Annual Report of the Council. lxi 



reports have had a more direct influence alike on educational 

 and on industrial progress than that presented by Roscoe and 

 his colleagues after their enquiry into technical instruction and 

 its effect upon industries abroad. Though his own legislative 

 attempts for the application at home of these experiences were 

 unsuccessful, while the Technical Schools' Act of 1889 was not 

 altogether in conformity with his own views on the subject, the 

 cause of which he was one of the most eminent advocates in 

 1890 derived a great moral as well as material advantage from 

 the spirited appropriation by the late Lord Goschen of the 

 'whisky money' to the purposes of technical and secondary 

 education ; and the great Education Act of 1902, though it 

 repealed the Technical Instruction Act of 1889, gave a far 

 more comprehensive range to the principle of this appropria- 

 tion ; and, in the end, Roscoe had the satisfaction of wit- 

 nessing the adoption in this country of the principle strenuously 

 urged by him in contravention of the practice preferred in 

 Germany, of co-ordinating the highest technological training 

 with instruction in arts and science. Many of us, it must be 

 confessed, long ' fought shy ' of this principle ; but Manchester 

 University has, not too soon, become a convert to it. May the 

 remark be added that for effective results from this system much 

 depends on the right sequence betw r een practical and University 

 work, consistently advocated by Sir William Mather ? 



Roscoe's labours as a member of the Royal Commission on 

 Secondary Education and of the Scottish University Commission 

 must here be passed by ; but those who have followed them are 

 aware of the consistency with which he asserted for original 

 research its place in higher, and for training to that end in 

 Secondary, Education — the latter even in the neighbourhood of 

 the playing-fields of Eton College, of which he was for many 

 years a Governor. When, at a later date, he became one of the 

 Carnegie Trustees, it was in the same direction that he success- 

 fully exerted his influence. During all these years, both while 

 he held a seat in Parliament and afterwards, his advice as a 

 practical chemist was eagerly sought by the House of Commons 



