236 Alexander Petrunkeritch, Ph.D., 



and a prolific writer. Before going to Russia he published 

 "Elenchus Zoophytorum" and "Miscellanea Zoologica." He 

 began publishing his celebrated "Specilegia Zoologica" in 1767. 

 The natural history results of his six years of travel through 

 Russia and Siberia were published in the French translation of 

 his "Travels, etc." (eight volumes with nine volumes of plates, 

 1 788- 1 793). He published "Icones Insectorum prsesertim Ros- 

 sise Siberiseque peculiarum" in 1 781 -1806, and "Zoographia 

 russo-asiatica" in three volumes, in 181 1. His was a remarkable 

 mind interested in many problems, he was an accomplished geol- 

 ogist and paleontologist, he studied the geographical distribution 

 of animals, wrote a memoire on variation in animals, as botanist 

 published the first "Flora Rossica" in two volumes in 1 784-1 788. 

 He was besides a philologist, topographer, mineralogist, ethno- 

 grapher, archeologist, agronomer and technologist. He was well 

 known in other countries, but although he did not particularly 

 enjoy life in Russia, he spent most of it there, partly in travels, 

 partly in research in his estate in the Crimea, which Catherine the 

 Second presented to him. 



Carl Ernst, or Carl Maximovitch von Baer. the father of 

 embryology, was born a Russian subject in 1792 in Estland. 

 Russia, and studied first at Reval at a gymnasium and then from 

 1810 to 1814 at the University of Dorpat. His work is too well 

 known to need any particular mention here. What I want how- 

 ever to point out is that Baer, like Wolff and Pallas, spent most of 

 his life in Russia. In Germany he spent only seventeen years as 

 professor at Konigsberg, from 1817-34. when he was called for 

 the second time to the St. Petersburg Academy. (He was called 

 the first time in 1829. but returned from St. Petersburg to Kon- 

 igsberg in 1830.) From now on to the end of his life. i. e., 

 forty-two years, he lived in Russia and worked there, dying in 

 Dorpat in 1876. Thus even the second volume of his celebrated 

 "Embryology of Animals." published in 1837, appeared three 

 years after his departure from Germany. And his discovery of 

 the mammalian egg in 1827 was also for the first time reported 

 in a communication to the St. Petersburg Academy. Baer was a 

 many-sided investigator, traveller, anthropologist, ethnographer, 

 historian and geographer. Some of his investigations were writ- 

 ten in the Russian language including the especially important 

 ])a])er "Why have our rivers which flow north or south, a high 



