ANIMALS OF LONG AGO 365 



relic. It shows that man hunted the Mammoth, that indeed the 

 Mammoth existed not so very long ago, when we consider how 

 recently man appeared, and what ages passed before his coming. 



All doubt as to the actual proportions and appearance of the 

 Mammoth has been dispelled by the finding of a frozen body in 

 Siberia. The story is an interesting one, and will bear re-telling. A 

 Tungusian fisherman, yclept Schumachoff, in the year 1799, descried 

 at Tamut, near the mouth of the Lena, amongst blocks of ice, a 

 shapeless fragment, the import of which he did not then discover. A 

 year after he saw the same fragment in a somewhat altered condition, 

 but still failed to divine its nature. Again in 1801 he visited the 

 spot, and to his astonishment saw one side and one tusk of a 

 Mammoth freed from ice. By 1803 the ice had cleared away so that 

 the frozen animal fell on to a bank of sand. The fisherman visited 

 the place again in 1804, secured the tusks and disposed of them to a 

 merchant. In 1806 Mr. Adams, a Moscow professor and member 

 of the Russian Academy of Sciences, visited the frozen Mammoth, 

 but found it greatly mutilated. Wild beasts had fed on the flesh, 

 and some of it had been given to dogs. One leg was missing, other- 

 wise the skeleton was complete. The length of the animal from 

 forefront of skull to end of tail was sixteen feet four inches ; in height 

 it was nine feet four inches. Measured along the curve the tusks 

 extended to nine feet, six inches ; from point to base in a straight 

 line they were three feet, seven inches. Mr. Adams got together 

 what was left of the interesting discovery and dispatched it to St. 

 Petersburg — a distance of more than seven thousand miles. In one 

 account it is said that no less than sixty pounds weight of the 

 reddish-brown wool and black, bristly hairs were collected and 

 preserved; another account, however, states the weight to be "more 

 than thirty-six pounds." The skeleton of this Mammoth is to be 

 seen in the Museum of the St. Petersburg Academy. 



It is related that in 1800 one Gabriel Saryschew saw an entire 

 Mammoth embedded in ice, standing erect on the banks of the 

 Alaseia. 



Many Mammoth remains^ have been found in Great Britain. 

 It probably made its way there in the wake of retreating ice, under 

 the pursuit of its human enemies at a time when what are now 

 the British Isles were attached to the European mainland. Then 

 the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the English Channel were not in 

 existence; where their waters now ebb and flow there were great 



