"You, born in the heart of Asia, are considered an honor by all European academies to have as a member," wrote a famous German geologist and traveler, professor at one of Germany's largest universities, Gerhardt vom Rath, to Nikolai Koksharov, Director of the Mining Institute and the Imperial Mineralogical Society.
Rath was not the only foreigner who admired the scientist's work. The Royal Academies of Sciences in Bavaria, Rome, Göttingen, the Royal Geological Institute in Vienna, the French Mineralogical Society in Paris, the specialized scientific societies in Berlin, Derpt, Riga and Prague, not to mention the congratulations of individuals, sent their dithyrambs for the 50th anniversary of his scientific activity. What exactly did Nikolai Koksharov do to deserve such recognition?
He was born in 1818 in the very southwest of the Tomsk region near the Ust-Kamenogorsk fortress. In the line of his grandfather, Lieutenant-General of the Russian Army and Prince of Georgian origin Stepan Eristov (Eristavi) Koksharov was a descendant of Georgian Bagrationites. A vivid representative of this ancient royal dynasty is the hero of the Battle of Borodino, General of the Russian Army Pyotr Bagration.
The mineralogist's father, Ivan Koksharov, descended from noblemen and was a famous mining engineer who served until 1822 at the Altai Imperial Mining Plants, and later managed the Beryozovsky gold mines.
Nikolai Ivanovich spent his childhood in the Urals, on the Koksharovs' estate "Metlino". The nature of the Perm province, excursions with his father to the mines and the wealth of local gems developed in the boy a passion for geology. Therefore, the 12-year-old boy gladly accepted his appointment to the Mining Cadet Corps, which was later transformed into the Mining Institute. His aptitude did not go unnoticed by Konstantin Chevkin, the chief of staff of the Corps of Mining Engineers (the future chief administrator of railroads, a member of the State Council of the Russian Empire and chairman of the Economics Department).
In 1840 by invitation of the Academy of Sciences, the famous British geologist Roderick Murchison, who became famous as a scientist who first in the history of science described the Silurian and Devonian periods, came to Russia to conduct large-scale geological research. At the recommendation of Chevkin, a young engineer, Nikolai Koksharov, who had barely passed his final exams at the Mining Institute, was assigned to accompany the first-class explorer on expeditions around the country.
It is known how fruitful that journey proved to be. Visiting nine provinces, from Olonets to Nizhny Novgorod, Murchison and his companions discovered controversial deposits that could not be assigned to the divisions of the German or English classifications available to science "either by fossils or by the nature of the rocks. The need to distinguish a new system, which was later called the Permian Paleozoic, became obvious.
Historians cite an interesting case characterizing both Koksharov and Murchison. In his report, the 22-year-old author did not agree with the conclusions of the venerable British scientist when describing the mottled rocks of the eastern belt of Russia. In turn, he, not only was not angry, but, after double-checking the data, agreed with Nikolai Ivanovich and sent him a personal letter, admitting that he was right. Such fidelity to science and depth of knowledge of the novice mineralogist motivated Murchison to invite him to a secondary expedition in 1841 and to put Koksharov's name next to his own when publishing the geological map of Russia.
Moreover, in 1842, at Murchison's request, the Russian scientist was sent to Paris and Berlin to continue his education and prepare for his professorship, where he attended lectures and worked under such coryphaei as the author of the "Geological Map of France" Elie de Beaumont, the major German crystallography theorists Christian Weiss and Karl Naumann.
Having returned home in 1846, Koksharov concentrated on science. If in the first years the systematic study of the stratigraphic sections, rocks, fossil organic remains, relations of magmatic masses and sedimentary sequences were the field of his scientific interests, from the middle of the 40's the scientist concentrated on mineralogy. Among his first successes was his work on the crystallization of minerals of the chlorite group.
