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A Russian chemist, Mendeleeff, drew up a table of the elements in illustration of this, grouping them in families, which seemed to point to hydrogen as the common parent, or ultimate constituent, of each. When newly discovered elements fell fairly into place in this scheme the idea was somewhat confidently advanced that the evolution of the elements was discovered.

Though this early exposition of what has since been admitted to be a most important discovery was very fully outlined, the generality of chemists gave it little heed till a decade or so later, when three new elements, gallium, scandium, and germanium, were discovered, which, on being analyzed, were quite unexpectedly found to fit into three gaps which Mendeleeff had left in his periodic scale.

In chemistry Mendeleeff formulated the theory relating to atoms and their chemical properties and relations, not then discovered to be the law by which they were governed, as later experiments proved. The Servian alphabet was first fixed and the language reduced to certain general rules only within the present century.

Petersburg treated Mendeléeff with contempt, and how the Royal Society of London refused to publish Joule's paper, in which he determined the mechanical equivalent of heat, finding it "unscientific."

Mendeleeff gave the discovery fullest expression, explicating it in 1869, under the title of "the periodic law."

Evidently there could not be unless there were atomic structures having in some degree different characteristics which we know the ether to be without. It is possible to arrange the elements in the order of their atomic weights in columns which will show communities of property. Newlands, Mendeléeff, Meyer, and others have done this.

Literature in Russia since the Crimean War: School of Nature; Turgenieff; Ultra-realistic School; Science: Mendeleeff. THE LANGUAGE. In the Russian language three principal dialects are to be distinguished; but the Russian proper, as it is spoken in Moscow and all the central and northern parts of European Russia, is the literary language of the nation.

In effect the periodic law had enabled Mendeleeff to predicate the existence of the new elements years before they were discovered. Surely a system that leads to such results is no mere vagary. So very soon the periodic law took its place as one of the most important generalizations of chemical science.

In 1864, however, a novel relation between the weights of the elements and their other characteristics was called to the attention of chemists by Professor John A. R. Newlands, of London, who had noticed that if the elements are arranged serially in the numerical order of their atomic weights, there is a curious recurrence of similar properties at intervals of eight elements This so-called "law of octaves" attracted little immediate attention, but the facts it connotes soon came under the observation of other chemists, notably of Professors Gustav Hinrichs in America, Dmitri Mendeleeff in Russia, and Lothar Meyer in Germany.