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.