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��his eighteenth year. He seems to have been unuBuallj boyish for his age, A contemporary recorda " how 3'oung he was in every way, be- I^Doing at first sight to tell with schoolboy frankness all about his study at Sheffield, how he furnished it. bow the boy next hixo had died, nnd how he hull read all his Greek plays." The master of Pembroke did not trouble him- self concerning the lid sophistication of his new scholar. He said. '■ He is a clever Yorkshire- man ; and, when a Yorkshire -man is clever, he ia clever."
In 1850 RoUeston graduated with a first class in classics, and next year he was elected a fellow of his college. His fellowship was only tenable on the condition that he should graduate in medicine within a certain period. Oxford affording at that time even less opportunity than now for medical studies, he went to St. Bartholomew's hospital in London. After com- pleting his professional course he worked with notable success for a time in the English hos- pital at Smyrna, towards the close of the Cri- mean war. In 1S57 we find him settled in London, and assistant physician to the hospi- tal for sick children. Extracts from letters written at this period show him entirely de- TOted to his work, and interested not merely in his little patients, but endeavoring to pro- mote the welfare of their parents. ■' I see a good deal of the London poor by this means, and, though I find among them much stupidity and bruLishneas, I nevertheless see more of qualities which are estimable. Love and self- denial I see constantly, and I make it my busi- ness to encourage these qualities."
Rolleston'a career was not, however, to be that of a successful London physician. Hia character, his talents, and his learning were not forgotten at Oxford ; nor had he lost his love for his university. Before he had prac- tised a j*ear in London, the Lee's readership in anatomy, and the post of assistant physician to the Kadclilfe infirmary, fell vacant, and Rol- leston was elected to both. For some time after returning to his alma mater, he was hamp- ered in the performance of his teaching duties by the necessity of practising medicine to make a sufficient income ; but in 1860, being then in hia thirty-first year, he was elected to the Linacre professorship of anatomy and physi- ology, just endowed by Merton college. This position he held for the rest of his hfe. Once fVeed from the cares and distractions of a physician's life, Rolleston'a future career was that of an earnest teacher and investigator, and protagonist in the weary war which biology had to wage in Oxford, year after year, before
��it could obtain any standing in the UDivei'sity less galling than a begrudged and contempt- uous tolerance.
When Rolleston was appointed Linacre pro- fessor, the Oxford museum was l>eiug oi^anized against much opposition, partly on financial grounds, but mainly because a jMwerful group of university leaders had aroused the senti- ment that natural phenomena should onlj' be studied from an artistic or emotional stand- l>oint. The beliefs of this group were, that there was something degrading, if not abso- lutely obscene, in the study of the bare facta of anatomy and physiology ; that skulls of early races of mankind were disagreeable objects, which no well-bred person would ever look at but through the semi-translncent atmosphere of history and poetry ; that organic nature could never interest any one i>0Bses9ing relined feel- ings, except when a hazy glamour had been thrown around it by the discoloration and dis- tortion of naked facts by mental spectacles of ' sweetness and light ; ' that the objective study of the question, how man came to live, and move, and have bis being, was not only irreligious (which might be pardoned), but nn- gentlemanly. and therefore inexcusable. The forees and feelings against which Rolleston had to contend, are hard to picture in imagination now, but they were then very real and vigor- ous. Ten years atler the foundation of the Linacre professorship, an Oxford man told us that all the natural-science students in Oxford called themselves mathematicians ; and even mathematicians were regarded with contempt by the average undergraduate, whose boyish aestbeticism led him to gently coo that ' cul- ture ' was all in all, and literature its only road. Against this sentiment Rolleston hod to work. He had personally experienced that a student who intended to adopt the profession of medi- cine was heavily handicapped if he gave up three or four years of his life, after leaving school, to the sole study of Greek and Latin. As one excelling in classical scholarship, and skilled ' in all the learning of the Egyptians,' he could command a respectful bearing, even from the most conservative supporters of the eighteenth century Oxford curriculum. His indisputable excellence as a scholar, his elo- quence, his energy', his executive ability, his genial nature, his universally rect^nized hon- esty of purpose, and hatred of all sham or subterfuge, enabled him to do what, perhaps, no other man of his time could have done; namely, obtain at Oxfor<l a tolerably fair rec- ognition of the value and imgwrtance of bio- logical study.
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