ABSTRACT
Rutherford loved chaffing his younger research workers on occasion at tea-time in his laboratory. As I was the only Scot amongst them I came in for a good deal of chaff on the real or supposed foibles of Scotsmen. He thought them an over-scholarshipped and over-praised lot. 'You young fellows come down here from across the border with such testimonials written by your Scots professors that, why man alive!, if Faraday or Clerk Maxwell were competing against you they wouldn't even get on to the short list.' One day he told us he had picked up a delightful phrase from one of the novels of H G Wells: 'a fellow of the Royal Society in the sight of God', and thereafter, on occasion, the young Scotsman of science was not only, on paper, miles better than Maxwell and Faraday, 'but already at twenty-four a fellow of the Royal Society in the sight of God'.
