St.-Pétersbourg [Saint Petersburg], Eggers [for the Académie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg], 1861. Folio (32.8 x 24.4 cm). 6 pp. (numbered 245-250). Original printed wrappers.

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907) was a Russian chemist known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the periodic law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but also to predict the properties of three elements that were yet to be discovered (germanium, gallium and scandium). Between 1859 and 1861, he worked on the capillarity of liquids and the workings of the spectroscope in Heidelberg. Later in 1861, he published a textbook named Organic Chemistry. This won him the Demidov Prize of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. a little-known fact is that Mendeleev, during the same period, made a first attempt to a chemical classification. On 2 August 1861 he read before the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg an essay on a theory of the limits of organic combinations (this paper), noting homologies in the properties of series of organic molecules of similar built. Evidently, his developing sense of organizing chemical elements according to analogies in their intrinsic properties started here, only later to become expanded to the periodic table of chemical elements which made him world-famous. Uncut. Contemporary label of the French bookseller Chevreuil in Paris mounted on the front wrapper, top edge; some minor, marginal damp-staining and spotting, otherwise very good, as issued.