At the end of the 18th century the Russian Empire included Belarus, the Right-Bank Ukraine, Crimea, the Sea of Azov, and the lands between the Bug and Dniester. Russia "took under its patronage" Georgia, Russian America - Alaska - appeared. In addition, the unexplored Urals and Siberia beckoned with their wealth. The new lands required detailed research "economically, economically, geographically and in other respects". One of those who Alexander I put in charge of this undertaking was Vasily Severgin, elected professor of the Academy of Sciences at the age of 27.
During 1802-1804 he traveled all over the Baltic States, Poland, Finland, Belarus and most of the western regions of Russia. He visited factories, plants, and mines, studied topography and minerals, and selected samples of minerals, ores, and soils for detailed study in a chemical laboratory. The purpose of the expeditions the academician saw, as is now customary to say, active import substitution: "The vast Russian state is so abundant in various works of nature that it requires only encouragement and hardworking hands to deliver them in sufficient quantity and to replace foreign ones."
How did the researcher gain such trust of the imperial crown?
Today Vasily Severgin is known as the founder of the Russian school of mineralogy, analytical and pharmaceutical chemistry. Considering that he was born in 1765 into the family of a freed peasant who had become a court musician, one can imagine how ardent and assertive his path to science was. While still with his father, the young man learned Russian literacy and painting, and gained an initial knowledge of Latin, French, and German. Only his outstanding abilities can explain the fact that at the age of eleven he managed to enter the Academic Gymnasium, the first general secondary school in the Russian Empire for boys from different free estates, which was directed by Mikhail Lomonosov until his death.
After graduating from grammar school, the young man was enrolled at the Academic University. In his second year, the young man as the most talented student was sent to continue his studies in the German city of Göttingen, where one of the largest and oldest universities in Europe was located. By the way, the University of Göttingen was mentioned in Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" - in the story Vladimir Lensky studied there.
Vasily Mikhailovich chose mineralogy as his specialty, but the range of interests, according to instructions from the leadership of the Academy of Sciences, was much wider than the study of samples in the collections. He was instructed to pay attention to chemistry and metallurgy - to study the work of mines, quarries and factories, to describe the composition of mountains, the order of layers, the position of ore veins.
Four years later, in 1789, Severgin took his examinations in front of the most respected scientists in the field of mineralogy, chemistry, physics, and botany. As a result, he was immediately elected an associate of the Academy of Sciences (four years later he was elevated to the rank of academician and professor of mineralogy). The examiners unanimously expressed confidence that the newly minted researcher was ready for independent work. And the work began to boil over!
In the second half of the eighteenth century the serious successes of chemistry made impossible the further development of a whole series of natural sciences without its consideration. Vasily Severgin fully shared the conviction about the need for chemical understanding of mineralogical material and the introduction of chemical methods of investigation in geology.
While abroad, following the purely verbal dispute between Neptunists and Plutonists (the former believed that all rocks were formed by deposition from seawater, the latter by the action of volcanoes), Vasily Mikhailovich developed a skeptical attitude toward abstract comprehensive theories that had no empirical basis. He was convinced that it was necessary to act only on the basis of convictions "which he had attained through experiments repeated by himself.
Severgin did not deny the practical value of the then popular classification of rocks according to their appearance proposed by the famous German geologist Abraham Werner, but he considered their chemical composition to be the most important attribute. One of the main scientific merits of the scientist is the substantiation and development of the chemical direction in Russian mineralogy.
For example, the study of the regular co-occurrence of certain minerals led Vasily Mikhailovich to the discovery of "contiguity". In 50 years, the German mineralogist August Breitgaupt called Severgin's discovery a paragenesis, and he himself became the official creator of the doctrine of paragenesis. Under that name, the phenomenon entered the geological literature.
Exploring mixed mineral formations, which had previously been described as "wild rocks", Severgin defined them as rocks and separated them into a separate section of mineralogy, thereby laying the foundations for Russian petrography.
