“The sunlit face of the earth would appear to shine by the light diffused back into space from the land and water-covered areas.”

A voyage to Europe in the summer of 1921 gave me the first opportunity of observing the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea.

I strongly believe that fundamental science cannot be driven by instructional, industrial, governmental or military pressures.

The fundamental importance of the subject of molecular diffraction came first to be recognized through the theoretical work of the late Lord Rayleigh on the blue light of the sky, which he showed to be the result of the scattering of sunlight by the gases of the atmosphere.

It seemed not unlikely that the phenomenon owed its origin to the scattering of sunlight by the molecules of the water.

The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.

I have always thought it a great privilege to have as my colleague in the Palit Chair of Chemistry such a distinguished pioneer in scientific research and education in Bengal as Sir Prafulla Ray.

We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity.

Towards the end of February 1928, I took the decision of using brilliant monochromatic illumination obtained by the aid of the commercially available mercury arcs sealed in quartz tubes.

The Sensations of Tone.’ As is well known, this was one of Helmholtz’s masterpieces.

All the instruments of percussion known to European science are essentially nonmusical and can only be tolerated in open air music or in large orchestras where a little noise more or less makes no difference.

In the first English class I attended, Prof. E. H. Elliot, addressing me, asked if I really belonged to the Junior B. A. class, and I had to answer him in the affirmative. He then proceeded to inquire how old I was.

Is there any more encouraging sign than to see an Indian, who has never been to a university, like our friend Mr. Asutosh Dey here, for example, carrying out original work and finding it recognized by the foremost societies of the world?

We begin to realise that the molecular scattering of light in liquids may possess an astronomical significance, in fact contribute in an important degree to the observed albedo of the earth.

It was my great good fortune, while I was still a student at college, to have possessed a copy of an English translation of his great work.

And it was this belief which led to the subject becoming the main theme of our activities at Calcutta from that time onwards.

It was the late Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar who, by founding the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, made it possible for the scientific aspirations of my early years to continue burning brightly.