102 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



elephant are broad and thin, and their grinding surface flat." To mention all the hypo- 

 theses and fables which this subject has produced, would be useless, and consume too 

 much time ; but I cannot omit stating two or three more on account of their whimsical 

 absurdity. One writer says that the bones in question are the remains of ceitain angelic 

 beings, the original tenants of this our terrestrial globe, in its primitive staie, till, for their 

 transgressions, both were involved in ruin, after which this shattered planet was refitted 

 for its present inhabitants. Another imagines that, at some remote period, the place in 

 which the bones were found might have laid in the track of a conqueror unknown to the 

 historians of Europe ; that it might have been the scene of a battle, and the animals in 

 question part of the baggage train destroyed by slaughter or disease, and left in the hurry 

 of flight, or of pursuit, to puzzle and set at defiance generations then unborn. 



Within a few years a better opportunity has been afforded of forming just conclusions 

 respecting this animal. Within the extent of a few miles nine or ten skeletons have been 

 discovered at the bottom of marl pits, in Orange and Ulster counties, and (from the calca- 

 rious nature of the substance in which they were deposited) in a high state of preserva- 

 tion. One of these skeletons has been mounted and placed in its natural form, and with 

 almost all the bones, in Peale's Museum, in Philadelphia. Its height over the shoulders 

 is eleven feet ; over the hips, nine feet ; from the chin to the rump, fifteen feet ; from the 

 point of the tusks to the end of the tail, following the curve, thirty-one feet ; length in a 

 straight line, seventeen feet ; length of the tusks, ten feet seven inches; weight of a 

 grinder, four pounds ten ounces ; of the whole skeleton, one thousand pounds. 



In 1799, upon the shores of the Frozen Ocean, near the mouth of the river Lena, in 

 Siberia, a Toungouse chief discovered, in the midst of a rock of ice, a substance which 

 did not resemble the floating pieces of wood usually found there: he endeavoured in vain 

 to discover what it was at that time: about the close of the second summer the melting 

 of the ice enabled him to know that it was a mammoth ; but he could not succeed m 

 obtaining the tusks of the animal Until the end of the 5th year, when the ice which 

 enclosed it, having partly melted, the level became sloped, and this enormous mass, 

 pushed forward by its own weight, fell over upon its side on a sand bank. In March, 

 1804, the Chief Schoumachoff obtained the tusks and sold them for fifty roubles. In the 

 summer of 1806, Michael Adams, a member of the Academy of St. Petersburgh, visited 

 the mammoth in company with the chief, and found it in a very mutilated state. The 

 proprietor was content with the profit he had already derived from it, and the jakouts of 

 the neighbourhuod tore off the flesh, with which they fed their dogs. Ferocious animals, 

 while bears of the north pole, gluttons, wolves, and foxes, preyed upon it also, and their 

 burrows were seen in the neighbourhood. The skeleton, almost completely unfleshed, 



