338 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chap. 



were actual "grip-claws." For he mentions in his oft-quoted 

 work, that he had seen such a claw 20 verschoks (0'9 metre) in 

 length, and when he visited St. Petersburg in 1830, the scientific 

 men there did not succeed in convincing him that his ideas on 

 this subject were incorrect.^ 



A new Jin(l of a mammoth murtimy was made in 1787, when 

 the natives informed the Russian travellers Sarytschev and 

 Merk, that about 100 versts below the village Alasejsk, situated 

 on the river Alasej running into the Polar Sea, a gigantic 

 animal had been washed out of the sand beds of the beach 

 in an upright posture, undamaged, with hide and hair. The 

 find, however, does not appear to have been thoroughly 

 examined.^ 



In 1799 a Tunguse found on the Tamut Peninsula, which juts 

 out into the sea immediately south-east of the river-arm by 

 which the Lena steamed up the river, another frozen-in mam- 

 moth. He waited patiently five years for the ground thawing 

 so nmch as that the precious tusks should be uncovered. The 

 softer parts of the animal accordingly were partly torn in pieces 

 and destroyed by beasts of prey and dogs, when the place was 

 closely examined in 1806 by Adams the Academician. Only 

 the head and two of the feet were then almost undamaged. 

 The skeleton, part of the hide, a large quantity of long hair and 

 woolly hair a foot and a half long were taken away. How fresh 

 the carcase was may be seen from the fact that parts of the eye 

 could still be clearly distinguished. Similar remains had been 

 found two years before, a little further beyond the mouth of the 

 Lena, but they were neither examined nor removed.^ 



A new find was made in 1839, when a complete mammoth 

 M^as uncovered by a landslip on the shore of a large lake to the 

 west of the mouth of the Yenisej, seventy versts from the Polar 

 Sea, It was originally almost entire, so that even the trunk 

 appears to have been preserved, to judge by the statement of 

 the natives that a black tongue as long as a month-old reindeer 

 calf was hanging out of the mouth; but it had, when it was 

 removed in 1842, by the care of the merchant Trofimov, been 

 already much destroyed.* 



^ Hedenstrorn, Otryivlci o Sihiri, St. Petersburg, 1830, p. 125. Ermann's 

 Archiv, Part 24, p. 140. 



^ Compare K. E. v. Baer's paper in Melanges Biologiques, T. V. St. P^ters- 

 bourg, 1866, p. 691; Middendorff, IV. i. p. 277; Gavrila Sarytschev's 

 AchtjUhrige Reise in nordostlichen Bihlrien, etc., translated by J. H. Busse, 

 Th. 1, Leipzig, 1805, p. 106. 



>* Adams' account is inserted at p. 431 in the work of Tilesius already 

 quoted. Von Baer gives a detailed account of this and other important 

 finds of the same nature in the above-quoted paper in Tome V. of Melanges 

 Biologiques, St. Petersbourg, pp. 645-740. 



* Middendorff, IV. 1, p. 272. 



