APPENDIX 543

Place. Nature of Improvement. Trans-Baikal . . 4448 rubles appropriated in 1886 for enlarging the [territory] Stretinsk etape. Rep. p. 84. Verkhni tJDiNSK . New prison finished in 18S6. Rep. p. 90. Yakutsk [province] 33,000 rubles appropriated in 1887 for the erec- tion of etapes along the river Lena. Rep. p. 103. Yeniseisk [province] 729 rubles appropriated for a well at the Kozul- skaya etape. Rep. p. 80. The most important works included in the above list are the new prisons at Verkhni Udinsk and Gorni Zerentiii. Unfortu- nately they were both unnecessarily expensive, and both, in my judgment, were erected in places where they were least needed. The prison building's that were in most urgent need of enlarge- ment or reconstruction, it seemed to me, were the forwarding pris- ons of Tiumen, Tomsk, and Achinsk, the etapes between Tomsk and Irkutsk, and the etape lazarets of Birusinskaya, Tiretskaya, and Skeragulskaya, which were not only shamefully overcrowded, but were literally hot-beds of virulent contagion. Nothing seems to have been done, however, since my return from Siberia, to relieve the terrible overcrowding of the prisons and etapes along the great

Siberian road.