This table and the accompanying observations were first
presented to the Russian Chemical Society in March 1869.
(Actually, Mendeleev was ill, and his colleague Nikolai
Menshutkin presented his paper [Menschutkin 1934].) The paper
was published in the first volume of the new society's journal.
That same year, a German abstract of the paper, consisting of
the table and eight comments, was published in Zeitschrift für
Chemie. The German abstract was the vehicle by which Mendeleev's
ideas reached chemists working in Western Europe. An English
translation of that German abstract is presented here. View a
manuscript draft of the table. By ordering the elements
according to increasing atomic weight in vertical rows so that
the horizontal rows contain analogous elements, still ordered by
increasing atomic weight, one obtains the following arrangement,
from which a few general conclusions may be derived. This table
contains several implicit predictions of unknown elements.
Mendeleev soon retreated from this predictio