“Lomonósoff was himself a university,” was Púshkin’s remark, and this remark was quite correct: so varied were the directions in which he worked. Not only was he a distinguished natural philosopher, chemist, physical geographer, and mineralogist: he laid also the foundations of the grammar of the Russian language, which he understood as part of a general grammar of all languages, considered in their natural evolution. He also worked out the different forms of Russian versification, and he created quite a new literary language, of which he could say that it was equally appropriate for rendering “the powerful oratory of Cicero, the brilliant earnestness of Virgil and the pleasant talk of Ovid, as well as the subtlest imaginary conceptions of philosophy, or discussing the various properties of matter and the changes which are always going on in the structure of the universe and in human affairs.” This he proved by his poetry, by his scientific writings, and by his “Discourses,” in which he combined Huxley’s readiness to defend science against blind faith with Humboldt’s poetical conception of Nature. His odes were, it is true, written in the pompous style which was dear to the pseudo-classicism then reigning, and he retained Old Slavonian expressions “for dealing with elevated subjects”, but in his scientific and other writings he used the commonly spoken language with great effect and force. Owing to the very variety of sciences which he had to acclimatise in Russia, he could not give much time to original research; but when he took up the defence of the ideas of Copernicus, Newton, or Huyghens against the opposition which they met with on theological grounds, a true philosopher of natural science, in the modern sense of the term, was revealed in him. In his early boyhood he used to accompany his father--a sturdy northern fisherman--on his fishing expeditions, and there he got his love of Nature and a fine comprehension of natural phenomena, which made of his Memoir on Arctic Exploration a work that has not lost its value even now. It is well worthy of note that in this last work he had stated the mechanical theory of heat in such definite expressions that he undoubtedly anticipated by a full century this great discovery of our own time--a fact which has been entirely overlooked, even in Russia.