ix] MAMMOTH FOLK-LORE. 305 



preserved for science. We can only refer to the discovery of 

 mammoth mummies,^ for the ^^'7u?s of mammoth tusks sufficiently 

 well preserved to be used for carving are so frequent as to defy 

 enumeration. Middendorff reckons the number of the tusks, 

 which yearly come into the market, as at least a hundred pairs,^ 

 whence we may infer, that during the years that have elapsed 

 since the conquest of Siberia useful tusks from more than 

 20,000 animals have been collected. 



The discovery of a mAinm.oth.-m'ummy is mentioned for the 

 first time in detail in the sketch of a journey which the Russian 

 ambassador EvEitT YssBRANTS Ides, a Dutchman by birth, 

 made in 1692 through Siberia to China. A person whom 

 Yssbrants Ides had with him during his journey through Siberia, 

 and who travelled every year to collect mammoth ivory, assured 

 him that he had once found a head of this animal in a piece of 

 frozen earth which had tumbled down. The flesh was putrefied, 

 the neck-bone was still coloured by blood, and some distance 

 from the head a frozen foot was found.^ The foot was taken to 

 Turuchansk, whence we may infer that the Ji7id was made on 

 the Yenisej. Another time the same man found a pair of tusks 

 weighing together twelve poods or nearly 200 kilogram. Ides' 

 informant further stated, that while the heathen Yakuts, Tun- 

 guses, and Ostyaks, supposed that the mammoth always lived 

 in the earth and went about in it, however hard the ground 

 miorht be frozen, also that the large animal died when it came 

 so far up that it saw or smelled the air ; the old Russians living 

 in Siberia were of opinion that the mammoth was an animal 

 of the same kind as the elephant, though with tusks somewhat 

 more bent and closer together ; that before the Flood Siberia had 

 been warmer than now, and elephants had then lived in numbers 

 there ; that they had been drowned in the Flood, and afterwards, 

 when the climate became colder, had frozen in the river mud.* 



The folk-lore of the natives regarding the mode of life of the 

 mammoth under ground is given in still greater detail in J. B. 

 MiJLLER's Zelcn und Geioonheikn der Ostiaken tmter dem Polo 



1 Tlie word mummies is used by Von MiddendorflE to designate carcases 

 of ancient animals found in the frozen soil of Siberia. 



2 The calculation is probably rather too low than too high. The steamer 

 alone, in which I travelled up the Yenisej in 1875, carried over a hundred 

 lusks, of which however the most were blackened, and many were so 

 decayed that I cannot comprehend how the great expense of transport from 

 the tundra of the Yenisej could be covered by the value of this article. 

 According to the statement of the ivory dealers the whole parcel, good and 

 bad together, was paid for at a common average price. 



^ Notices of yet other finds of iiiaininoth carcases occur, according to 

 MiddendorflE {Sih. Beise, IV. i. p. 274) in the scarce and to me inaccessible 

 first edition of Witsen's Noord en Oost Tartarye (1692, Vol. IL p. 473). 



■* E. Yssbrants Ides, Dreyjorir/e Heise nach China, etc., Frankfort, 1707, 

 p. 55 The first edition was i)ublislied in Amsterdam, in Dutch, in 1704. 



X 



