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.