A GREAT CHEMIST.

Timaru Herald, Volume XC, Issue 13243, 25 March 1907, Page 6

A GREAT CHEMIST.

The greatest of modern chemists died on Febtuaiy 2in St. Petersbuig. Mendeleef lived'to. ii ripe old age, and he had had the glory of watching lor a geneiatlon his grea.u theory accepted by the whole civilized world, and ■ liuctilying in the hands of other men. He might reckon all the chomLts who followed lnm among his dis ciples, and trace in their boldest speculations the influence of a principle w hicli he discovered. His work was long since assured, and his- death lobs the woild of no fresh developments Lavoisier first taught chemistry to obey the balance and i educed the play of her elements to the foiirt ot exact equations. Dalton laid the foundations for ,ill our modem conception of the elements and their combinations in the magnificent genei nidation of his atomic law. Mendeleef 'found the elements isolated ,jid irrelevant facts; he left them fitted together in a, great scheme of interrelation, winch did for chemistiy what Dai win had done for biology The pioneers hail separated out the "elements, ascertained their weights and their behaviour in combination. It was left for Mendeleef in his Periodic Law to point out that these isolated elements really formed an almost continuous sei les of atomic w eights, to classify them as groups, and to show how similar pvoperties repeated theinselve.i with an astonishing regularity at lecuirent intervals. He showed in short, that tlie properties of the elements were actually functions which could beideduced from their atomic weights. Pythagoras has dieamed that number was the essence of things ; Mendeleef actually evolved the detailed chemical properties of matter from these figures of atomic weight. The leal romance of this generalisation lay in the accuracy of the predictions to which it led. Leverrier. and Adams, studying tlie movements of tlie stai-s, had calculated the planet Xep'une l into existence out of heaps of algebra. The sum once finished, Dr. Galle with his telescope found the hypothetical planet exactly wheie mathmetics had located it, Mendeleef predicted that three elements, whose properties k he named, must occur with ceitain atomic weights in tlie gaps which he found in liis table One af'er. another these elements weie found. There i-j sc.ucely an ex lciss of th° human reason which brings with it such a_ seiu-e of triumph to humanity as this, or deserves from-'the civilised world a grea.'er need cf glory.