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]