Eminent Chemists of Our Time

. Mendeleeff's Periodic Law has shown how the elements, the chemist's building-stones, can be grouped to exhibit striking family resemblances. The chaos of the sixties gave place to a law of nature in the seventies, and the law paved the way for the more remarkable discoveries of the present era. Dmitri Ivanowitch Mendeleeff was born in Tobolsk, Siberia, on February 7, 1834. He was the youngest of eleven, fourteen or seventeen children?authorities seem to differ. On the paternal side Mendeleeff came from priestly stock, his grandfather, Pawal Maksim- owitch Sokoloff, occupying a modest position in the Greek Church ruled by the Hqly Synod. Since celibacy is not obligatory for the lower clergy of this church, Pawal took advantage of such permission and married. Of his four sons, Wassili, Iwan, Timofei and Alexander, the second, Iwan, came to be called Mendeleeff because early in life he dealt (exchanged) in horses (" mjenu djelatj " = to make an exchange). Iwan in time became a student of the chief Pedagogical Institute in Petrograd, and sometime after his graduation the government appointed him director of the gymnasium at Tobolsk. Here he met and married Maria Korniloff. The Korniloffs belonged to an old Russian family that had settled in Tobolsk early in 17oo. They were the first to introduce the manufacture of paper and glass in Siberia. In 1787 Maria's father established a printing press at Tobolsk, and two years later he began the publication of ...