404 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
not perhaps be out of place here to give a brief account of some 
of the most important mammoth finds which have been pre¬ 
served for science. We can only refer to the discovery of mam¬ 
moth mnnimies^ for the finds of mammoth tusks sufficiently well 
preserved to he used for carving are so frequent as to defy 
enumeration. Middendorff reckons the number of the tusks, 
which yearly come into the market, as at least a hundred pairs,^ 
whence we may infer, that during the years that have elapsed 
since the conquest of Siberia useful tusks from more than 
20,000 animals have been collected. 
The discovery of a mammothis mentioned for the 
first time in detail in the sketch of a journey which the Russian 
ambassador Evekt Yssbrants Ides, a Dutchman by birth, 
made in 1692 through Siberia to China. A person whom 
Yssbrants Ides had with him during his journey through Siberia, 
and who travelled every year to collect mammoth ivory, assured 
him that he had once found a head of this animal in a piece of 
frozen earth which had tumbled down. The flesh was putrefied, 
the neck-bone was still coloured by blood, and some distance 
from the head a frozen foot was found.^ The foot was taken to 
Turuchansk, whence we may infer that the find was made on 
the Yenisej. Another time the same man found a pair of tusks 
weighing together twelve poods or nearly 200 kilogram. Ides’ 
informant further stated, that while the heathen Yakuts, Tun- 
1 The word mummies is used by Von Middendorff to designate carcases 
of ancient animals found in the frozen soil of Siberia. 
2 The calculation is probably rather too low than too high. The steamer 
alone, in which I travelled up the Yenisej in 1875, carried over a hundred 
tusks, of which however the most were blackened, and many were so 
decayed that I cannot comprehend how the great expense of transport from 
the tundra of the Yenisej could be covered by the value of this article. 
According to the statement of the ivory dealers the whole parcel, good and 
bad together, was paid for at a common average price. 
^ Notices of yet other finds of mammoth carcases occur, according to 
Middendorff {iSih. Beise, IV. i. p. 274) in the scarce and to me inaccessible 
first edition of Witsen’s Noord en Oost TaHarye (1692, Vol. II. p. 473). 
