a CT eae 
Miscellaneous. 387 
that, in a period of 200 years of trade with that country, the tusks 
of 20,000 mammoths must have been disposed of, perhaps even twice 
that number, since only 200 Ibs. of ivory is calculated as the average 
weight produced by a pair of tusks. — 
As many as ten of these tusks have been found lying together in 
the “Tundra,” weighing from 150 to 300 lbs. each; the largest 
are rarely*seen out of the country, many of them being too rotten to 
be made use of, while others are so large that they cannot be carried 
away, and are sawn up in blocks or slabs on the spot where they are 
found, with very considerable waste, so that the loss of weight in 
the produce of a tusk: before the ivory comes to market is of no trifling 
amount. A large portion of this ivory is used by the nomad tribes 
in their sledges, arms, and household implements; and formerly a 
_ great quantity used to be exported to China,—a trade which can be. 
traced back to a very distant period ; for Giovanni de Plano Carpini, 
a Franciscan Monk, sent by Pope Innocent IV., in 1246, into Tartary, 
describes a magnificent throne of carved ivory, richly ornamented 
with gold and precious stones, belonging to the Tartar Khan of the 
Golden Horde, the work of a Russian jeweller, the slabs of which 
were so large that they could only have been cut out of large mam- 
moth-tusks. 
Notwithstanding the enormous amount already carried away, the 
stores of fossil ivory do not appear to diminish ; in many places, near 
the mouths of the great rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean, the 
bones and tusks of these antediluvian pachyderms lie scattered about 
like the relics of a ploughed-up battlefield, while in other parts these 
creatures of a former world seem to have huddled together in herds 
for protection against the sudden destruction that befell them, since 
their remains are found lying together-in heaps. 
In 1821, a hunter from Yakutsk, on the Lena, found in the New- 
Siberian Islands alone 500 poods (18,000 lbs. English) of mammoth- 
tusks, none of which weighed more than 3 poods—and this not- 
withstanding that another hunter, on a previous visit in 1809, had 
brought away with him 250 poods of ivory from the same islands. 
The inhabitants on the mainland pile up in heaps the tusks which 
are found scattered about on the “ Tundra,” and convey them in 
large boats up the Lena. In the period from 1825 to 1831, at least 
1500 poods reached Yakutsk yearly; the trade in fossil ivory at 
Turuchansk, on the Jenissei, has for many years past amounted to 
from 80 to 100 poods annually, and that of Obdorsk, on the river 
Ob, from 75 to 100 poods. 
Entire mammoths have occasionally been discovered, not only with 
the skin (which was protected with a double covering of hair and 
wool) entire, but with the fleshy portions of the body in such a state 
of preservation that they have afforded food to dogs and wild beasts 
in the neighbourhood of the places where they were found. They 
appear to have been suddenly enveloped in ice or to have sunk into 
mud which was on the point of congealing, and which, before the 
process of decay could commence, froze around the bodies and has 
preserved them up to the present time in the condition in which 
they perished. It is thus they are occasionally found when a land- 