In 1807 in his thorough work "A Detailed Dictionary of Mineralogy" he introduced the Russian reader to the basics of crystallography, 55 years before Nikolai Koksharov and 80 years before Yevgraf Fedorov.
He also gave rise to Quaternary geology (a branch of geology and paleogeography that studies the Quaternary system and its corresponding period of Earth history), dividing mountains into four groups: primary (such as granite mountains), second origin (clayey layered mountains), third origin (limestone mountains with fossils) and fourth formation (sandy mountains and hills). The modern development of this branch of science in Europe and the United States began only in the late 1920s.
Expeditions throughout Russia enriched Vasily Mikhailovich with field observations and samples, whose chemical and mineralogical composition was thoroughly investigated upon his return. The result was numerous works by the author - on Siberian aquamarine, aventurine and tin ore, selenite from Poltava, granites from Finland, rocks from Ararat, and serpentite from Altai. Not surprisingly, he was one of the founders of the Mineralogical Society in 1817.
Wishing to bring as many people as possible to the natural sciences, Severgin organized public lectures on mineralogy at the Academy of Sciences, and deliberately made them as accessible to all as possible. At the same time he taught chemistry, mineralogy and assaying at a higher level for future engineers and doctors - in the Mining Corps (now the Mining University) and the Medical-Surgical Academy. The performances were an incredible success. The "First foundations of mineralogy" published based on the materials of the lectures were the first original course of mineralogy in Russia, as well as a work on the systematics of minerals.
Considering the mentioned merits of Severgin, he is justly called the founder of mineralogy in Russia. However, his manual on assay art, manual on extraction of mineral alkaline salts, manual on production of saltpeter and manual on production of sulfur from sulfuric cauldron show that he was a true pioneer also in the field of analytical chemistry. The book on the art of assaying is the first textbook on analytical chemistry in the country, so the date of its publication in 1801 is rightly considered the date of the establishment of the science as a separate branch of knowledge.
Among the most important innovations of the scientist are the use of soldering tube in the practice of chemical analysis, creation of a facility for the analysis of ores in the field, development of methods of precipitation and separation of various metals, application of alkali as a group reagent and organic reagents in inorganic analysis.
Vasily Mikhailovich adhered to the scientific direction in analytical chemistry, striving to give any performed operations a theoretical explanation. Such a direction did not develop until many years later, only at the end of the nineteenth century. Even in the best books on analytical chemistry of the first half of the 19th century - Rose, Berzelius, Fresenius - all operations and methods of analysis were presented purely empirically.
A manual on pharmaceutical analysis of drugs, published by an academician under the title "The way to test the purity and insubstantiality of chemical products of medicines" was a great success. Before its publication in the first half of XVIII century the quality of drugs was determined only by organoleptic method - by smell, taste, color, consistency and other features, which created conditions for their adulteration.
The book considered all known at the time medicinal substances from the "kingdom of fossils" according to the scheme: production, physical properties, identification, purity testing. This order of research has been preserved to this day. The scientist's work became a valuable addition to the first Russian Pharmacopoeia, because it was published in Latin and the manual - in Russian, which made it accessible to a wide range of specialists.
Unlike most researchers of that time, the professor wrote and printed his works exactly in Russian. He purposefully translated from French and German the most important textbooks on mineralogy, chemistry, technology, and physics. Vassily Mikhailovich did more than any other Russian scientist of his time for the development of the Russian scientific terminology. He created the first Russian chemical and geological nomenclatures, in the four-volume textbook of chemistry (1810-1813) he was the first to introduce many terms that still exist today: oxidation, silica, alkali, sulfuric acid salts, luster, transparency, flexibility, "shell" fracture of minerals, etc. In botany, Severgin coined such names as "calyx," "corolla," and "stamen."
The outstanding scientist died on November 29, 1826. A member of the Academy of Sciences wrote him an epitaph:
"Here lies Severgin, industrious and honest;
He was known to his fatherland by his talent,
He followed Lomonosov into the underground
And the secrets of humble ores he comprehended and described."