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.