Ivan Polyakoff

Abstract

RUSSIA has lost one of her most promising men of science in Ivan Polyakoff, who died lately at St. Petersburg, from hepatic disease, at the age of about forty. He was born in the small village of Transbaikalia, on the Argun, of Cossack parents, descendants from the earlier settlers of Siberia, and received his first education in a military school for sons of soldiers and Cossacks at Irkutsk—a very limited education indeed. As his parents were poor, and life in his native village offered no attractions, he accepted the position of teacher at the same school where he had been educated. Zoology and botany became the sciences of his choice A large park belonging to the Governor, close by the military school, peopled with a variety of birds and insects, became the first field of his researches. As the spring came, he would spend the day in the garden, sometimes extending his excursions to the neighbourhood of Irkutsk, where so much is to be learned. He wrote down his observations, and published them in the Irkutsk Gazette. From the very first lines of his description one is struck by a remarkable feature of Polyakoff's mind-a feature which is to be found in all his later writings, and which cannot but be highly appreciated by a true naturalist: it is the simplicity of his conception of the animal world; I should say his intimacy, his familiarity, with every bird or animal he describes. He understood them. One must be born in a lonely Siberian village on the confines of the civilized world, at the border of the uninhabited Gobi steppe—the Argun is such a border—to be always in so close a contact with Nature.