Vestigia Semper Adora(The bicentary of the death of Peter Simon Pallas)
The second half of the eighteenth century was a golden age for naturalist and travelers, of whom Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811) is one of the most important. Was in 1768 invited to St. Petersburg by the Empress Catharine the Great as an eminent naturalists. He spent six years (1768-1774) exploring the Russian empire. He amassed a valuable collection of plants, animals and minerals, including the meteorite "Pallas Iron"; returning with an extraordinary treasure of specimens, including a malarial mosquito (<i>Anopheles hyrcanus</i> Pallas). Pallas was a founder of some branch of the science, but most important was an idea that an environment (or geographical space) caused changes in the structure of organism. Pallas's essentialy virtue was a constitutional bias to compromise between Carl von Linne and Comte de Buﬀ on.