338 BUSSIA IN EUROPE. 



epidemics at times carrying off one-fifth of all the children. Of the 7,578 

 received into the Foundling Hospital in 1876, as many as 7,190 were illegitimate, 

 and the total mortality rose to 6,088, or about 80 per cent. 



A city in which the military and officials of all ranks form such a large section 

 of the population is naturally a gay and extravagant place, and here luxury and 

 squalor are brought into the closest contact. Apart from the poverty-stricken rural 

 immigrants, the proletariate classes are necessarily very numerous in the first 

 manufacturing town of the empire. To the State belong some very large 

 porcelain, glass, and carpet establishments ; but much more important are the 

 private industries, sugar refineries, foundries, tanneries, woollen and cotton 

 spinning and weaving factories, breweries, distilleries, tobacco works, altogether 

 about 620 establishments, employing (1875) 41,400 hands, of whom one-fourth are 

 women, and yielding manufactured goods to the amount of £12,000,000. Yet 

 more even than on the resources of industry the wealthy classes depend on the 

 revenues of the great domains, and on their heavy salaries and pensions, to 

 support their princely expenditure. The retail trade alone is partly in the hands 

 of the Russians, while the wholesale business is mostly carried on to the profit of 

 German or English merchants and Jewish bankers. The local trade is very 

 large, the exchanges amounting in some years to a fourth or a third of the 

 commerce of the whole empire. But more than half of the shipping sails under 

 the English, German, and Norwegian flags. To facilitate the approaches by water, 

 it is now proposed to dredge a passage 16 or 17 feet deep and 18 miles long 

 between Kronstadt and the capital, and to avoid the Neva windings and rapids 

 by a canal running from its mouth directly to Lake Ladoga. 



As regards public instruction St. Petersburg lags behind most of the Western 

 European cities, over 300,000 being still wholly unlettered. But its high schools 

 and learned bodies rank amongst the very first in the world. For works of 

 classic literature, the arts and sciences, it is the chief centre of the empire, 

 while far surpassed by Moscow for publications of a more popular character. 

 Its University, with 88 professors and 1,418 students, and a library of 120,000 

 volumes, turns out the best physicists and mathematicians. Th e School of 

 Medicine, with nearly 1,600 students in 1876, is henceforth limited to 500, the 

 female courses being now conducted in a separate establishment. The Academy 

 of Sciences and some other societies have published memoirs of permanent impor- 

 tance, while the Geographical Society, disposing of a large income and greatly 

 encouraged by the State, continues to further ethnological research throughout 

 Central Asia and China. Besides those of the University and Academy of 

 Sciences, containing some rare works and valuable collections, the Imperial 

 Library ranks next to those of London and Paris, with nearly 1,000,000 volumes 

 and over 40,000 manuscripts, including Voltaire's collection of 7,000 volumes and 

 many unique works. The museums also are amongst the most remarkable in 

 Europe. Attached to the Academy of Sciences is an admirable Asiatic gallery, 

 besides zoological collections, where may be seen the famous mammoth brought 

 from Siberia in 1803. The Hermitage, which communicates with the Winter 



