Miscellaneous, 387 



that, in a period of 200 years of trade witli that country, the tusks 

 of 20,000 mammoths must have been disposed of, perhaps even twice 

 that number, since only 200 lbs. 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 canrot 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 

 +he 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 qixantity used to be exported to China, — a trade which can be 

 traced back to a very distant period ; for Giovanni de Piano 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 foixnd Ijdng 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 fieshy portions of the body in such a state 

 of preservation that they have aftbrded 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- 



