Germanium is the most striking of the three confirmations of Mendeleev's periodic law. In 1871 Mendeleev had predicted an element to fill the gap below silicon, naming it eka-silicon and forecasting its atomic weight, density, colour, oxide and even the properties of its chloride with remarkable precision. When Winkler analysed germanium fifteen years later, the match was so close, point by point, that it silenced lingering doubts about whether the periodic table was a real law of nature or a convenient chart. Coming after gallium and scandium, germanium turned prediction into proof, and Winkler himself recognised his new element as the long-awaited eka-silicon.
Winkler briefly considered naming his new element neptunium, since he thought it might correspond to a metal a rival chemist, R. Hermann, had wrongly claimed to detect in 1877 and had named for the planet found three decades earlier, before realising his sample matched Mendeleev's eka-silicon far more precisely and settling on Germania in patriotic homage to his homeland, only recently unified in 1871. The real element neptunium would not be discovered for another fifty years, leaving Winkler's discarded name to a very different, radioactive part of the periodic table. His choice joined gallium (France) and, later, ruthenium (Russia) and polonium (Poland) in the small set of elements named directly for a nation.