What Englishman?

In older scientific journals,  you get the situation where one paper would end half way down a page and the next article would start on the same page.  So when, in this modern age, we download a pdf of a paper, we sometimes get the start of another paper, and sometimes they can be interesting things, if only because they are very much of their time and not something that we would deliberately download to read for its enduring relevance. 

I was prompted, by a talk at the CNR*24 conference that I went to last week, to look at a paper by Eugene Wigner entitled "Nuclear Reactions and Level Widths", Am. J. Phys. 17, 99 (1949).  The journal it's in - the American Journal of Physics - is a long-running educational journal with articles aimed at those interested in teaching physics, generally at the undergraduate level.  I am yet to read through the paper, but I did see on the last page an extra thing which is a poem reproduced from the British satirital magazine Punch.  I reproduce an excerpt as (I hope) fair usage, since I think the poem is still in copyright.  It's about some characters in electromagnetism and begins:

and then in verse 4 we have

where the "Englishman" referred to is James Watt (scientist, not the BrewDog guy).  I'm sure Scots everywhere will snort Irn Bru out their noses at this claim of Watt's nationality. 

I do remember Punch from the final years of its existence.  It carried on until 1992 (and was revived briefly later).  I don't think I ever read it much outside doctors' waiting rooms but I did struggle to see what ever was funny about it.  Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it, but perhaps also it was a rather old and conservative kind of humour.  Anyway, the poem, lighthearted in style as it is written, has an unwelcome nationalism to it, as well as that affectation that still continues to this day – that it's just fine to be a kind of intellectual and at the same time to admit in a happy way that you don't understand science.