Vol 40

Before the outbreak of the First World War, the level of economic development of tsarist Russia was very low, especially in the mining industry. In 1913 coal production in Russia amounted to 29 million tons (2.4% of world production), oil 9.2 million tons (20%), iron ore 9.2 million tons (5%), copper 30 thousand tons (3%), lead 1.5 thousand tons, zinc 2.9 thousand tons (a fraction of a percent of world production).

Indication of articles by sections.

We refer only to the main successes achieved by the scientists of the Mining Institute. We shall begin our review with a consideration of the position of the course of petrology at the Mining Institute and the studies of rocks carried out by the scientists in the pre-revolutionary period, and then we shall dwell on the analysis of the works carried out after 1917. From the year of foundation of the Mining Institute (1773) and until the middle of the nineteenth century, no separate course of petrography was taught at the Institute. Usually this or that information about various rocks was given in the general courses of geology. But from the very beginning of the Mining Institute's activity in St. Petersburg, the necessity of creating a cabinet where the rocks that make up the “Earth's skull” would be collected began to be felt. Such a cabinet under the name of geognostic was created in the walls of the Mining Institute in 1804. In 1830 it was said that “it now contains 1233 pieces” of rocks and minerals, and it was noted that “the collection of lavas and other works of Vesuvius deserves special attention here”.

The first issue of the scientific printed organ of the Leningrad Mining Institute was published in St. Petersburg under the title “Notes of the Mining Institute of Empress Catherine II” on November 12, 1907, i.e. 134 years after the founding of the Institute. Until the beginning of the XX century its role was actually performed by the Mining Journal, founded in 1825 at the Mining Corps (as the Institute was then called) as an organ of the Mining Scientific Committee on Mining and Salt.

Control figures for the development of the national economy of the USSR for 1959-1965 provides for a further increase in the production of various ores. It suffices to say that by 1965, ore output in the various branches of the mining industry will have increased from 2 to 3 times as much as in 1958. The major part of this increase will be achieved (mainly at new deposits) at the expense of open-pit mining, but the share of underground works remains high - about 40-50%.

St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) Mining Institute even before the Great October Socialist Revolution was one of the centers of crystallography and mineralogy, widely known not only in our country, but also throughout the world. In the last century, the works of two founders of the descriptive crystallographic-mineralogical school in Russia - famous professors of the Institute - Academician N. I. Koksharov (1818-1892) and Academician P. V. Eremeev (1826-1899) were universally recognized. Since 1905, the chairs of crystallography and petrography were headed by E. S. Fedorov (1853-- 1919), an outstanding pupil of the Institute; mineralogy was taught by his pupil and assistant V. V. Nikitin (1867-1942), the author of the famous monograph “Fedorov's Universal Method”. New crystallographic, mineralogical and petrographic methods developed at the Institute, based on the remarkable Fedorov discoveries and achievements, attracted numerous students not only from all parts of our homeland, but also from abroad. T. Barker from Oxford, L. Duparc from Geneva, Jimbo from Japan and a number of other major foreign specialists spent several years in Russia learning crystallochemical analysis and universal method from their creator, E. S. Fedorov.

The above transformation of series expressing theta functions has been well known for a long time. It was obtained by Jacobi in 1828 and is related to his studies on the theory of elliptic functions.

Mathematics and mechanics are represented in the “Notes of the Leningrad Mining Institute” by studies in various fields of analysis, geometry and mechanics. Considering the works published in the pages of the Notes of the LMI for the fifty-year period of their existence, one can get a general idea of the work of the departments of mathematics and mechanics, the orientation of these works, their nature and the results achieved.

From the establishment of the connection between the external shape of a crystal and its structure, as is known, all modern crystal chemistry was born: before the development of X-ray structural analysis, information about the structure of crystals was based solely on the external shape and cleavage.

Thanks to the outstanding studies of pegmatites made by A.E. Fersman, a group of his collaborators and followers, which aroused general interest in this important type of mineral deposits, as well as the works of numerous foreign scientists, the hypothesis of pegmatite formation by fractional crystallization of the so-called “pegmatite” melt was almost universally accepted among Soviet geologists for many decades. The hypothesis was based on the idea of successive crystallization of this melt in a calm tectonic environment, in a closed and isolated chamber of the pegmatite vein body. It was assumed that rare-metal minerals and large-crystalline mica, as well as minerals of the accessoria (garnets, apatite, tourmaline, etc.) appeared by crystallization in the free environment of the “pegmatite melt” before the surrounding quartz-feldspar rocks of the pegmatite crystallized. It was supposed that in some cases some of the rare-metal minerals could also arise as a result of autometasomatic reactions under the influence of the so-called “residual solutions” separating from the “pegmatite melt” here on the spot, inside the vein chamber.

The "Journal of the Leningrad Mining Institute during the fifty years of its existence occupy a prominent role in the history of the development of Russian mineralogy and crystallography. From the beginning of the foundation of the journal and to the end of his life one of the most active workers of the Notes was the famous professor and director of the Mining Institute, the greatest Russian crystallographer, geometer, petrographer, and mineralogist E. S. S. Kovalov. С. Fedorov (1853-1919). From 1907 to 1917, 144 of his works appeared in the pages of the Notes. Of these, 65 are related to crystallography proper, 4 to mineralogy and 5 to petrography. The remaining articles treat mainly questions of new geometry, intensively developed in those years by the scientist. However, in these seemingly purely geometric works E. S. Fedorov paid special attention to the practical use of his theoretical conclusions in the field of crystallography, mineralogy and mining. Thus, for example, in the article “Precise representation of points of space on the plane” (1907, vol. I, vol. 1, issue 1) various ways of representing points of three-dimensional space on the plane with the help of circles (vectoral and ordinary) and parallel vectors are proposed. In the article “Representation of Crystal Structure by Vectorial Circles” (1908, vol. I, vol. 4), the mentioned methods were successfully applied to represent elementary particles composing spatial crystal structures on the plane. This remarkable method was recalled by A. N. Zavaritsky and demonstrated its efficiency on examples of the image of real crystal structures.