September 22, 1741

In 1767  Catherine the Great invited Peter Simon Pallas, a German naturalist, (September 22, 1741, to September 8, 1811 ) to Russia, where he led expeditions exploring and studying the Russian environment. He traveled as far as Lake Baikal to the east and on later expeditions explored the Caucasus also. Catherine had him tutor her children, and she gave him an estate. She also bought his collection of specimens for a generous price, which included the proviso he could keep the collections unitl his death. Pallas was of course connected with the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. A  major work  Zoographica Rosso-Asiatica, was finished after Pallas died.

While in the Russian East Pallas was shown an huge rock he could not identify. He had it sent to St.  Petersburg for study, and the composition turned out to be a newly discovered type of stony–iron meteorite. The composition was determined to be olivine crystals of peridot quality in an distinctive iron-nickel matrix. For a while the scientific community considered it as originating in an asteroid area, but now, some have suggested the unique rock was actually formed on impact. The type of composition was  named  pallasite, after the man who first analyzed the composition.

And a zoological specimen is one of the many items from the natural world also named after Pallas: The Pallas cat is described by a 1905 children's encyclopedia this way:

Pallas's Cat  (Felis manul), of the Siberian steppes, the Mongolian deserts, and the highlands of Tibet, is about the size of the domestic cat, with long, thick, soft fur varying from silver-gray to buff, becoming darker on the back and chest and lighter below. The sides are marked by a few transverse stripes and the tail, which is half as long as the body and bushy, has six or seven dark rings. This cat represents, in the Asian steppes, the wild cat of Europe. Its food is small rodents, especially hares. Pallas's cat is named after Peter Simon Pallas .... a German naturalist, who first described it. The Tartar name is Manul'.

The young folks' cyclopædia of natural history (1905) lists John Denison Champlin as its author.