PALLAS, PETER SIMON German natural ist and traveller, was born in Berlin on Sept. 22, 1741, the son of Simon Pallas, a surgeon. He studied medicine at Berlin, Halle, Gottingen and Leyden, and showed a leaning towards natural history. In 1761 he went to England, where he devoted himself to a geological investigation of part of the coast; and at the age of twenty-three he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. In 1768 he became professor of natural history at the Imperial Academy of Science, St. Petersburg, and was appointed naturalist to a scientific expedition through Russia and Siberia, to observe the transit of Venus in 1769. Pallas went by Kazan to the Caspian, and journeyed across to China. In 1793-1794 he visited the southern provinces of Russia, and determined to settle in the Crimea. The empress gave him an estate at Simpheropol and 10,00o roubles to assist in equipping a house. He continued to live in the Crimea, devoted to research in botany, till the death of his second wife in 1810, when he moved to Berlin, where he died on Sept. 8, 181I.
His works include: Elenchus Zoophytorum (Hague, 1766) ; Miscel lanea Zoologica (Hague, 1866) ; Spicelegia Zoologica (Berlin, 1767 1804) ; Reisen durch Verschiedene Provinzen des riissischen Reichs (3 vols., St. Petersburg 1771-76) ; Sammlungen historischer Nachrichten fiber die mongolischen Volkerschaften (2 vols., 1776-1802) ; Novae Species quadrupedum (1778-79) ; Icones insectorum praesertim Rossiae Siberiaeque pecularium (1781-1806) ; Zoographia rossoasiatica (3 vols., 1831) ; Bemerkungen auf einer Reise durch die siidlichen Statthalter schaften des russischen Reichs (Leipzig, 1799-1801).
See the essay of Rudolphi in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy for 1812 ; Cuvier's Eloge in his Recueil des doges historiques, vol. ii.; and the Life in Jardine's Naturalists' Library, vol. iv. (Edin., 1843).