PALLAS, Peter Simon (1741-1811), naturalist and traveller, was born in Berlin, September 22, 1741, the son of Simon Pallas, surgeon in the Prussian army, and professor of surgery in Berlin. Pallas was carefully educated by his father, being accustomed from boyhood to the use of several languages, among them English and French. He was intended for the medical profession, and his progress was such that in 1758 he lectured publicly on anatomy. Pallas studied at the universities of Berlin, Halle, Göttingen, and Leyden. He early displayed a strong leaning towards natural history investigations, which by the time he reached manhood almost monopolized his attention. In 1761 he came to England, where he spent a year, devoting himself to a thorough study of the collections he found there, and to a geological investigation of part of the English coast; and at the age of twenty-three he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. Pallas spent some time in Holland, where he found ample scope for investigation in his special subjects, the results of which appeared at the Hague in 1766 in his Elenchus Zoophy torum and Miscellanea Zoologica, and in 1767-1804 in his well-known Spicilegia Zoologica (Berlin). In 1768 he gladly accepted the invitation of the empress Catherine to fill the professorship of natural history in the Imperial Academy of Science, St Petersburg, and from that time until within a year of his death his home was in Russia. The great event of his life, and that by which he will be permanently remembered, was the expedition through Russia and Siberia in 1768-74, in which he acted as naturalist, in company with Falk, Lepechen, and Güldenstadt, the immediate object being the observation of the transit of Venus in 1769. In this leisurely journey Pallas went by Kasan to the Caspian, spent some time among the Calmucks, crossed the Urals to Tobolsk, visited the Altai Mountains, traced the Irtish to Kolyvan, went on to Tomsk and the Yenissei, crossed Lake Baikal, and extended his journey to the frontiers of China. Few explorations have been so fruitful as this six years’ journey. Pallas’s collections included all departments of natural history, and his observations extended to every point of interest in the region traversed and its inhabitants. The leading results were given in his Reisen durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs (3 vols. 4to, St Petersburg, 1771-76), richly illustrated with coloured plates. A French translation in 1788-93, in 8 vols., with 9 vols, of plates, contained, in addition to the narrative, the natural history results of the expedition; and an English translation in three volumes appeared in 1812. As special results of this great journey may be mentioned Sammlungen historischer Nachrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften (2 vols. 4to, St Petersburg, 1776-1802); Novae Species Quadrupedum, 1778-79; Pallas’s contributions to the dictionary of languages of the Russian empire, 1786-89; Icones Insectorum, praesertim Rossiae Siberiaeque peculiarium, 1781-1806; Zoographia Rosso- Asiatica (3 vols., 1831); besides many special papers in the Transactions of the academies of St Petersburg and Berlin. The empress bought Pallas’s natural history collections for 20,000 roubles, 5000 more than he asked for them, and allowed him to keep them for life. He spent a considerable time in 1793-94 in visiting the southern provinces of Russia, and was so greatly taken with the Crimea that he determined to take up his residence there. The empress gave him a large estate at Simpheropol, and 10,000 roubles to assist in equipping a house. Though disappointed with the Crimea as a place of residence, Pallas continued to live there, devoted to constant research, especially in botany, till the death of his second wife in 1810, when he removed to Berlin, where he died September 8, 1811. The results of his journey in southern Russia were given in his Bemerkungen auf einer Reise durch die südlichen Statthalterschaften des Russischen Reichs (Leipsic, 1799-1801; English translation by Blagdon, vols. 5-8 of Modern Discoveries, 1802, and another in 2 vols., 1812). Pallas also edited and contributed to Neue Nordische Beiträge zur physikalischen Erd-und Völkerbeschreibung, Naturgeschichte, und Oekonomie (1781-96), published Illustrationes Plantarum imperfecte vel nondum cognitarum (Leipsic, 1803), and contributed to Buffon’s Natural History a paper on the formation of mountains, and to the Transactions of various learned societies a great number of special papers.

The solid value and great extent of Pallas’s contributions to natural science have been long admitted; his name is inseparably associated with the geography (in its varied branches) of Siberia and a large part of European Russia. That he had a marked influence on the progress of zoology there is no doubt; some authorities even hold that he changed the face of the science; while his geological investigations and speculations, if they did not revolutionize the young science (as has been maintained), greatly helped its progress. Though not in any sense brilliant either as an investigator or as a writer, Pallas is certainly one of the most important figures in the science of the latter half of the 18th century.

See the Essay of Rudolphi in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy for 1812; Cuvier’s Ëloge in his Recueil des Éloges Historiques, vol. ii.; and the Life in Jardine's Naturalists’ Library, vol. iv., Edin., 1843.