302 THK VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [cHAr. ix. 



a remarkable antiquarian discovery made in France. Along 

 with a number of roughly worked flint flakes, pieces of ivory 

 were found, on which, among other things, a mammoth with 

 trunk, tusks, and hair was engraved in rough but unmistak- 

 able lineaments, and in a style resembling that which distin- 

 guishes the Chukch drawings, copies of which will be found 

 further on in this work. This drawing, whose genuineness 

 appears to be proved, surpasses in age, perhaps a hundredfold, 

 the oldest monuments that Egypt has to show, and forms a re- 

 markable proof that the mammoth, the original of the drawing, 

 lived in Western Europe contemiDoraneously with man. The 

 mammoth remains are thus derived from a gigantic animal form, 

 living in former times in nearly all the lands now civilized, and 

 whose carcase is not yet everywhere completely decomposed. 

 Hence the great and intense interest which attaches to all that 

 concerns this wonderful animal. 



If the interpretation of an obscure passage in Pliny be correct, 

 mammoth ivory has, from the most ancient times, formed a 

 valued article of commerce, which, however, was often mistaken 

 for the ivory of living elephants and of the walrus. But portions 

 of the skeleton of the mammoth itself are flrst described in de- 

 tail by WiTSEX, who during his stay in Russia in 1686 collected 

 a large number of statements regarding it, and at least in the 

 second edition of his work gives good drawings of the under jaw 

 of a mammoth and the cranium of a fossil species of ox, whose 

 bones are found along with the remains of the mammoth (WlT- 

 SEN, 2nd. edit. p. 746). But it appears to have escaped Witsen, 

 who himself considered m-ammoth bones to be the remains of 

 ancient elephants, and who well knew the walrus, that in a 

 number of the accounts which he quotes, the mammoth and the 

 walrus are clearly mixed up together, which is not so wonderful, 

 as both are found on the coast of the Polar Sea, and both yielded 

 ivory to the stocks of the Siberian merchants. In the same 

 way all the statements which the French Jesuit, AvRiL, during 

 his stay in Moscow in 1686, collected regarding the amphibious 

 animal. Behemoth, occurring on the coast of the Tartarian Sea, 

 (Polar Sea) refer not to the mammoth, as some writers, 

 HowoRTH^ for example, have supposed, but to the walrus. 

 The name mammoth, which is probably of Tartar origin, Witsen 

 appears to wish to derive from Behemoth, spoken of in the 

 fortieth chapter of the Book of Job. The first mammoth tusk 

 was brought to England in 1611, by JosiAS Logan. It was 

 purchased in the region of the Petchora, and attracted great 



^ Compare Ph. Avril, Voyage en divers etafs d''Europe et d^Asie entrepris 

 pour decouvr'ir un noureau chemin a la Chine, etc., Paris, 1692, p. 'J09. 

 Jianry H. Howorth, "The Mammoth in Siberia" {Geolog. Mag. 1880, 

 p. 408). 



