Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/407

Rh upon his little drug-store for support, and was closely confined to it during the greater part of every day. By denying himself sleep, however, and rising very early in the morning, he managed to get a few hours every day for scientific work, and in those few hours he made a dozen or more identical collections of such plants and minerals as could be found within an hour's walk of the town. After classifying and labeling the specimens carefully, he sent one of these collections to every country school-teacher in the Minusínsk district, with a request that the scholars be asked to make similar collections in the regions accessible to them, and that the specimens thus obtained be sent to him for use in the projected museum. The teachers and scholars responded promptly and sympathetically to the appeal thus made, and in a few months collections of flowers and rocks began to pour into Mr. Martiánofs little drug-store from all parts of the district. Much of this material, of course, had been collected without adequate knowledge or discrimination, and was practically worthless; but some of it was of great value, and even the unavailable specimens were proofs of sympathetic interest and readiness to coöperate on the part not only of the scholars, but of their relatives and friends. In the mean time Mr. Martiánof had been sending similar but larger and more complete collections to the Imperial Academy of Sciences, to various Russian museums, to his own alma mater, and to the professors of natural history in several of the great Russian universities, with a proposition in every case to exchange them for such duplicates of specimens from other parts of the Empire as they might have to spare. In this way, by dint of unwearied personal industry, Mr. Martiánof gathered, in the course of two years, a collection of about 1500 objects, chiefly in the field of natural history, and a small but valuable library of 100 or more scientific books, many of which were not to be found elsewhere in Siberia. In 1876 he made a formal presentation of all this material to the Minusínsk town council