[Nīkolaí Īvanovich von]. Russian mineralogist and major-general in the Russian army, born at Ust-Kamenogork in Tomsk, on the 5th of December 1818 (O.S.). He was educated at the military school of mines in St. Petersburg. At the age of twenty-two he was selected to accompany R. I. Murchison and de Verneuil, and afterwards De Keyserling, in their geological survey of the Russian Empire. Subsequently he devoted his attention mainly to the study of mineralogy and mining, and was appointed director of the Institute of Mines. In 1865 he became director of the Imperial Mineralogical Society of St. Petersburg. He contributed numerous papers on euclase, zircon, epidote, orthite, monazite and other mineralogical subjects to the St. Petersburg and Vienna academies of science, to Poggendorf’s Annalen, Leonhard and Brown’s Jahrbuch, &c. He also issued as separate works Materialen zur Mineralogie Russlands (10 vols., 1853–1891), and Vorlesungen über Mineralogie (1865). He died in St. Petersburg on the 3rd of January 1893 (O.S.).
