CHAPTER VI

ROSCOE AS A TEACHER

Some years before Owens College attained to the position of a university, several attempts were made to induce Roscoe to sever his connection with it. In 1870 he was offered the lectureship on Chemistry at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in succession to Dr. Matthiessen.

The following letter under date October 14, 1870, refers to this circumstance:

…

I have just refused to go to London again! They wanted me at St. Bartholomew’s.

Miller is to be succeeded by ⸺ ⸺, and it appears that this gentleman has made a compromise with the New School, and is to adopt O = 12! Is not this rich? Originality at King’s was always at a discount, but then Orthodoxy reigns supreme, and this is the “Wahre Jakob,” as they say in German!

Lockyer is down here visiting Stewart, and I had a physical and astronomical party here last night (my wife being away), at which a large number of interesting new observations on the heavenly bodies and on science in general were made, which did not conclude until the small hours.

I cannot buckle to the new book—but I have arranged the order of things to my tolerable satisfaction. Whether it will ever see the daylight remains a mystery.…

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]

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.

Having thus obtained a knowledge of the principles of the science, facility in manipulation, and reliance on his own powers of observation, the student should begin quantitative analytical work, in which he learns by degrees what scientific accuracy means, and how exact results are to be obtained by careful work. Constant personal supervision of the student is absolutely requisite, as everything depends on the care with which the various operations are carried on, working from recipes without superintendence being really valueless. One main object of this course is so to teach the pupil as to give him reliance on his own power of exact work; to inculcate habits of neatness and order; to make him aware of sources of error, and to teach him either to estimate their amount, or how, if possible, to obviate them.

On this firm foundation of a competent theoretical knowledge of inorganic and organic chemistry, and of a thorough practical acquaintance with analysis, can alone the proper and higher education of the chemist, whether for purely scientific or for technical purposes, be based. It was upon this view Roscoe consistently acted. He steadily set his face against any practising of rough-and-ready works-methods until the student had learnt to appreciate the exacter processes. It is only when he has gained the capacity for judging as to the particular applicability of a method that he should be permitted to compromise between efficiency and speed. When confidence is based upon knowledge and practice, the special circumstances of his position and his sense of responsibility, when engaged in technical work, will enable him to determine rightly when such compromise is justifiable.

As regards instruction in applied chemistry, Roscoe always held that the application can only be properly learnt in the factory or works, just as a trade cannot be taught in a school—unless, indeed, the school becomes a shop. But there is no reason why the scientific principles and details of the various industrial processes should not be brought to the knowledge of the pupil who is intended afterwards to conduct such processes. Provided a sound scientific basis is secured, such instruction, given by a teacher who has had practical as well as theoretical experience, is of great value to the technical student.

Thanks mainly to Roscoe’s example, these principles are nowadays among the commonplaces of chemical instruction, and are adopted substantially by all teachers of experience. That they commended themselves to lay minds capable of appreciating and judging them, and that the practical results of working the Owens College Chemical Department by means of them proved satisfactory, was proved by the steady increase in the number of Roscoe’s pupils, session after session, and by the variety of responsible and important positions many of these pupils subsequently filled. Another significant feature was the increasing public recognition of the meaning and value of a sound chemical education as shown by the growing willingness of parents and of young men themselves to devote such an amount of time to their studies as would enable them to obtain real benefit. He found in the earlier years of his experience that the prevailing notion of the majority of manufacturers (though there were notable exceptions) was that if the son stayed at College for six months he could be “put up” to all the necessary information to enable him to apply chemistry to his business.

The fathers (he said) frequently used to come with a story of this kind: “I am a calico-printer, or a dyer, or a brewer, and I want you to teach my son chemistry so far, and only so far, as it is at once applicable to my trade,” and when informed that chemistry as a science must be taught before its applications could be understood, and that his son could not for two or three years at least begin to work upon the subjects directly bearing on his trade, he too often replied that if that were the system he could not afford time for his son to learn on this plan, and that if he could not be taught at once to test his drugs he should prefer to leave him in the works, where he and his father before him had made a great many commercial successes with no scientific knowledge, and where he saw no reason to doubt that his son would do the same. The change that has come over our manufacturers during the last five and twenty years [this was written in 1887] has been remarkable, and now all are, I believe, fully awake to the necessities of their position, and are most desirous of improving the scientific knowledge not only of themselves and their sons, but of their managers, foremen, and workpeople. That this is so may be proved by the fact that whereas formerly it was difficult to keep our students for more than one session, we now find our senior laboratory well stocked with men in their third, fourth, and even fifth years, working at advanced subjects and becoming “chemists” in the highest and best sense of the word.

When he laid down his office he could point to the fact that his laboratories, spacious as they were thought to have been when first erected, had been more than full during the previous half-dozen years. It was calculated that upwards of two thousand men had passed through his courses. Among them were many teachers, technologists, and professional chemists occupying responsible and important positions. In the list of the Dalton Chemical Scholars, and of the Berkeley Fellows, were to be found names known in the literature of science for their scientific investigations. Indeed, no similar place in the kingdom could show such a record of contributions to chemical knowledge. Under Roscoe’s government the Owens College Chemical Laboratory furnished, from first to last, two hundred and thirty-five original communications, mainly to the _Journal of the Chemical Society_, or the _Proceedings_ and _Transactions of the Royal Society_.

The laboratories which Roscoe designed, and which are known under his name, have long since proved inadequate to accommodate the numbers which now flock to the Manchester School of Chemistry. After Schorlemmer’s death it was found necessary to add to their number, and the new Schorlemmer laboratories, of eighty-nine working benches, were built for the special study of organic chemistry. These were in their turn overcrowded, when Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the well-known American multi-millionaire, who never forgets he was born on British soil, presented the University with £10,000 to erect buildings, on condition that they should be called the John Morley Laboratories, in honour of his friend Viscount Morley of Blackburn, the eminent historian and statesman, and now Chancellor of the Victoria University.

On October 4, 1909, Roscoe was requested to open formally the new laboratories, when he remarked: “It was very gratifying to know that Mr. Carnegie, who has spent millions of money on founding public libraries all over the English-speaking countries, seemed to be turning his attention to the foundation of laboratories which, in my opinion, was of still greater consequence.” A characteristic remark which those who knew the speaker would be quite prepared to hear.