Background
Levinson-Lessing was born Feodor Yulievich Levinson-Lessing on March 9, 1861, in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire (now Russia), the son of a well-known doctor, Julius Dmitrievich Levinson-Lessing, and Elizaveta Iosifovna Ber.
1934
Levinson-Lessing in 1934.
Solyanoy Pereulok, 12, St Petersburg, Russia, 191028
Levinson-Lessing graduated from the Third St. Petersburg Gymnasium in 1879.
University Embankment, 7/9, St Petersburg, Russia, 199034
Levinson-Lessing entered St. Petersburg University, where he studied under the petrographer A. A. Inostrantsev. He graduated from the physico-mathematical faculty in 1883.
Фра́нц Левинсо́н-Ле́ссинг
geologist mineralogist scientist
Levinson-Lessing was born Feodor Yulievich Levinson-Lessing on March 9, 1861, in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire (now Russia), the son of a well-known doctor, Julius Dmitrievich Levinson-Lessing, and Elizaveta Iosifovna Ber.
Levinson-Lessing spent his childhood in St. Petersburg and received his secondary education there. He graduated from the Third St. Petersburg Gymnasium in 1879. He then entered St. Petersburg University, where he studied under the petrographer A. A. Inostrantsev. He graduated from the physico-mathematical faculty in 1883.
Levinson-Lessing remained after graduation in St. Petersburg State University to prepare for a teaching career. Undoubted influences on him in the first years of his scientific career were his teacher and colleague, the pioneer soil scientist V. V. Dokuchaev, and V. I. Vernadsky. Under this influence, he concentrated on the chemistry of inorganic nature. Levinson-Lessing maintained lifelong ties with soil science, had a continuing interest in its problems and headed various soil institutions.
Ten years after graduating from the university, during which period he had synthesized his work in regional petrography and marked out new paths in its theoretical structure, Levinson-Lessing became professor of mineralogy at the University of Yurev (Tartu).
Working from 1902 to 1930 at the Polytechnical Institute in Leningrad, Levinson-Lessing organized the first laboratory of experimental petrography in Russia, and then a geochemical section. From a division of mineralogy he created petrography, which has become an independent field of knowledge. His main areas of concentration were the analysis of the crust of the earth, the penetration of its depths, and the clarification of the structure of mountains and rocks and their accompanying ore deposits.
Levinson-Lessing’s regional petrographic works were the basis for the development of theoretical petrology. His expeditions in Karelia, the Urals, the Caucasus, Transcaucasia, the Crimea, the Khibiny Mountains, and eastern Siberia enabled him to approach the solution of the problems of petrographic formations and origin. In 1888 he advanced the idea of the Olonets diabasic formation, which was productively developed in the theory of formations. His trips to Italy and his ascent of Vesuvius with A. Rittmann provided an impetus for the creation in 1935 of the volcanological station at Kamchatka, where Soviet volcanology developed.
Classifying and systematizing igneous rocks occupied Levinson-Lessing throughout his career. In 1898 he proposed the first rational chemical classification of rocks. In his works he depended on physical and chemical research methods, using them to solve such problems as the differentiation of magma and the genesis and classification of rocks and ore deposits.
An active participant in the International Geological Congress, Levinson-Lessing corresponded with the most distinguished geologists and petrographers of western Europe and the United States. At the seventh session of the Congress, Levinson-Lessing was elected to the commission on the classification of igneous rock. For the eighth session, which took place in 1900, he prepared the Petrographic Dictionary. At the Paris meeting of the Commission on the Petrographic Nomenclature he presented a report and his own additions. He also participated in the twelfth, fourteenth, and seventeenth sessions. In the last session the Permanent Commission on Petrography, Mineralogy, and Geo-chemistry was organized, with Levinson-Lessing as president.
Levinson-Lessing was a historian of petrography and the natural sciences whose works are well-known both in the Soviet Union and abroad; his monographs. Uspekhi petrografii v Rosii (“The Progress of Perography in Russia”; 1923) and Vvedenie v istoriyu petrografii (“Introduction to the History of Petrography”; 1936) and many biographical sketches of well-known scientists reveal a tireless researcher in the history of science. A historical approach to the solution of basic scientific problems characterized Levinson-Lessing and appeared in many of his works, particularly in the important “Problema genezisa magmaticheskikh porod i puti k ee razresheniyu” (“The Problem of the Genesis of Magmatic Rock and the Means of Solving It”; 1934).
Levinson-Lessing developed the idea of the separation or differentiation of magma, placed it on a factual basis, and transformed it into a scientific theory. Having firmly established magma as a complex silicate solution differing from aqueous solutions by its considerable viscosity and susceptibility to intense supercooling, he advanced the doctrine of two ancestral magmas, granite, and basalt, that had played a primary role in the creation of the rock of the earth’s core. From them came all igneous rocks, the various compositions of which are caused by differing mixtures of these magmas, by the melting and assimilation of previously existing rocks, by fractional crystallization, and by gravity settling. All these processes together create the phenomenon of magmatic differentiation. Igneous rocks after the Precambrian era are primarily the result of the melting of particular parts of the earth’s solid crust. Only older igneous rocks had the ancestral granite and gabbroci magmas as their sources.
Analyzing the phenomena of rock formation, the centuries-long changes in shorelines and volcanoes, Levinson–Lessing concluded that different parts of the earth’s crust rise and fall simultaneously. Mountains were formed by these movements, and plastic or liquid magma was transferred at depth, serving as the source of magmatic and volcanic phenomena. Bringing together all that was known at the beginning of the twentieth century regarding the formation of mountains, he asserted that systems arose after prolonged sinking followed by slow uplift. Folded mountain chains were formed at the borders of the continents and seas. The sinking of some blocks in the sea was accompanied by rising of the adjoining lands. Sinking and rising were kept more or less equal by the warping of separate blocks of the earth’s crust. Levinson-Lessing believed that volcanoes accompany uplifts of parts of the earth’s crust and that a major factor in their eruption is the pressure on lava exerted by the sinking of other blocks. He considered the fluctuation of lava levels in the volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands to be an especially clear example, believing that the lakes of lava form the upper parts of columns of liquid lava going down to subterranean lava reservoirs. These columns of lava would be in hydrostatic equilibrium.
For Levinson-Lessing science not only collects and describes facts but also compares them, penetrates into their essence, and structures them in broad generalizations. In his article “Rol fantazii v nauchnom tvorchestve” (“The Role of Fantasy in Scientific Creativity”) he described scientific creativity as consisting of three main elements: the empirical, which provides a basis; scientific fantasy, or the creative idea; and the testing and investigation of the creative idea through logical analysis and experiment. All three elements are necessary, he believed, for scientific creativity and progress. The development and flowering of science requires a harmonious combination of observations, experiments, and ideas; induction and deduction together; a combination of concrete facts, perceived externally, and intuitive forms, which arise subjectively.
Levinson-Lessing married Varvara Ippolitovna Tarnovskaya, who was his colleague in the Commission for Scientific Education, in 1919. Their son Vladimir, an art critic, became a well-known specialist in European art.