He intentionally left gaps between the already discovered elements, so that later on those gaps would be filled with new elements that he knew existed, but haven’t been discovered yet. How did he know that?
In: Chemistry
Basically, the periodic table is set up in such a way that columns of elements are similar and there are repeating patterns of characteristics and properties, so he knew that there were elements missing when the pattern had gaps. He was even able to predict the properties of the missing elements based on the table
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