Mendeleev was not concerned in 1869 with establishing a basic law of chemistry. He was concerned with writing a textbook for young chemists at St. Petersburg University. ...From 1871 on, Mendeleev himself would repeatedly abstract periodicity from its context... making it seem an emblem of pure science. ...it is how those sketches turned into an immutable law that requires explaining....Mendeleev's predictions themselves had naturalized periodicity by demonstrating the predictive power of his system. He then used this success to naturalize other components of the Great Reforms model.
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About Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev was a 19th-century Russian chemist. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was a Russian chemist known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the periodic law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but also to predict the properties of three elements that were yet to be discovered. Read more on Wikipedia →