Note 1 — Chapter XIII · FROM TOMSK SOUTHWARDS.

My scientific attempts brought me in contact with some pleasant people; notably Captain Rykatcheff, of the Observatory in Petersburg, and with others at Moscow, Ekaterineburg, Tomsk, etc.; at all of which places they have observatories, that near Petersburg being, I was told, in some respects better than ours at Greenwich. The Russians take considerable pains in collecting data from 103 stations throughout the Empire, of which 14 are in Siberia, namely: at Omsk, Akmolinsk, Semipolatinsk, Tomsk, Barnaul, Kuznetsk, Yeneseisk, Turukhansk, Irkutsk, Kiakhta, Nertchinsk mines, Blagovestchensk, Nikolaefsk, and Vladivostock. The Russians have an observatory also in China, at Peking; and I think I heard of some new ones established on the Obi. They register thrice daily—at seven, one, and nine—the readings of the barometer, the dry and wet bulb thermometers giving the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere, the direction of the wind, and the amount of clouds, rain, snow, etc.; and these statistics are collected and published at Petersburg with a fulness which exceeds, I am told, anything that we do in poor England. I was presented with the Report for 1877 (the last then published)—a great volume of 600 pages. It will be from this source that I shall from time to time air before the reader my meteorological learning. Tomsk was the first of the Siberian stations at which we arrived, where the maximum temperature of the year rose, at one o’clock on the 6th August, to 106°.9, and the minimum temperature, 83°.2 below zero, occurred on Christmas Day. At Barnaul, some 200 miles south, it was a little hotter and a little colder, the maximum being 107°.8, and the minimum 84°.8 below zero. On the Sunday we spent there, June 15th, the temperature was the hottest we had experienced up to that time in Siberia; and we heard it is so cold in winter that small birds sometimes drop dead in the streets.