FoundationalConceptsNeuroscience

today and set forth what he believed to be a comprehensive listing of
all the chemical elements known in his time.
Life was not easy for these pioneers of modern chemistry. Priest-
ley’s primary vocation was as an educator and minister. He was a dis-
senter from the Church of England and a supporter of the American
and French Revolutions. In 1791, his home and laboratory in Birming-
ham, England, were destroyed by a riotous mob, and he fled with his
family first to London and then, in 1794 to America, where he lived
the final decade of his life in rural Pennsylvania. Lavoisier’s fate was
far worse. Because of his history of involvement with an institution
that collected taxes for the French crown, he was arrested during the
French Revolution and executed by guillotine in 1794 at the age of
fifty. Later, the new French government is said to have apologized to
Lavoisier’s family.
Flash forward to 1869: Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-
1907) puts forth a way of organizing the known chemical elements
into what we now call the periodic table. The periodic table of the
chemical elements qualifies as one of the great achievements of the
human intellect, representing a large amount of information in a very
compact form. From gaps in his organizational scheme, Mendeleev
predicted the existence of several not-yet-discovered chemical ele-
ments. Three of these elements, discovered later, are now called gal-
lium, germanium, and scandium. Figure 3.1 shows the basic form of
the modern periodic table of the chemical elements.