Graham, Thomas, his characteristics as a lecturer, 19

  Green, Prof. A. H., 59

  Greenwood, Principal, 34, 44, 48, 50

  Guthrie, Dr. Frederick, 35


  Harden, Dr., 36, 141, 189

  Heaton, Dr. J. D., 55, 57, 83, 86

  Heddle, Professor (of St. Andrews), 126, 127

  Heywood, James, F.R.S., 47

  Heywood, Joseph, 101, 126


  Irving, Washington, his appreciation of William Roscoe, 12


  Jevons, Stanley, 20

  “John Dalton and the Rise of Modern Chemistry,” 141

  Jones, H. L., his plan for University of Manchester, 47

  Joule, James P., 37


  Lead and thallium chlorides, vapour densities of, 131

  Leeds Educational Council, 55

  “Lessons in Elementary Chemistry,” 138

  Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, 171

  Liveing, Dr., first laboratory in Cambridge, 23

  Lunt, Dr. Joseph, 139, 158

  Lupton, Francis, 75


  M’Creery, John, 6

  Manchester University, early attempts to found, 45

  Marshall, Prof. John, his appointment to the Yorkshire College, 74

  Miall, Prof. Louis C., his appointment to Yorkshire College, 42

  Morley, Viscount, of Blackburn, 109


  “New View of Dalton’s Atomic Theory,” 141

  Nussey, Arthur, plan for a Technical Institution for Leeds, 54

  Nussey, George Henry, his plan for a Technical Institution for Leeds and
      District, 54

  Nussey, Thomas, 53


  Owens College, its origin, 28;
    its foundation, 30;
    its first professors, 31;
    its location, 31;
    its growth, 32;
    its extension, 41;
    new constitution, 42;
    its first attempt to include women, 43;
    erection of new buildings, 44;
    new chemical laboratories, 44

  Owens, John, 28, 29

  Owens, Owen, 28


  Pankhurst, Dr. Richard Marsden, 91

  Perchloric acid and its hydrates, 122

  “Philippium,” 131

  Photochemical induction, 111

  Photometric observations at Pará, 115;
    near Lisbon, 120

  Playfair, Lord, 62;
    his address on technical education, 63, _et seq._

  Pulling, Prof. F. S., his appointment to the Yorkshire College, 74


  Reform Bills, 1831-1832, drafted by Henry Roscoe, 13

  Reid, Sir Wemyss, his support of the Yorkshire College, 68, 141

  Ripon, Lord, 61, 66, 80, 82

  Roscoe, Henry, his birth, 12;
    his characteristics, 12;
    becomes a barrister, 13;
    his legal works, 13;
    drafts Reform Bills of 1831-1832; his “Life of William Roscoe,” 13;
    married Maria Fletcher, 15;
    becomes Judge of the Court of Passage, 14;
    his death, 14;
    appreciation of him by Henry Chorley, 14

  Roscoe, Henry Enfield, his birth, 16;
    his education, 17;
    receives his first lessons in chemistry from William H. Balmain, 17;
    enters University College, London, 18;
    connection with Thomas Graham, 19;
    elects to follow chemistry as a career, 20;
    enters Birkbeck Laboratory, 21;
    his appreciation of Williamson, 21;
    becomes Williamson’s assistant, 21;
    is offered an assayership in the Sydney Mint, 22;
    takes his degree in the University of London, 22;
    goes to Bunsen at Heidelberg, 23;
    in Heidelberg, 25;
    his first published paper, 25;
    makes his doctor examination, 25;
    memorial lecture on Bunsen, 25-26;
    studies German University system, 26;
    returns to London, 27;
    is appointed to Owens College, 27;
    his work at Owens, 34;
    his part in shaping the curriculum of the new University, 38;
    is elected Chairman of Convocation, 90;
    as a teacher, 97;
    is offered lectureship at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 97;
    Chair at Oxford, 98;
    his method of working the Chemical Department at Owens, 98;
    his characteristics as a lecturer, 101;
    his portraits by Burgess and Herkomer, 103;
    address by students, 103;
    as an investigator, 110;
    gives his first Bakerian Lecture, 114;
    studies the absorption of hydrochloric acid and ammonia in water, 121;
    perchloric acid and its hydrates, 122;
    vanadium and its compounds, 123;
    gives his second Bakerian Lecture, 128;
    studies tungsten compounds, 130;
    discovers uranium pentachloride, 130;
    discovers columbium trichloride, 131;
    determines vapour densities of chlorides of lead and thallium, 131;
    disproves existence of “philippium,” 131;
    maps spark spectrum of terbium, 131;
    redetermines the atomic weight of carbon, 131;
    lectures on spectrum analysis, 132;
    papers on spectrum analysis, 134;
    Sicilian eclipse expedition, 134;
    wreck of H.M.S. _Psyche_, 135;
    “Lessons in Elementary Chemistry,” 138;
    “Chemistry Primer,” 139;
    “Treatise on Chemistry,” 139;
    “John Dalton and the Rise of Modern Chemistry,” 141;
    “New View of Dalton’s Atomic Theory,” 141;
    writes his life and experiences, 144;
    is elected into the Royal Society, 146;
    is awarded a Royal Medal, 146;
    joins Chemical Society, 146;
    is President, 146;
    “Society of Chemical Industry,” 147;
    receives medal of Society of Chemical Industry, 149;
    Honorary President of the International Congress of Applied
      Chemistry, 149;
    British Association, 150;
    British Association President, 151;
    member of Royal Commissions, 152;
    is knighted, 154;
    enters Parliament, 154;
    political services, 155;
    chemical adviser to Metropolitan Board of Works, 157;
    becomes Vice-Chancellor London University, 162;
    Fellow of Eton College, 165;
    member of Scottish Universities Commission, 167;
    of Royal Commission of 1851 Exhibition, 168;
    examiner in the Science and Art Department, 170;
    Lister Institute, 171;
    dignities and honours, 175;
    member of Privy Council, 176;
    his jubilee, 177;
    the _Deutsche Revue_, 179;
    Germany and England, 180;
    home life, 190;
    characteristics, 191;
    Woodcote Lodge, 197;
    death, 203

