история биологии, университеты, профессора, естественные отделения, лекции, Social Sciences

Purpose. The purpose of this article is systematizing the information about extant copies of professorial lectures in the archives and the libraries. Methodology. The main methods are the methods of objectivity, source analysis and the comparative method. Results. A lecture as a reflection of the professor’s scientific potential should be considered not only on its own but also in the context of the memories about those professors who was the author of the lectures. The extant copies of the lectures of professors are not numerous. Especially it was problematic to keep them in the first half of the 19th century when universities had many foreign professors whose lectures were difficult to understand due to insufficient knowledge of foreign languages by students. Among the known lectures of this period, there are only lectures of Russian-speaking professors. Most of the extant lectures of the professors of life science are from the second half of the 19th century when many famous scientists worked at universities. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the known lectures are lectures of the professors of Moscow University. Conclusions. It’s quite hard to discover the place of conservation of the lectures. Also, the lack of a systematic approach to their preservation must be admitted. The obligation to transfer the papers of famous scientists to the archive of the Academy of Sciences had led to the fact that nowadays this archive has got the largest number of known copies of lectures.