Annual Report of the Council. lix 



one of the divisions of the borough. His motives for this 

 relinquishment of his academical work were of a purely personal, 

 but wholly unselfish, nature, and implied no diminution of his 

 attachment to the University of which he had been the principal 

 founder. Several years earlier, he had been in vain tempted to 

 transfer his services to Oxford, and again to the foremost of 

 the great London Medical Schools ; as to Oxford, whose 

 relations with Manchester in connection with the teaching of his 

 science have consisted in a continuous profitable system of give 

 and take, he, -after some hesitation, made up his mind with that 

 simple straightforwardness which, fortunately for the institu ions 

 and causes with which he was brought into contact, was part of 

 his nature : 'I felt that I had a wider scope and more useful life 

 in building up the Chemical School of the Owens College.' 



The 'Extension Movement' of 1870, and the foundation 

 of the Victoria University, accomplished by the grant of the 

 Royal Charter in 1880, were the two occasions on which the 

 paramount position of Roscoe in Manchester's academical, as 

 connected with its industrial and general life, was most notably 

 displayed. The former movement, of which its successor, 

 ten years afterwards, may be regarded as the natural outcome, 

 was what the Germans, in the days when they still used to envy 

 British enterprise, would have called a ' practical ' effort, and 

 needed for its execution a man practical in the fullest sense of 

 the word. Him Roscoe found in the late Thomas Ashton, in 

 his generation a man of leading, if ever there was such in the 

 public life of a great community. The more complex under- 

 taking which was to crown the result thus achieved, by the 

 recognition as a national University of a College which had 

 come to do university work in the centre of the busiest part of 

 the kingdom, was first suggested to Roscoe by Lord Kelvin, 

 himself one of the glories of Glasgow and of Cambridge alike. 

 In the preliminary struggle which ensued — for there was a good 

 deal of hard hitting on the adverse side, with Mr. Robert Lowe 

 (Lord Sherbrooke) in the van — many took part : none more 

 usefully than the Principal of the Owens College, the late Dr. 



