A.A. Stukenberg Geological Museum of Kazan University

The first filling of the collection for the future museum belongs to the end of the XVIII century. In 1798, a collection of minerals from the personal collection of Prince Potemkin - Tauride, which formed the basis of the museum, was delivered to Kazan. In the first half of the XIX century, the museum received a large collection of minerals of A.I. Lobachevsky from his expedition to Siberia in 1819 and a collection of rare shells of the southern seas, brought by Professor Simonov from the first Russian round-the-world Antarctic expedition of 1818 - 1821. For many years, the trustee of the University M.N. Musin-Pushkin purchased polished Ural porphyrites and jaspers at the Yekaterinburg Granite Factory. In 1883, M.N. Musin-Pushkin transferred to the museum rocks and minerals collected at copper mines by Anatoly Nikolaevich Demidov. Since the beginning of the XX century, systematic mineralogical collections have been acquired for the museum. The main suppliers were foreign firms of R. Damon from England, Dr. Krantz and Dr. Werth from Germany. In recent decades, the museum fund was mainly replenished by the forces of Kazan geologists, graduates, philanthropists, students, as well as through exchanges abroad and in Russia.