Mendeleyev's Dream

What is the world made of? The ancient Greeks speculated about earth, air, fire, and water; today we turn to the periodic table for more reliable information. The story of how we got from there to here is full of fascinating people, and in this elegant, entertaining book, Paul Strathern introduces us to ancient philosophers, medieval alchemists, and the earliest chemists-and to Dimitri Mendeleyev, the card-playing nineteenth-century Russian who claimed that the answers came to him in a dream.