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390 through it, and especially in examining its anthropological and archæological collections, which, we had been informed, were very rich.

Mr. Martiánof seemed gratified to know that we had heard the museum well spoken of in other parts of the Empire, but said, modestly, that it might disappoint travelers who were acquainted with the great scientific collections of America and Europe, and that he hoped we would make due allowance for the difficulties with which they had to contend and the scantiness of their pecuniary resources. It was, as yet, he said, only the kernel or nucleus of a museum, and its chief importance lay in the promise that it held out of becoming something better and more complete in the future. Still, such as it was, we should see it; and if we were at leisure he would take us to it at once. We replied that we had nothing better to do, and in five minutes we were on our way to the museum building.

The Minusínsk museum, of which all educated Siberians are now deservedly proud, is a striking illustration of the results that may be attained by unswerving devotion to a single purpose, and steady, persistent work for its accomplishment. It is, in every sense of the word, the creation of Mr. Martiánof, and it represents, almost exclusively, his own individual skill and labor. When he emigrated to Siberia, in 1874, there was not a public institution of the kind, so far as I know, in all the country, except the half-dead, half-alive mining museum in Barnaül; and the idea of promoting popular education and cultivating a taste for science by making and exhibiting classified collections of plants, minerals, and archæological relics had hardly suggested itself even to teachers by profession. Mr. Martiánof, who was a graduate of the Kazán university, and whose scientific specialty was botany, began, almost as soon as he reached Minusínsk, to make collections with a view to the ultimate establishment of a museum. He was not a man of means or leisure. On the contrary, he was wholly