410 HA. H. Howorth—The Mammoth in Siberia. 
root as the rest, hollow and worm-eaten at the end like a rotten 
tooth. ‘This being granted,” says the old writer, “as it is really 
true, I will positively assert it to be a tooth fallen out of the jaw- 
bone of the same fish known in Iceland by the name of Narwhal, 
and that consequently it is no horn.” 
In regard to the Griffon’s claw, it is a curious fact that a writer 
in the “Bulletin of the St. Petersburg Academy,” in a paper on 
Griffons, who was not aware, apparently, of the existence of the 
St. Denis specimen, makes out that the so-called claws are nothing 
more than the horns of the fossil Rhinoceros. . Upon this question 
Erman has acurious passage which I shall quote. He says, speaking 
of the narrative of Aristeas Proconesus, who made a journey into North- 
Eastern Europe: ‘The obscurest portion of his narrative, in which he 
tells us that the Arimasps, seeking metals in the extreme north of 
Europe, ‘drew forth the gold from under the Griffons,’ will be 
found to be at this moment literally true in one sense, if we only 
bear in mind the zoologically erroneous language used by all the 
inhabitants of the Siberian tundras. By comparing numbers of the 
bones of antediluvian pachyderms, which are thrown up in such 
quantities on the shores of the Polar sea, all these people have got 
so distinct a notion of a colossal bird, that the compressed and 
sword-shaped horns, for example, of the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, 
are never called, even among the Russian promnishleniks and 
merchants, by any other name than that of birds’ claws. The 
indigenous tribes, however, and the Yukagirs in particular, go much 
further, for they conceive that they find the head of this mysterious 
bird in the peculiarly vaulted cranium of the same Rhinoceros, 
its quills in the leg bones of other pachyderms, of which they 
usually make their quivers; but as to the bird itself they plainly 
state that their forefathers saw it and fought wondrous battles 
with it: just as the mountain Samoyedes preserve to this day the 
tradition that the Mammoth still haunts the sea-shore, dwelling in 
the recesses of the mountains, and feeding on the dead.” Erman 
goes on himself to suggest that this Northern tradition preserves 
the prototype of the Greek story of the Griffons, which is familiar to 
readers of Herodotus, and perhaps also of the Arab fable of the 
Roc. The gold sand is still found under the earth, and peat 
containing the fossil-remains of these Mammoth and Rhinoceros, so 
that the metal-finders of the Northern Ural did literally draw 
their gold from under the Griffons (op. cit. ii. 88 and 89), 
Again, ‘The nomade geologists at the Icy sea have arrived at the 
conclusion,” he says, ‘that these bones are the talons or claws of 
gigantic birds, which were more ancient than the Yukagir tribe, 
and in former times fought with the latter for the possession of the 
tundras. I have already alluded to the way in which the Mythus of 
Northern Asia appears to have been transformed into the Greek 
fable of the Griffons. It is now propagated as credulously here in 
Yakutsk, as it formerly was by Aristeas and Herodotus. When I 
told them of the Rhinoceros, they said that they had often heard all 
about it, but that they always called the bones in question birds’ 
