THE MAMMOTH 
199 
It is greatly to be hoped that some day our National Treasure 
House at South Kensington may be enriched with a complete 
Mammoth skeleton from British soil. 
The Chinese, as might be expected, heard of the Mammoth 
long before Europeans did, and they have some strange stories 
about it. In the northern part of Siberia, so great is the abun- 
dance of Mammoth tusks, that for a very long period there has been 
a regular export of Mammoth ivory, both eastward to China and 
westward to Europe. Even in the middle of the tenth century 
an active trade was carried on at Khiva in fossil ivory, which was 
fashioned into combs, vases, and other objects, as related by an 
Arab writer of that time. Middendorf reckoned that the number 
of fossil tusks which have yearly come into the market, during the 
last two centuries, has been at least a hundred pairs — an estimate 
which Nordenskiold considers as well within the mark. They 
are found all along the line of the shore between the mouth of 
the Obi and Behring Straits, and the further north a traveller 
goes, the more numerous does he find them. The soil of Bear 
Island and of the Liachoff Islands (New Siberia) is said to consist 
only of sand and ice with such’ quantities of Mammoth bones 
that it appears as if they were almost made up of bones and 
tusks. Every summer numbers of fishermen make for these 
islands to collect fossil ivory, and during the winter immense 
caravans return laden with Mammoth tusks. The convoys are 
drawn by dogs, and in this way the ivory reaches both the ancient 
Eastern and the newer Western markets. 
It is evident from the Chinese legends that the frozen bodies 
of Mammoths have for ages past been either seen by, or reported 
to, members of the celestial empire, for it is mentioned in some 
of their old books as an animal that lives underground. In a 
great Chinese work on natural history, written in the sixteenth 
century, the following quaint description occurs : “ The animal 
named tien-schu^ of which we have already spoken, in the ancient 
work upon the ceremonial entitled Lyki [a work of the fifth century 
