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“this talented man did honor to the academy and the
whole people.” In physics, Lomonósof, independent of
Franklin, explained the principles of electricity in the
air and of the Northern Lights, which accords in many
points with Franklin’s, and in some other respects he
is even more advanced. In mineralogy he was the first
to point out the vegetable origin of amber and the
production of coal from peaty soil under the influence of
subterranean gases. In astronomy he was the discoverer
of the atmosphere of Venus. Finally, as a chemist
and geologist, he distinguished himself by his popular
descriptive powers.
His studies in the Russian language, literature, and
history made an epoch. His Russian grammar has
controlled education in his native land for half a century.
He wrote books about Russian style, rhetoric, and metres
at the same time that he himself was working as a poet
and orator. Finally, he is Russia’s pioneer in mosaic
art. There still exist from his hand a well executed
portrait in mosaic of Peter the Great, and a large work
representing the battle at Poltava.
It is this man of genius who, for the first time since
the introduction into Russia of the intellectual and in
some directions material foreign ascendency by the Tsar
Peter, gave an organ to the old Russian national feeling,
while he at the same time made himself its poetical
exponent and its practical champion, — the latter being
carried out to the most infatuated chauvinism. His
great reputation in this generation, when his poetry is
no longer read, depends on the fact that it was he
who gave the first impulse towards the liberation of
the Russian intellectual life and of Russian science,
then just dawning, from the foreign and especially from
the German yoke.
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