72 of the L'Histoire générale des voyages (1768). Delisle and his party set out from St. Petersburg on 28 February 1740, arriving in Beryozovo, on the bank of the River Ob, on 9 April, having travelled via Moscow, the Volga, and Tyumen. On 22 April, the date of the transit of Mercury, the sun was obscured by clouds, however, and so Delisle was unable to make any astronomical observations. Delisle arrived back in St. Petersburg on 29 December 1740, having sojourned in Tobolsk and Moscow en route. Non-astronomical scientific observations Throughout the expedition, Delisle recorded numerous ornithological, botanical, zoological (e.g. the Siberian beaver), geographical, and other scientific observations. In the "Extrait d'un voyage fait en 1740 à Beresow en Sibérie" published in the Histoire Générale des Voyages, Delisle's ethnographic observations on the native peoples he encountered (the Votyaks, Ostyaks, Tartars, Voguls, and Chuvash) include details of their religious beliefs, marital customs, means of subsistence, diet, and costume. It seems that Delisle even planned to write a general study of the peoples of Siberia. In Delisle's unpublished papers there is a document entitled "Ordre des informations à faire sur chaque différente nation", which gives a structured outline of the ethnographic data to be collected for each particular Siberian nation: its history, geographical area, relations with other ruling powers, system of government, religion (e.g. belief in God, the Devil, life after death), knowledge in the arts and sciences, physical characteristics, costume, occupations, tools, mores, dwellings, and language. Delisle's "cabinet de curiosité" On 30 June 1740, Delisle visited a monastery in Tobolsk, where in addition to Russian and Old Church Slavonic manuscripts he was shown a mammoth tusk and other bones "d'une grandeur extraordinaire". The abbot recounted to Delisle that the previous year (1739) a Siberian merchant by the name of Fugla, already famous for his prodigious strength (he had fought and killed a bear with his bare hands), further added to his fame when he found near Yeniseisk an intact mammoth head "d'une grosseur étonnante." Delisle himself was an indefatigable collector and during his Siberian expedition he took every opportunity to add to his "cabinet de curiosité", bringing back with him not only copies of manuscripts and mammoth bones like those he had seen in Tobolsk, but also "objets hétéroclites," which included items of Ostyak costume, a Samoyed quiver, a bark bucket, rare stones, and Tobolsk porcelain ware. The Atlas Rossicus The