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

by T. E. Thorpe

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.