You _must_ take care of yourself. This attack ought to be and will be a warning to you not to work on as you have done. It is serious, and I am, with many friends, anxious you should draw in your horns. Really your professional work is enough for one man, and what a pile you put on to the top of this!
Let me know, if possible, to-morrow (Sunday) night whether you will go. I am sure you would enjoy yourselves, and I will let E⸺ know so that all shall be ready.
No man was more quick to recognize and to appreciate merit and worthy motives. Of strong common sense, perfectly sincere, frank and direct of speech, of an integrity of purpose which was perfectly obvious and which admitted of no unworthy compromise, he was, as they say in the quaint forceful Lancashire dialect he loved at times to recall as the speech of his forerunners, his eminent grandfather included—“jannock”[31] to the backbone—the very type we associate with the national character. These marks of his personality constituted the source of his influence. A broad-minded man, who thought spaciously and did things magnanimously, nature intended him to be a leader. His example was infectious, and nowhere was it more obvious than at Owens College, where the success of his own department was a constant stimulus to his colleagues. Men valued his counsel because they trusted his judgment.
He knew his limitations as a man of science. He was too honest and sincere to cherish any illusions as to the position posterity would assign to him as a leader in chemical inquiry. The profound respect, amounting almost to reverence, he had for Faraday, Joule, Bunsen, Helmholtz—all men he learned to know personally—was based upon the knowledge that they had reached intellectual heights to which he could not climb. He had not the studious, contemplative habit of his master Graham. Contact with Williamson kindled no latent faculty for speculation. The shibboleths of modern chemistry—types, bonds, linkages, chains, etc., etc., had hardly more real meaning for him than they had for Bunsen, to whom they were practically unintelligible. It was characteristic of both that when, at Kekulé’s solicitation, they jointly attended the chemical congress on nomenclature at Carlsruhe in 1860, when Cannizzaro brought forward his memorable communication concerning the rational basis of fixing atomic and molecular weights, they should not have recognized its significance. Of course they were not singular in this respect. The revolution did not come at once. Avogadro’s hypothesis never affected Bunsen’s teaching; some years were needed before it reached Manchester, and there are still survivals who never have been clear why water should be HO one year and H₂O the next. Bunsen, indeed, used to say that one new chemical fact, even an unimportant one, accurately determined, was worth a whole congress of discussion of matters of theory. The truth was Roscoe, in chemistry as in other matters, was primarily a man of action: he was essentially an “experimentarian philosopher,” as Hobbes sneeringly dubbed the whole of the Fellows of the Royal Society. A fact absolutely ascertained was a definite and permanent addition to knowledge; hypotheses and theories were transitory and mutable; they have their day and cease to be.