  Roscoe, Maria, her marriage, 15;
    her “Life of Vittoria Colonna,” 16;
    her characteristics, 16;
    letter from, 39

  Roscoe, William, his birth, 2;
    his schooling, 2;
    his love of literature, 2;
    becomes an attorney, 2;
    his poem “Mount Pleasant,” 3;
    attacks the Slave Trade, 3;
    welcomes the French Revolution, 3;
    his studies of Italian literature, 4;
    his “Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” 4;
    his translation of Tansillo’s “Nurse,” 5;
    his “Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth,” 5;
    purchases Allerton Hall, 6;
    reclamation of Chat Moss, 6;
    his connection with John M’Creery, 6;
    his protection of John Gibson, 6;
    his interest in botany, 7;
    founded Society for the Encouragement of the Arts of Painting and
      Design, in Liverpool, 7;
    Liverpool Academy, 7;
    Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, 7;
    Liverpool Lyceum, 8;
    Liverpool Atheneum, 8;
    Liverpool Botanic Garden, 8;
    Liverpool Royal Institution, 8;
    is elected member for Liverpool, 9;
    his share in the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 9;
    votes for Catholic Emancipation, 10;
    riots in Liverpool, 10;
    his Parliamentary work, 10;
    failure of Liverpool bank, 10;
    his monograph on the monandrian plants, 11;
    his edition of Pope’s works, 11;
    his death, 12;
    appreciation of him by Washington Irving, 12

  Royal Institution, lecture on amount of chemical light in tropics by
      Roscoe, 118

  Rücker, Sir Arthur, 59, 81, 165


  Sandbach, Mrs., 7

  Schorlemmer, Carl, 35, 102, 121, 139

  Schuster, Dr. Arthur, 131, 133

  Science Lectures for the People, 38

  Scott, Principal A. J., 33

  Scottish Universities Commission, 167

  Scudder, Frank, 159

  Sherbrooke, Lord, 50

  Spectrum analysis, 132

  Spontaneous polymerization of volatile hydrocarbons, 101

  Stewart, Dr. Balfour, 115


  Technical Instruction Commission, 153

  Terbium, spark spectrum of, 131

  Thallium perchlorate, 123

  “The Life and Experiences of Sir Henry E. Roscoe,” 144

  Thompson, Joseph, his “History of Owens College,” 29, 46, 48

  Tithonometer, 111

  “Treatise on Chemistry,” 139

  Tungsten pentabromide and pentachloride, 130


  University College, Dundee, 167

  University College, Liverpool, 167

  University of London, 161

  Uranium pentachloride, 130


  Vanadium and its compounds, 123

  Victoria University, 77;
    constitution as proposed by Manchester, 78;
    objections by Yorkshire, 80;
    joint memorial in favour of, 81;
    charter granted, 86;
    associates of Owens College the first graduates, 93


  Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 11

  Ward, Sir A. W., 48, 50, 81

  Waterhouse, Alfred, R.A., 44, 75

  Watts, Dr. W. Marshall, 133

  Whatton, W. R., his plans for University of Manchester, 46

  Williamson, Alexander, his characteristics, 21, 93

  World Supremacy or War, 185

  Wreck of H.M.S. _Psyche_, 135


  Yorkshire Board of Education, 55

  Yorkshire College, the, its origin and growth, 58, _et seq._;
    report of Yorkshire Board of Education, 56;
    foundation of professorships, 58;
    its first premises, 59;
    its inauguration ceremony, 60;
    new college buildings, 75;
    Council considers question of foundation of Northern University, 76, 79

                      _Printed in Great Britain by_
      UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON







*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR HENRY ENFIELD ROSCOE P.C., D.C.L., F.R.S. ***


    

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