John Newlands. Portrait of John Alexander Reina Newlands, English chemist (1837-98). By 1863, he began to build on observations by Dobereiner that there was a relationship between the chemical properties of elements and their atomic weight. Devising an early form of the periodic table of the elements, in 1865 he drew up a table of 62 elements in eight groups arranged in ascending order of atomic weight and called this the law of octaves". Although this was much derided, is was later seen as a precursor to Mendeleyev's periodic table."