MONSTERS OF A BURIED WORLD. 157 



science ; for except one fore-leg, the skeleton remained perfect. 

 A large part of the skin had also escaped destruction, together 

 with one of the ears, which still retained its characteristic tuft 

 of hairs. The skin was of a dark tint and was covered ^ith 

 reddish wool an inch in length, interspersed with reddish- 

 brown hairs four inches long, and sparser black bristles twelve 

 to sixteen inches long. Every thing of value was now col- 

 lected, including more than thirty pounds of fur ; the tusks 

 were repurchased, and the whole was transported to St. Peters- 

 burg, where the mounted specimen at present stands, in the 

 Imperial Museum. This individual was nine feet high and 

 sixteen feet long, exclusive of the tusks. 



Other discoveries have been made more recently. In 1843, 

 a mammoth was found by Middendorf in so perfect a state 

 that the bulb of the eye is still preserved in the museum at 

 Moscow. In 1858, a mammoth was discovered in the delta 

 of the Lena, twenty-three miles from Sagastyr. The head 

 and tusks had already been removed by a Russian merchant. 

 The Yakuts soon after the discovery took a leg, several ribs 

 for making spoons, parts of the skin for straps, and fat for 

 painting their sledges. The body was reported in 1884 as 

 lying on its side in the lower part of a crag of alluvial de- 

 posits thirty feet high. Dr. Bunge, who undertook to exca- 

 vate on the spot, found the material a frozen mass of snow 

 "as hard as sugar." Still another mammoth was discovered 

 in 1878 on the Moloda River, a tributary of the Lena, which 

 it joins on the left thirty miles above Siktyakh. We shall 

 have to inquire, hereafter, what was the nature of the catas- 

 trophe which buried these huge quadrupeds in their common 

 tomb of ice. 



The same Mammoth dwelt in Alaska. His tusks are ex- 

 tensively sought and sold for ivory. This utilization of the 

 ivory products of an age in which civilization had not yet ap- 

 peared, to learn the value of the product, recalls our reflec- 

 tion on the fossilization of sunlight for a more auspicious 

 period. 



The great original skeleton standing in the Museum at 



