Nikolai Kashchenko

Born Apr 25 (May 7), 1855, on the Veselyi farmstead, in present-day Zaporozhye Oblast; died Mar. 29, 1935, in Kiev. Soviet biologist; academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1919).

Kashchenko graduated from the University of Kharkov in 1880. In 1888 he became a professor and, in 1895, rector of the University of Tomsk. In 1912 he became a professor at the Kiev Polytechnical Institute. Between 1913 and 1935 he was the director of the acclimatization garden of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in Kiev. He was also the organizer and director of the zoological museum of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1919–26). His principal works dealt with embryology (he showed that mesenchyme forms not only from mesoderm but also from ectoderm, that is, ectomesenchyme) and human pathological embryology. Kashchenko also did research on Siberian fauna (particularly mammalian) and on the acclimatization of fruit and other plants under the conditions of Siberia and the Ukraine.