HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION. o09 



collected and criticized in an admirable paper published more 

 tlian twenty years ago by Von Olfers, of Berlin.^ 



The Siberians are constantly finding bones and teeth of mam- 

 moths imbedded in the faces of cliffs or river banks at some 

 depth below the surface. Often a mass of earth or gravel falls 

 away from such a clifi", and exposes such remains. How could 

 they have got there ? A plausible explanation suggested itself, 

 that the creature was a huge burrowing animal, and lived un- 

 derground. Not only the skeleton, but the body in tolerable 

 preservation with flesh and skin being found in a frozen state 

 in high Northern latitudes, the notion grew up that it was a 

 monstrous kind of burrowing rat, and it is described in Chinese 

 books under such names as fen-slnt, or " digging rat," yen-men, 

 or " bun-owing ox," slin-mu, " mother of mice," and so on. A 

 difficulty which suggested itself to the native Siberian geologists 

 was met in a characteristic manner. It was strange that when- 

 ever they came upon a mammoth imbedded in a clifi", it was 

 always dead. It must be a creature unable to bear the air or 

 the light, and when in the course of its subterranean wander- 

 ings it breaks through to the outer air, it dies immediately. 

 With so much knowledge of the natural history of the creature 

 to start from, other details grow round it in the usual way. 

 Yakuts and Tunguz have seen the earth heave and sink, as a 

 mammoth walked beneath. It frequents marshes, and travels 

 underground, never appearing above the surface of the earth 

 or water during the day, but has been seen at dawn in lakes 

 and rivers, just as it dived below. The account of it given in 

 the Chinese Encyclopajdia of Kang-hi is as follows : — 



" Fen-fihu. — The cold is extreme and almost continual on the 

 coast of the Northern Sea, beyond the Tai-tong-Kiang ; on this 

 coast is found the animal Fen-shu, which resembles a rat in 

 shape, but is as big as an elephant ; it dwells in dark ca- 

 verns^ and ever shuns the light. There is got from it an ivory 

 as white as that of the elephant, but easier to work, and not 

 liable to split. Its fiesh is very cold, and excellent for refresh- 



' J. F. M. V. Olfers, ' Die Ueberresfce vorweltlicber Riesentliiere in Beziehung 

 zu Ostasiatisolieu Sagen imd Chiuesisclien Scliriften ' (Berlin Acad., 1839) ; Ber- 

 lin, 1840. 



