For some time Rolleston acted as an assistant physician to the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, London. But in 1857, on the death of James Adey Ogle [q. v.], regius professor of physic in Oxford, Rolleston was elected, in his stead, physician to the Radcliffe Infirmary, and was at the same time appointed by the dean and chapter of Christ Church Lee's reader in anatomy, in succession to Dr. (afterwards Sir Henry Wentworth) Acland, the new regius professor of medicine. Rolleston continued to practise as a physician in Oxford, but the development of scientific teaching in the university, mainly due to the energy of the new regius professor, soon led to the establishment of a Linacre professorship of anatomy and physiology. In 1860 Rolleston was called to that chair, and he filled it with conspicuous ability until his death.
Rolleston's scientific work dates from this period. He was present at the historical meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860, when Richard (afterwards Sir Richard) Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley discussed with some heat, in reference to the Darwinian theory, the structural differences between the brains of men and monkeys. The controversy set Rolleston to work upon the problem of brain classification, and he published his first results in a lecture at the Royal Institution on 24 Jan. 1862. Owen renewed the dispute with Huxley at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association in 1862, and Rolleston entered into the debate on Huxley's side. The questions of cerebral development and the classification of skulls maintained their interest for him until the end of his life. To his suggestion is due the magnificent collection of human skulls in the Oxford Museum.
The earlier years of his professorship were largely occupied in preparing his work on ‘The Forms of Animal Life,’ published in 1870. It was the first instance of instruction by the study of a series of types, a method which has since obtained general recognition in the teaching of biology. His intervals of leisure were spent with his friend Canon Greenwell in examining the sepulchral mounds in various parts of England, the results being published in ‘British Barrows, a Record of the Examination of Sepulchral Mounds in various parts of England,’ Oxford, 1877. He thus became a skilled anthropologist. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1862, and a fellow of Merton College in 1872. In 1873 he delivered the Harveian oration at the Royal College of Physicians, London.
Rolleston subsequently wasted much energy in university and municipal politics. He did much, however, to promote the study of sanitary science, and, as a member of the Oxford local board, he was mainly instrumental in causing the isolation of the cases of smallpox as they occurred during the epidemic of 1871, while to his advocacy Oxford owes the system of main drainage which replaced the cesspools of previous generations. In later life Rolleston was a strong advocate of the Permissive Bill, and he became from conviction a total abstainer for two years. He gave evidence before the commission appointed in 1874 to inquire into the practice of experiments upon living animals. He was in favour of vivisection under fitting restrictions, and the act 39 & 40 Vict. cap. 77 was to a large extent drafted from his suggestions; but these were curiously perverted by the opponents of the bill.
Failing health, accompanied by a nervous irritability, the result of overwork, obliged him to spend the winter of 1880–1 in the Riviera. Returning home with difficulty, he died in Oxford on 16 June 1881. He was buried in the cemetery at Holywell, Oxford. His professorship was subdivided at his death, Professor Henry Nottidge Moseley [q. v.] being entrusted with the chair of human and comparative anatomy, Professor Tylor with that of anthropology, and Professor (Sir) John Burdon Sanderson (1828–1904), then regius professor of medicine, with that of physiology.
Rolleston married, on 21 Sept. 1861, Grace, the daughter of Dr. John Davy and the niece of Sir Humphry Davy. They lived until 1868 at 15 New Inn Hall Street, Oxford, and then removed to the house which they had built in South Parks Road, close to the museum. Rolleston left seven children.
Rolleston represented an admirable type of university professor. On his pupils he impressed the love of knowledge for its own sake and not from any mere monetary benefit which might accrue from it. While deeply learned in his special branch of study, he was well informed on all subjects. He was perhaps the last of a school of English natural historians or biologists in the widest sense of the term, for, with the training of a Francis Trevelyan Buckland [q. v.] or of a William Kitchen Parker [q. v.] he combined the culture of a classical scholar, the science of a professor, and the gift of speech which belongs to a trained linguist and student of men. He was an attractive conversationalist, apt at quotation and brilliant in repartee. Warm-hearted and of sterling honesty, he was a good hater, and never abandoned a losing cause after he had convinced himself
