Before the year is out, let's raise a glass to the great Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev, to celebrate the 140th anniversary of his periodic table of the elements. Russia has commemorated this, and the 175th anniversary of Mendeleev's birth, with a postage stamp (pictured) and a two-rouble silver coin.

Mendeleev's outstanding achievement was to organize all the chemical knowledge of the day into a single table and to predict the existence of new elements such as scandium, gallium and germanium. His periodic table, published in 1869, contained empty spaces to accommodate these as-yet undiscovered chemical elements.

Mendeleev's periodic law and periodic table of the elements were welcomed by the world's scientific community, and yet he received scant recognition for his work during his lifetime. He was never awarded a Nobel prize, for example. And the third Tsar Alexander is said to have blocked Mendeleev's election as a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, although he was allowed to continue as a corresponding member.

However, Mendeleev has been recognized more recently. This year, the American Chemical Society celebrated his periodic table during its national chemistry week, with the theme 'Chemistry — it's elemental'.

In keeping with terms such as Newtonian mechanics, Darwinian theory, Mendelian genetics and Watson–Crick hydrogen bonding, should the world not honour Mendeleev by referring to his achievement as the 'Mendeleev periodic table of the elements'?