It is also extremely well matched to the fascinating story adduced in this absorbing and enlightening book. And it was philosophy because it used reason to reach these conclusions: there was no appeal to the gods or mysterious metaphysical forces. The author's fascinating accounts of the peculiar early-modern "scientists" really closer to the medieval alchemists Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno (the latter Galileo's unlucky predecessor before the Inquisition) show how quackery can combine with real insight to make notable advances in science.

It's clearly written with the benefit of hindsight and is selecting the stories in light of what would later prove to be important, even though that direction was unknown at the time. After dutifully describing each's accomplishment, as a history of science requires you to do, the author delves into some personal tabloid factoid about the scientist, usually about their sexuality or their poor familial relations! Others, in particular the German chemist Julius Meyer, were also puzzling over the tantalizing patterns that Mendeleyev had begun to discern in his early arrangements of the known elements. Complement Mendeleyev’s Dream with Margaret Mead’s existentially revelatory dream about the meaning of life and John Steinbeck’s prophetic dream about how the commercial media are killing creative culture, then revisit the science of what the brain actually does while we sleep.A few of the intervals began with a certain regularity, but then the pattern just seemed to peter out. Instead, the vast majority of the book is a history of what was to become chemistry, from the ancient Egyptians concerned with mummification up until the discovery of the Periodic Table.

Meyer’s doubts about the anomalies in his tables prevented him from making the leap of faith that Mendeleyev made and stuck to. One of Bill Gates' Top Five Book Recommendations* The wondrous and illuminating story of humankind's quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev's dream of the Periodic Table.

However, the title of the book sets up wrong expectations that the book would be focused on Mendeleyev's life and work. I'm a scientist and I value the scientific method but I'd argue that even today the method only gives us simplistic glimpses of the truth and I know better than to mock the people who came before me. I strongly recommend this book not only for the insight it provides but for the way it allows any reader to access one of the huge steps humankind took to understand the universe (the reason we are here).