344 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



may be due to this superstitious dread that neither the orig- 

 inal native discoverer of the Beresovka mammoth in 1 900, 

 nor those of his tribe to whom he shortly afterward commu- 

 nicated his discovery, dared to make any effort to remove the 

 body,* 



The finding of the remains of a mammoth in northern 

 Siberia at the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the 

 eighteenth century is reported by the Dutch traveller, Is- 

 brand Ides, his informant being a native, who made yearly 

 trips in search of fossil ivory. This man stated that he and 

 a companion once found the head of a mammoth or elephant 

 which had become freed from the enveloping ice. The tusks 

 were still attached to the head and were only broken off with 

 considerable difficulty; some flesh in an advanced state of 

 decomposition still clung to the skull. Working down 

 through the ice they came upon one of the forelegs, a piece 

 of which they cut off and took to the city of Trugan. On the 

 neck of the animal they saw something red that looked like 

 blood. Ides was told by the natives of this region that the 

 subterranean wanderings of these mammoths were sometimes 

 betrayed by a sudden upheaval of the soil, which would 

 then fall in, forming a deep pit. He was also told by one 

 of the natives that the latter had found a pair of tusks weigh- 

 ing the equivalent of 400 Dutch pounds. Even at this early 

 period considerable fossil ivory was taken to Russia and 

 worked up into combs and other objects. t 



The growth of popular legend that often results from an 

 effort to find an explanation for some strange and apparently 

 mysterious fact is shown in the case of the natives of the 

 Liakhov Islands in northern Siberia. They explain the 

 existence of the immense deposits of the bones and tusks of 



*See O. F. Herz, in Bulletin de L' Academic dcs Sciences de St. Petersbourg, Ser. V, Vol. 

 XVI, pp. U7, 148 (text in Russian). 



fides, "Driejarige Reize naar China," Amsterdam, 1704, p. 31. 



