December 23, 1915] 



MATURE 



459 



nothing- to do with it. Briefly, the essence of 

 the scheme is to secure an effective partnership 

 between the State and the local authority for 

 furthering agricultural education. Each scheme 

 has to be considered as a whole and estimates 

 planned before it is put into operation ; then the 

 cost is to be divided between taxpayer and rate- 

 payer on an approved scale. 



The effect of the partnership will be more than 

 financial; it is by no means intended that the 

 State shall be the sleeping and paying partner. 

 The agricultural resources of the country have 

 got to be developed to the fullest extent, and this 

 is no time for allowing any backward county 

 council to block the way. 



As might have been expected, the war has had 

 a serious effect on the agricultural colleges and 

 research institutes. The best of their young men 

 volunteered at once for military service. Some of 

 the colleges were practically emptied, and the 

 research institutes lost their most vigorous and 

 enterprising workers, some, alas ! never to re- 

 turn. But, to the credit of the Board, the prin- 

 ciple that education and research must be kept 

 going has so far been successfully maintained, 

 and although the grants are rightly reduced auto- 

 matically as members of the staff enlist, there is 

 no evidence from the report that any of the insti- 

 tutes have suffered financially. In return, it is 

 satisfactory that the Board is able to record 

 that the research institutes and colleges have 

 rendered valuable help in dealing with the special 

 problems arising out of the war. It never was 

 more necessary than now that farmers should 

 have the best expert advice available, and it is 

 gratifying- to know that all concerned are doings 

 their utmost to help in the emergency. Research 

 institutes subsidised by Government are new 

 things to the ordinary taxpayer, and a great 

 responsibility devolves on them to justify them- 

 selves in the present emergency. If science can 

 help agriculture, surely this is the time for doing 

 so. 



SIR HENRY ROSCOE, F.R.S. 



BY the death of the Rt. Hon. Sir Henry Enfield 

 Roscoe, through heart-failure, on December 

 18, at his residence, Woodcote Lodge, West 

 Horsley, we lose one more of that rapidly 

 dwindling body of men of whom Huxley may be 

 said to be the type and leader, who spent their 

 exiergies, after the passing of the Education Act 

 of 1870, and largely in consequence of it, in 

 attempting to rouse this country to a sense of the 

 national importance of secondary and technical 

 education. Except for occasional trouble with 

 gout, and the slight infirmities of advanced age, 

 be was in his usual state of good health and happy 

 irenity of mind up to within the very hour of 

 us seizure. It was such a passing as he would 

 himself have desired ; a swift and painless ending 

 to a long, strenuous, and honourable career. 



As he tells us in his "Life and Experiences," 

 an autobiographical record which he published in 



NO. 2408, VOL. 96] 



1906, with the characteristic motto on its title- 

 pag^, from Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus," 



What is the use of health, 

 Of life, if not to do some 

 Work therewith ? 



he first saw the light at 10 Powis Place, off Great 

 Ormond Street, London, on January 7, 1833. 

 His father, Henry Roscoe, was a barrister, and 

 became Judge of the Court of Passage in Liver- 

 pool ; his " Digest " was for many years a 

 standard work of reference. Roscoe 's grand- 

 father, William Roscoe, was a still more remark- 

 able man, who from very humble beginnings 

 raised himself to a position of affluence, and of 

 considerable influence in his native town. He 

 represented Liverpool for a session in the Parlia- 

 ment of 1806 as an advanced Liberal, but in 1816 

 lost his fortune by the failure of a bank in which 

 he was a partner. He left his mark on our litera- 

 ture by his "Lives of Lorenzo di Medici and 

 Leo X." He also made occasional contributions 

 on botanical subjects to the Linnean Society. 



Roscoe 's mother was a Miss Fletcher, the 

 daughter of a Liverpool merchant, who also lost 

 his money by the failure of a bank. She was a 

 highly capable woman, of great force of char- 

 acter, and lived to a green old age. She had con- 

 siderable artistic gifts, and on the death of her 

 husband after five years of married life, when 

 she was left with very straitened means, she gave 

 lessons in painting. She had, too, literary ability, 

 and when well advanced in years published 

 a life of " Vittoria Colonna," with admirable trans- 

 lations of the sonnets. Roscoe 's forbears on both 

 sides were of Presbyterian or Unitarian stock, his 

 great-grandfather on the mother's side being Dr. 

 Enfield, a colleague of Priestley in the Warring- 

 ton Academy, and the author of the once well- 

 known "Enfield's Speaker." 



After a few years at a preparatory school 

 Roscoe was sent to the High School of the Liver- 

 pool Institute, where he had little Latin and less 

 Greek, but, what was remarkable in those days, 

 a certain modicum of science. His teacher of 

 chemistry was Balmain, the discoverer of 

 "luminous paint" and of boron nitride, a genial 

 and capable instructor, from whom he seems to 

 have acquired his taste for the science. At all 

 events he now started experimenting on his own 

 account, and began his career as a lecturer by 

 giving demonstrations to his sister, his cousins, 

 and, no doubt, also his aunts, at a charge of one 

 halfpenny each person, to defray the cost of the 

 chemicals — the summit of his ambition at that 

 time being, as he said, to "burn phosphorus in 

 oxygen on a large scale before an admiring 

 audience." 



The attitude of the older universities towards 

 Dissenters at this period caused Roscoe to be sent 

 to University College, London, which he entered 

 in 1848 with a view to preparing for a degree of 

 the University of London. Here he came under 

 the influence of Graham, at that time professor 

 of chemistry, and afterwards of Williamson, 

 who succeeded him. He took his degree in 1853, 

 and decided to follow chemistry as a profession. 



