1854.] Linnean Society. 319 



the last-named year he was appointed Professor and Director of the 

 Museum of Natural History at Moscow, where a new field was 

 opened to his talents, in which he continued to labour with inde- 

 fatigable industry to the close of his life. In 1805 he founded the 

 Society of Naturalists of Moscow, which afterwards obtained per- 

 mission to take the title of Imperial, and whose labours under his 

 active and vigilant superintendence are so well known and appre- 

 ciated by the scientific world. In the same year he also published 

 the first volume of his '^Description du Museum d'Histoire Na- 

 tureUe,' the copper-plates of which, in the absence of any competent 

 artist, he engraved with his own hands. This museum, which he 

 had greatly enriched, and which contained, among other remarkable 

 objects, a very large and valuable collection of skulls, intended as 

 the foundation of a general Comparative Anatomy of Crania, of which 

 he published the ' Prodromus ' in 1811, was destroyed by the burn- 

 ing of the city in 1812. Undeterred, however, by this great cala- 

 mity, he immediately set to work to replace, as far as possible, the 

 treasures which had been lost, and exerted himself so strenuously 

 that the new museum in the course of a few years became the de- 

 positary of a very rich collection of natural objects. Soon after his 

 removal to Moscow, he began to turn his attention more particularly 

 towards Entomology and Fossil Zoology, and his numerous contribu- 

 tions to the Bulletin and Memoirs of the Moscow Society in both 

 these departments of science attest the zeal, energy, and j^erse- 

 verance with which he laboured in their promotion. Among the 

 more important monuments of his extensive knowledge in these two 

 branches, it is proper especially to mention his ' Entomographia 

 Imperii Rossici,' Moscow, 1820-43, 4 vols. 4to ; his ' Oryctogra- 

 phie du Gouvernement de Moscou,' Moscow, 1830-7, fol. ; and his 

 ' Bibliographia Palseontologica Animalium Systematica,' Moscow, 

 1810, 4to. As works of a more general nature, which exercised an 

 important influence on the rising naturalists of the empire, and con- 

 tributed to the enlargement of science beyond its limits, it may be 

 suflScient to refer to his ' Zoognosia,' of which the third edition, in 

 3 vols. 4to and 8vo, was published at Moscow in 1813-14; and 

 his 'Museum Demidoffianum,' Moscow, 1806-7, 3 vols. 4to. His 

 separate publications and papers in Transactions and Journals, enu- 

 merated in the ' Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologise ' of the Ray 

 Society, amount to no fewer than 150, and embrace almost every 

 variety of subject. Comparative Anatomy, and the systematic arrange- 

 ment and description of Mammalia, Birds, Reptiles, Fishes, Mollusca, 

 Insects, Worms, and Polypes, (recent and fossil), Minerals, and their 



