THE ICE AGE 



feet and sometimes more at the shoulders. Among the 

 fossil elephants of Southern Europe and of North 

 America (Elephas imperator) there are two which stood 

 from twelve to thirteen feet high. The remains of the 

 Mammoth are left all over the north of Europe and 

 Asia and of the countries which were subjected to 

 glacial influences. Even in England its teeth and 

 tusks are constantly found, and in the Natural History 

 Museum there is a whole skull with enormous tusks, 

 which was dug up in a brickfield at Ilford. Probably 

 this animal continued to exist longer in Asia and Siberia 

 than in our own part of the world : and the cold and 

 ice preserved their remains so well that whole carcases 

 have been dug up. 



One such instance is historic. In 1799 a native chief 

 near Lake Onkoul, in Siberia, while seeking for Mammoth 

 teeth, perceived a great shapeless mass among the ice. 

 He watched it for some years, till at the end of the fifth 

 year the ice melted and disclosed the carcase of a whole 

 Mammoth. 



In the month of March, 1804, Schumakhoff cut 

 off the horns (the tusks), which he exchanged with 

 the merchant Bultunof for goods of the value of fifty 

 roubles (not quite eight pounds sterling). It was not 

 till two years after this that Mr. Adams, of the St. 

 Petersburg Academy, who was travelling with Count 

 Golovkin, sent by the Czar of Russia on an embassy 

 to China, having been told at Yakutsk of the discovery 

 of an animal of extraordinary magnitude on the shores 

 of the Frozen Ocean, near the mouth of the River Lena, 



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