In 1953 he began the main work of his life - the multi-volume work "Materials for the mineralogy of Russia". By this fundamental work, Nikolai Koksharov made a considerable contribution to the study, exact measurement, description of morphological characteristics of crystals of more than 400 minerals, many of which he was the first to discover in the country (including brukite, ortite, wollastonite, yellow cancrinite, euclase). Not only the scale, but also the approach to the research was revolutionary in its essence. The young scientist consciously rejected the popular at that time method of purely verbal multi-word descriptions of Werner school, replacing them by exact characteristics, first of all morphological ones, with corresponding crystallographic data and exact images of crystals. For the first of eleven volumes of the work alone, the Academy of Sciences awarded the author the honorary Demidov Prize.
A second trip abroad (to Europe and the USA) showed that "Materials for mineralogy of Russia" did not go unnoticed, and Nikolai Ivanovich won the fame of an outstanding mineralogist not only in Russian, but also in foreign scientific circles.
The famous German geographer and traveler Alexander Humboldt wrote:
"Koksharov's works are considered among the best and most accurate, they are very valued in Europe."
Romulus Prendel, the founder of Russian meteorology, rightly remarked:
"No state in the world can boast of such a collection on native minerals."
And the results of Nikolai Ivanovich's work have no expiration date. Already in the 20th century the natural scientist Vladimir Vernadsky emphasized: "We can say that only thanks to Koksharov we have an exact knowledge of the geometrical form of the main groups of minerals and only after his work were correct generalizations and comparisons possible of those phenomena for the knowledge of which the form is the main and decisive. He measured and calculated the representatives of the main groups of the mineral kingdom, and Koksharov's numbers are still the basis of our knowledge of natural crystals".
In addition to research, Koksharov paid great attention to the training of future geologists and mineralogists. Higher and secondary educational institutions vyingly invited him to join their teams.
In 1846, immediately after his first trip abroad, the scientist began to teach at the Mining Institute. In addition to his alma mater, he taught courses in mineralogy, geology and physical geography, mining art and metallurgy at St. Petersburg University (where he became friends with the young Dmitry Mendeleev), the Institute of Railway Engineers, the Forestry and Mezhevsky Institutes, Konstantinovsky College, Pages Corps, First Cadet Corps and the Technical School at the Institute of Technology. His "Lectures on mineralogy" historically became the first original (not translated) textbook on crystallography and mineralogy in Russia.
For almost three decades (from 1865 to 1892) Nikolai Ivanovich was the director of the Imperial Mineralogical Society. It was only thanks to his ebullient activity and long leadership that the society became one of the main initiators and participants of a systematic geological study of the Russian Empire, the ultimate goal of which was to produce a full-fledged geological map.
In 1866, Koksharov became an ordinary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and director of its Mineralogical Museum. Among his official duties was not only to replenish the exposition and conduct topical scientific research, but also to work on the popularization of Russian mineralogy. Thus, he was entrusted to accompany the German Crown Prince of Bavaria, the grandson of Emperor Nicholas I and great-grandson of Josephine Beauharnais, Duke Nicholas of Lichtenberg, during his official tour of the Tula Province and the Urals.
In 1872 Nikolai Koksharov, who by that time had already gained the status of the "father of Russian crystallography", became the director of the Mining Institute. His appointment coincided with the preparations for and the celebration of the centennial of the first technical college in Russia. Having coped with the task brilliantly, the academician once again proved himself as a talented organizer.
In 1881, however, he had to leave his post. His leadership should have lasted much longer, but so-called "family circumstances" intervened in the course of history. A close relative of Koksharov's wife, who was the daughter of the Baltic baron Stromberg, was captured and executed in 1881 as a revolutionary terrorist and one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Central Military Organization "Narodnaya Volya". This had an immediate effect on the career of the mineralogist himself... Although he still enjoyed enormous prestige among his colleagues and remained director of the Mineralogical Society, it was no longer possible for him to head the university.
In 1889 Nikolay Koksharov received one of the highest awards of the Russian Empire - the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky, which became his 12th.
The scientist died in St. Petersburg on December 21, 1892, at the age of 74. Until his last day he was a member of eight foreign academies, 19 Russian scientific societies and 11 foreign ones, the author of more than 150 scientific works in Russian, French, and German, continued to work on his life's work - he tried to solve organizational problems of printing the 11th volume of "Materials for mineralogy of Russia..."
