Dmitri Ivanowitsch Mendeléeff, with whose name this fruitful generalisation is indissolubly connected, was born February 7, 1834 (N.S.), at Tobolsk, in Siberia, and was the fourteenth and youngest child of Ivan Mendeléeff, the Director of the gymnasium at that place. Soon after the birth of Dmitri his father became blind, and the family were practically dependent upon the mother, Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, who established a glass works near Tobolsk, on the profits of which she brought up and educated her large family. At the age of fifteen Mendeléeff was taken by his mother to St. Petersburg, and began the study of natural science at the Physico-Mathematical Faculty of the Institute. After serving as a science master at Simferopol in the Crimea and at Odessa, in 1856 he became a privat-docent in the University; then, following a short period of study in France and Germany, he returned to St. Petersburg, and in 1866 he was made Professor of General Chemistry in the University. His reputation mainly rests upon his contributions to chemical philosophy and physical chemistry, notably on specific volumes, on critical temperatures, on the thermal expansion of liquids, on the nature of solutions, on the elasticity of gases, and the origin and nature of petroleum. He died on January 31, 1907.
CHAPTER VII
Valency
Chemical formulæ, from the time of Berzelius onwards, have been regarded as rational expressions—that is, they serve to represent the relations and analogies of the substance they are employed to designate, and indicate in the simplest and at the same time the most comprehensive manner the chemical changes in which the substances take part. In the words of Gerhardt, those formulæ are “the best that make evident the greatest number of such relations and analogies,” and that serve to express the greatest number of the chemical changes in which they are concerned.
In such concrete expressions of chemical change it was frequently observed that a definite group of some or all of the constituent elements of the substance hung together, as it were, and passed, apparently unchanged, into the products of its transformation. These groups were not necessarily radicals in the sense in which Liebig and Wöhler used the term; to Gerhardt and to Kekulé they were simply residues, remaining unattacked in a chemical metamorphosis, and passing as such into the products of the change. They might or might not be capable of isolation as definite entities. Thus, for example, we may represent the composition of the following sulphur compounds so as to show that they all contain the group SO2, or sulphuryl:
Sulphuryl chloride.
Chlorosulphonic acid.
Leaden chamber
crystals.