EIZAL
ROBERTS
1883, and was Questeur of the Chambre
from 1898 to 1903. It was Rivet who
proposed the abolition of the oath in
France. Passing to the Senate in 1903,
he cordially supported the legislation
against the Church. He has written a
number of dramas.
RIZAL, Jos6, M.D., Ph.D., Philippine physician and reformer. B. 1861. Ed. Jesuit College, Manila, and Madrid, Paris, Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Berlin Univer sities. Rizal was a remarkable illustration of a member of a backward race displaying brilliant talent and seeking to displace the priesthood which checked the growth of his people. After obtaining in the univer sities of Europe a distinguished command of modern science, he returned to the Philippines and began at once to attack the Church. His novel, Noli Me Tangere (Eng. trans., Friars and Filipinos), drasti cally exposed Spanish maladministration and lashed the clergy and the monks. The year after its publication (1886) he ventured home ; but the clergy and the Spanish officials compelled him to leave. He travelled over Asia and Europe, and in 1891 he followed up his attack with another caustic novel, II filibusterismo. He organized the Liga Filipina to expel the monks and secure religious liberty, and had an enormous influence over his countrymen. In 1892 he got permission to return, but he was arrested and banished to the provinces. Four years later he volunteered for service in the yellow-fever epidemic at Cuba, and started. He was treacherously arrested on the way, and shot as a traitor. See Blumentritt s Bio graphy of Dr. Jose Rizal (Eng. trans., 1898). D. Dec. 30, 1896.
ROALFE, Mathilda, reformer. B. 1813. Miss Roalfe was active with Holyoake and Paterson in the London Anti-Persecution Union of the early forties. Hearing in 1843 that an Edinburgh bookseller had been prosecuted for selling Rationalist literature, she went north, opened a shop, 665
and published a defiant circular calling
attention to the fact. She was prosecuted,
and was imprisoned for two months in
1844 ; but she resumed her sale of books
like those of Paine when she was set at
liberty. She afterwards married a Mr.
Sanderson, and settled in Scotland. D.
Nov. 29, 1880.
ROBERTS, Isaac, D.Sc., F.R.S., astro nomer. B. Jan. 27, 1829. Ed. Denbigh, In 1844 he was apprenticed to a Liverpool builder. Four years later he set up a business of his own, and he was able to retire with considerable means in 1888. Roberts was in his earlier years keenly interested in geology. He was a Fellow of the Geological Society, and in 1878 he read a paper at the meeting of the British Association. From that date, however, he transferred his interest to astronomy, and he came to be regarded as one of the most eminent amateur astronomers in England. He was president of the Liverpool Astro nomical Society, and was one of the few amateurs invited to attend the Conference of Astronomers at Paris in 1887 to arrange for a great chart of the heavens. The photographs he took with his 20-inch reflector were not surpassed in his time. He was admitted to the Royal Society in 1890, received an honorary degree from Trinity College in 1892, and won the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1895. Roberts was one of the Governors of the University of North Wales, and he had a strong feeling for progress and reform. His letters to George Jacob Holyoake (pub lished in McCabe s G. J. Holyoake, 1908) express a thorough Agnosticism. He wrote : " We seem to be now as ever the playthings of some Being that permits us to blunder into the maximum of discomfort in life, and at the end has arranged that we must return to the state of unconscious atoms " (ii, 300). D. July 21, 1908.
ROBERTS, Morley, novelist. B. Dec. 29, 1857. Ed. Bedford Grammar School and Owens College, Manchester. In 1876 he 666
