lx Annual Report of the Council. 



Greenwood. To him it was largely due, that, as in the extension 

 of the College, so in the design of converting it into a University, 

 full regard was had to the preservation of a fair balance between 

 the great divisions of learning, which proved attainable even 

 without insisting on compulsory Greek and Latin for its degrees. 

 But it was Roscoe's knowledge of men and things which facili- 

 tated every step of the progress towards the desired end. Nor 

 was the basis of compromise, on which a federal university was 

 in the first instance called into life, in lieu of the municipal which 

 had been originally intended, wholly unwelcome to his width 

 and freedom of judgment — more especially in view of the 

 certainty that the adoption, for the time at all events, of the 

 federal system must lead to an advance in other great commercial 

 and industrial centres besides Manchester itself. The real 

 drawback in the victory gained lay elsewhere, though it was not 

 unconnected with the causes which had brought about the 

 change of design ; but no one could doubt that the new Uni- 

 versity would not long be left without the power, denied to it at 

 first, of granting medical degrees. At the time, however, Roscoe 

 greatly resented this 'emasculation,' as he called it, of the Uni- 

 versity curriculum ; for, as his later correspondence with Mr. 

 Balfour showed, he attached the highest importance to a sound 

 basis of the teaching of science to medical students. 



More cannot be said here of these important transactions, 

 the significance of which for the progress of higher education, 

 and through it, in some measure, for that of secondary education, 

 also, in England, is now universally acknowledged. On the 

 advance of a particular kind of instruction, which long hovered 

 half-way between the one and the other, he likewise set his 

 personal mark after, in 1881, he had become a member of the 

 Royal Commission on Technical Instruction. (The first occasion 

 on which he had been called upon to give his services in the 

 same capacity had, characteristically, been that of a purely 

 scientific enquiry : Lord Aberdare's Noxious Vapours Com- 

 mission of 1876, which led to the passing, not more than fifteen 

 years later, of the first of the Alkalis Acts.) Few Commissioners' 



