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160 granted me permission to inspect the Semipalátinsk prison, said he would send the chief of the police to take us to the mosques and show us about the city, and promised to have prepared for us an open letter of introduction to all the subordinate officials in the Semipalátinsk territory.

From the house of the governor I went, upon his recommendation, to the public library, an unpretending log-house in the middle of the town, where I found a small anthropological museum, a comfortable little reading-room supplied with all the Russian newspapers and magazines, and a well-chosen collection of about one thousand books, among which I was somewhat surprised to find the works of Spencer, Buckle, Lewes, Mill, Taine, Lubbock, Tylor, Huxley, Darwin, Lyell, Tyndall, Alfred Russell Wallace, Mackenzie Wallace, and Sir Henry Maine, as well as the novels and stories of Scott, Dickens, Marryat, George Eliot, George Macdonald, Anthony Trollope, Justin McCarthy, Erckmann-Chatrian, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bret Harte. The library was particularly strong in the departments of science and political economy, and the collection of books, as a whole, was in the highest degree creditable to the intelligence and taste of the people who made and used it. It gave me a better opinion of Semipalátinsk than anything that I had thus far seen or heard.