The Petersburg Academy of Science selected Wolff as a 

 member. It gave him those material conditions which he needed 

 for his work, and for twenty-seven years it supported him 

 in his scientific work. He was ensured the right to prepare 

 his works for publication and to publish them. In the year 

 following his arrival at the Petersburg Academy, Wolff began 

 to publish, in "New Commentaries of the Petersburg Academy/' 

 his vast work (nearly 150 pages in quarto) in Latin on the 

 development of the intestine. In 1789 the Academy published 

 Wolff's great theoretical work on the essential power (about 

 100 pages in quarto), and also in the period from 1770 to 

 1780, fourteen anatomical and teratological works. What about 

 the great manuscripts of Wolff which remain unpublished? These 

 manuscripts were not completed for print by the author himself 

 and were fragments of a larger work, the work which was 

 interrupted by his sudden death in 1794. The supposition of 

 B. E. Raikov that Wolff's main manuscripts remained unpublished 

 because the representatives of the Russian scientific world, 

 in particular academicians A. P. Protasov and I. I. Lepekhin, 

 did not want to support him, and that Wolff in Russia "lived 

 in ideological loneliness," is a supposition only. It is 

 insufficiently grounded because at that time in Russia, the 

 academicians S. Ya. Rumovsky and F. Epinus, who worked on 

 physiological investigations to which Wolff referred in his 

 work about the essential power (1789) , and also professors 

 M. M. Terekhovsky, N. M. Maksimovich-Ambodic, A. M. Shumlyansky 

 and other investigators, were able to understand Wolff's ideas 

 and to evaluate the significance of his investigations. 



There is reason to believe that the educated Russian 

 people were seriously interested in these problems, which 

 constituted the subject of Wolff's scientific investigations 

 and reflections. The discussions of these people, as recorded 

 by Antiokh Dmitrevich and historian Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev, 

 serve as evidence of this. Tatishchev 's work, "Conversation 

 about the benefit of sciences and schools, "5 was begun in 1733 

 and continued for many successive years; it was published after 

 more than 150 years. It stated, for example, these advanced 



5. v. N. Tatishchev, RAZGOVOR DVYKH PRIYATELEI 



POL'ZE NAUK I UCHILISHCH (Conversation of two friends 

 about the benefit of science and schools) , with preface 

 and index by Nil Popov (1887) . 



45 



