370 authorizations concerning the establishment of mines and foundries. The college’s accounts were kept by a special office known as the kammarkontor, while all minutes taken at the meetings of the college board were prepared by a so-called notaries office. The bergskollegium also had its own prosecutors office under the leadership of an advocatfiscal charged with seeing to it that the functionaries of the college and the owners of foundries followed the ordinances issued by the royal government and by the bergskollegium Itself. Also included in the bergskollegium were an assaying office, a laboratoriumchemicum, and a laboratoriummechanicum. The laboratoriumchemicum, headed by the so-called riksvardien, was to see to it that copper, silver, and gold coins retained the metallic values prescribed by the royal government and the kammarkollegium, while the laboratorium mechanicum developed mechanical models and instructed “youths” in mechanics.**^ There was no special chancellery for the administration of mining activities in seventeenth-century Russia. Instead, a series of different prikazy had various functions which in one way or another concerned the mining and refining of metals and minerals. The division of these administrative tasks was not characterized by any sort of systematization, and the participation of the prikazy in the administration of the mining industry developed according to the functional pattern typical of the prikaz system. Thus, one prikaz might be charged with the organization of mining in a given region, while another prikaz was the principal consumer of the products mined in that same region. There were also prikazy charged simultaneously with the performance of both functions.^- A measure of centralization in the administration of mining was introduced at the beginning of the eighteenth century when two prikazy with important ties to Russian mining operations, the Sibirskii prikaz and the Pushkarskii prikaz (the Siberian and artillery chancelleries), were united under the same leadership for some time. In addition, the Rudokopnyi prikaz, or mining chancellery, was founded in 1700 to oversee “gold and silver and such things.” From later legislative acts it is evident that this prikaz was founded primarily to find sources of precious metals within the country so that such metals would not have to be imported from abroad. The Rudokopnyi prikaz was instructed to ask people in trading centers and marketplaces whether they knew of any such deposits. Rewards were Johan Axel Almquist, Bergskollegium och bergslagsstaterna 1637—18S7 (Stockholm, 1909), 31—42. N. I. Pavlenko, Razvitie metallurgicheskoi promyshlennosti Rossii v pervoi polovine XVIII v. (Moscow, 1953), 93. See, too, A. M. Loranskii, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk administrativnykh uchrezhdenii gornogo vedomstva v Rossii 1700—1900 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1900), 1—7.
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