The Great Sovereign decrees .... in all parishes 

 of His Great Majesty, under penalty of death, 

 that midwives delivering babies who are born 

 with any deformed characteristics or appearance, 

 or immature in form or strange, must not kill 

 and must not hide them. They must declare 

 them to the priests of the monastic order of 

 these parishes , and the priests must declare 

 them to boyar Ivan Alekseevich Musiny-Pushkin 

 and his assistants. 2 



The prohibition against killing monsters and the 

 request for information about them indicated that before 

 1704 there had been no systematic collection of teratological 

 and embryological material. Related to the latter was the 

 nominal decree of May 30,1705, which stated: "To all ranks 

 of people whose pregnant wives deliver embryos of babies 

 from five to nine months and whose wives die: the hour of 

 death of these wives must be reported in person to the 

 monastic order, to be reported to boyar Ivan Alekseevich 

 Musiny-Pushkin and his assistants .''3 



The collected materials at first were added to the 

 collections of Peter I, brought by him from the journey of 

 the "Great Embassy" to Western Europe in 1697 - 1698. The 

 anatomical and embryological preparations from this 

 collection were kept in the main pharmacy of Moscow, where 

 the preparations from the hospital dissecting room, opened 

 in 1703, were transmitted. In 1714 these collections were 

 transported to the building of the Summer Palace in 

 Petersburg, to the so-called "Imperial Cabinet," and from 

 there, in 1718, to a special building, "Kunstkamera," in 

 the house of A. Kikin. 



The embryological collections were at first exhibited 

 in the form of pictorial compositions (2) , like the famous 

 collection of the Dutch anatomist Ruysch, which Peter 

 purchased from him during the second journey to Holland 

 in 1717. Besides this, according to one foreign eye-witness, 



2. Ibid ., v. IV, p. 243. 



3. Ibid., p. 308. 



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