238 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



furnished by elephants, as the chmate was much too cold 

 to admit of such animals living there, but came from "other 

 amphibian animals, to which the name behemoth was given/' 

 Possibly the name mammut was either mistaken for or cor- 

 rected to the Biblical "behemoth" by the Jesuit priest, and 

 the fact that the fossil ivory came from the mouths of the 

 rivers or from the coasts of certain islands in the Arctic 

 Ocean may have given rise to the vague rumour that the 

 animals whence the tusks were derived were actually exist- 

 ant as amphibia. However, another explanation appears 

 to be more probable. Father Avril states that he saw 

 several of these teeth in Moscow and that they were "10 

 in. long and 2 in. in diameter at the base." These 

 were, of course, walrus teeth, not fossil mammoth ivory. 

 The animal itself is described as being as large and formida- 

 ble as a crocodile, and the teeth not only furnished beautiful 

 ornamental material, highly prized by Turks and Persians 

 for sword and poignard hilts, but also possessed strong reme- 

 dial virtues, especially for stopping hemorrhages. In any 

 case the Jesuit probably heard of both forms of ivory, fos- 

 sil mammoth and walrus, and supposed that both pro- 

 ceeded from a single living animal species. 



One of his informants, the Vaivode of Smolensk, named 

 Mushin Pushkin, had elaborated a theory that the peopling 

 of the American continent was due to the hunting of these 

 animals. In order to secure them, the hunters, who fre- 

 quently took their families with them, would often be forced 

 to go out on the ice, far away from the coast. Now it 

 frequently happened in the early spring that a sudden 

 thaw would split up the ice, so that immense pieces would 

 become detached and float off into the sea, sometimes bear- 

 ing away a party of hunters who had been caught unawares 

 by the thaw. These might in some cases be able to escape; 

 in others they would be borne away, helpless and hopeless, 



