IX.] 
MAMMOTH FOLK-LOEE. 
405 
guses, and Ostyaks, supposed that the mammoth always lived 
in the earth and went about in it, however hard the ground 
might be frozen, also that the large animal died when it came 
so far up that it saw or smelled the air; the old Eussians living 
in Siberia were of opinion that the mammoth was an animal 
of the same kind as the elephant, though with tusks somewhat 
more bent and closer together ; that before the Flood Siberia had 
been warmer than now, and elephants had then lived in numbers 
there ; that they had been drowned in the Flood, and afterwards, 
when the climate became colder, had frozen in the river mud.^ 
The folk-lore of the natives regarding the mode of life of the 
mammoth under ground is given in still greater detail in J. B. 
Mullee’s Lehen iind Gewonheiten der Ostiaken iinUr dem Polo 
arctico ivolinende, &c. Berlin, 1720 (in French in Becueil de 
Voiages au Nord, Amsterdam, 1731-38, Vol. VIII. p. 373). 
According to the accounts given by Muller, who lived in Siberia 
as a Swedish prisoner of war,^ the tusks formed the animaTs 
horns. With these, which were fastened above the eyes and 
were movable, the animal dug a way for itself through the clay 
and mud, but when it came to sandy soil, the sand ran together 
so that the mammoth stuck fast and perished. Muller further 
states, that many assured him that they themselves had seen 
such animals on the other side of Beresovsk in large grottos in 
the Ural mountains {loc. cit. p. 382). 
Klaproth received a similar account of the mammoth’s way 
of life from the Chinese in the Eusso-Chinese frontier and trad¬ 
ing town Kyachta. For mammoth ivory was considered to be 
tusks of the giant rat tien-slm, which is only found in the cold 
1 E. Yssbrants Ides, Dreyjdrige Reise nach China, etc., Frankfort, 1707, 
p. 55. The first edition was published in Amsterdam, in Dutch, in 1704. 
2 Strahlenberg in Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa iind Asia, 
Stockholm, 1730, p. 393, also gives a large number of statements regarding 
the fossil Siberian ivory, and mentions that the distinguished Siberian 
traveller Messerschmidt found a complete skeleton on the river Tom. 
