xlviii Annual Report of the Council. 



remember with interest the brilliant lecture he gave as Wilde 

 lecturer of this Society in 1898, on "The Physical Basis of 

 Psychical Events." He died in London on January 28th of this 

 year, a few hours after he had delivered a short but valuable 

 speech at a meeting of the British Science Guild. S. J. H. 



By the death of Dmitri Iwanowitsch Mendeleeff the 

 Society has lost one of its most distinguished honorary members. 

 The enunciator of the periodic classification of the elements, the 

 author of the most original chemical text-book of modern times, 

 a physical chemist of great experimental powers, an inspiring 

 teacher and daring theorist, Mendeljeeff stood easily in the front 

 rank of European chemists. 



He was a Siberian, born at Tobolsk in 1834, and spent the 

 whole of his life, with the brief exception of two years at Heidel- 

 berg, in Russia. His remarkable force of character, no less 

 than his intellectual abilities, marked him out for rapid promo- 

 tion, and in 1866 we find him professor of chemistry in the 

 University of St. Petersburg. From that time until his death 

 Mendeleeff was almost the dictator of Russian natural science. 

 To him two generations of Russian chemists owe their training, 

 and the confidence reposed in him by the Government was 

 shown by his appointment to the sole control of the Standards 

 Bureau. 



His name is inseparably linked with the periodic law and 

 classification of the elements. Though the previous work of 

 Dbbereiner, Dumas, Newlands and others had clearly hinted at 

 the existence of a law correlating the properties of the elements 

 with their atomic weights, it was left for Mendeleeff to make 

 this clear — in his own words — " by raising the whole question 

 to such a height that its reflection on all the facts could 

 be clearly seen." 



The year 1869 saw the enunciation of the periodic law by 

 Mendeleeff, its illustration in his periodic system, and his bold 

 challenge to the future by predicting in detail the properties of 



