Russia's Contribution to Science. 227 



took interest in local affairs and was a member of the Luga 

 County Zemstwo and of the St. Petersburg Zemstwo. Although 

 very exacting to his students in the laboratory, he was a friend 

 of all who were striving to acquire education and was for many 

 years president of a committee of aid to needy students. 



It seems to be scarcely necessary to review the work of the 

 greatest of all Russian chemists and the pride of all to whom 

 Russia means more than a land of mystery, surprises, Kazaks, 

 knuts, vodka and revolution. But the account would be incom- 

 plete without some reference to Dmitri Ivanovitch Mendelejefif, 

 the creator of the periodic system. He was born in 1834 in 

 Tobolsk in Siberia the youngest of a family of seventeen. His 

 father died while he was a child and his mother when he was 

 a youth of fifteen. At first he attended a gymnasium in Tobolsk, 

 then in ]\Ioscow. Later he studied at the Pedagogical Institute 

 of St. Petersburg and the St. Petersburg University. As a 

 student he published his first research in chemistry concerning 

 isomerism. After gradtiation he became high school teacher, 

 first in Sympheropol then in Odessa. Only in 1856 had he been 

 appointed Privatdozent in chemistry at the University of St. 

 Petersburg, after the successful public defense of his dissertation 

 on the subject of "Specific Volumes." In 1859 he went to Heidel- 

 berg where he made a research in capillarity of fluids. While 

 there he also began the publication in Russian of his course in 

 organic chemistry. In 1863 he returned to Russia and was 

 appointed professor at the Imperial Technological Institute. At 

 this time questions of applied chemistry and technology occupied 

 most of his attention. He investigated the oilfields of Baku in 

 the Caucasus and performed various experiments in connection 

 with agricultural problems. In 1866 he was appointed professor 

 of chemistry at the University of Petrograd. In 1868 he began 

 the publication of his Principles of Chemistry wherein he pro- 

 pounded for the first time his periodic law. This work marked 

 an epoch in the study of chemistry and was repeatedly reprinted 

 with additions and corrections made by the author. It was also 

 translated into many languages and brought him later in 1882 as 

 reward for his discovery the Davy medal of the Royal Society. 

 The arrangement of the elements into short and long periods 

 according to their atomic weight and properties showed the pres- 

 ence of various gaps in the series and permitted Alendelejeff to 



