Mining Museum Collections

The law on regulation of hunting in the Russian Empire (1892) was still 90 years away, when the Emperor Alexander I took over the role of an official in issuing permits for shooting wild animals. It is true that such an order concerned only one area, Belovezhskaya Forest, and one species, the bison (or Bison bonasus in scientific jurisprudence). By the beginning of the 19th century, the vastest tract of forest in Europe remained the only place where these bison could live.

In The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Alexander Pushkin wrote about a squirrel cracking wondrous nuts. It is not by chance that the gemstones appeared in the fairy tale. In August 1931, when Pushkin finalised his poem, Saint Petersburg had been already taken over by the ’emerald fever’.

To get an idea of how Earth looked like in the distant past, one just has to look attentively at today’s living creatures. Some ancient animals still resemble their progenitors. Some organisms are no longer found. The others have survived without losing their original form.

Before the pandemic kicked in, a major scandal had broken out in the museum world of St. Petersburg. The Amber Room was too popular among Chinese tourists. Deputy Minister of Culture Alla Manilova even suggested that on certain days of the week, the Catherine Palace be open to Chinese nationals only.

It is hardly possible to guess an exact number of museums - an estimate would be over 100,000 globally. As for exhibits on display, there must be tens of billions of them. While they are all to some extent interesting, some items are so unique that people travel long distances to glance at them.

Art iron castings became a trademark of the Ural in the late 19th century and thereupon gained wide recognition globally, with a real triumph coming in shortly. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the world-famous Kaslinksy cast-iron pavilion won the highest award - a gold medal and a grand prize.

Some 165 years ago, virtually everyone on this planet believed that the world and all the living creatures would have never existed if not for the higher forces. Yet long before that, Greek philosophers had already presumed life forms could evolve.

Each year over 16 tons of large-sized meteorites fall down onto the surface of Earth. But until the end of the 18th century, scientists did not believe that meteorites were simply falling down from the sky. All because of the beliefs of the Catholic Church, stating this was impossible.

The first technical devices began to be used in mining back in the 14th century. By the middle of the 18th century, the industrial revolution led to the replacement of tools such as picks, shovels, wedges and hammers, with albeit primitive, but machines.

In the second half of the 19th century, art iron casting became the trademark of the Urals and gained wide recognition around the world. The real triumph of products of the Ural masters occurred at the world exhibition in Paris. Products of the famous Kaslin plant were presented in a chiseled pavilion of cast iron in the Byzantine style and received a “Grand Prix” gold medal, the top award of the time.