BRINGING HOME THE EXOTIC
Peter Simon Pallas
Travels Through the Russian Empire
(1802)
At the time of his death in 1778, Carl von Linné, better known as Linnaeus, was thought of as the greatest
scientist of the age. Some time before, Linnaeus himself had implied a successor, "a most intelligent
youth, most competent in the study of entomology, ornithology, and all nature." In fact, Peter Simon
Pallas would be one of the last scientists to be acquainted with "all nature," and to try to catalog all of it for
posterity.
The son of a professor of surgery, Pallas was born in Berlin and studied at the Universities of Halle and
Göttingen before receiving his doctorate at the University of Leiden at age nineteen. His dissertation
disputed the widely held idea that intestinal worms are spontaneously generated inside the body, the
first of many hypotheses he would debunk. Leiden was the home of the world’s premier natural history
collection, and Pallas soon began to add to its holdings and to write a classification and description of all
mammals.
Before he could complete this enormous project, Pallas received an invitation from Catherine the Great
to become Professor of Natural History at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Still in
the throes of the modernization movement begun by Peter the Great, Russia felt its deficiency of major
intellectual institutions, and Catherine was handpicking experts from many parts of Europe to make up
the lack. She hoped simultaneously to extend knowledge of the farther reaches of her realm.
In pursuit of both these goals, Pallas led a major expedition from 1768 to 1774, traveling to the Ural and
Altai mountains, the Caspian Sea, and as far east as Lake Baikal. Along with collecting numerous animal
and plant specimens, he made keen observations of rock layers and modified the popular theory of the
creation of the earth with evidence of volcanic activity. Near the city of Krasnoyarsk he found a strange
compound stone; the meteorites in its class are now called pallasites in his honor. His three-volume book
Travels Through Various Provinces
in the Russian Empire documented huge amounts of new knowledge.
A shorter expedition in 1793 and 1794 took Pallas to the Crimea and Black Sea regions and inspired
Travels Through the Southern Provinces.
This work increasingly described human cultures as well as
natural features, based on the idea that linguistic and cultural groups could be charted just like related
species. This technique produced invaluable research on the vanishing Siberian tribes, but also required
arbitrary value judgments that led Pallas to call one tribe "an honest and brave set of people" and their
neighbors "a barbarous, predatory, and miserable race of men." Tsarina Catherine used Pallas’s research to
write her 1786 play The Siberian Shaman.
Pallas lived in Russia for forty-three years. His many ambitious projects included the fundamental
documents of comparative vertebrate anatomy, a comparative dictionary, and a series of articles on the
relationship of geography and agriculture. When the Napoleonic wars made him fear for the safety of
his specimens, he returned to Berlin in 1810, leaving much work unfinished at his death the following
year. He had described an amazing total of more than 220 plants, 45 mammals and 78 birds previously
unknown to science. A number of animals, such Pallas’s Cat and Pallas’s Sandgrouse, are named for him,
along with a street in Berlin and a town in Volgograd Oblast. Charles Darwin would refer to Pallas in
four of his major works, joining the generations of scientists in many disciplines whose work could not
exist without Pallas.
Further Reading:
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