408 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
this century Hedenstrom, the otherwise sagacious traveller on 
the Siberian Polar Sea, believed that the fossil rhinoceros' horns 
were actualgrip-claws.” For he mentions in his oft-quoted 
work, that he had seen such a claw 20 verschoks (0‘9 metre) in 
length, and when" he visited St. Petersburg in 1830, the scientific 
men there did not succeed in convincing him that his ideas on 
this subject were incorrect.i 
A new find of a mammoth mummy was made in 1787, when 
the natives informed the Russian travellers Sarytschev and 
Meek, that about 100 versts below the village Alasejsk, situated 
on the river Alasej running into the Polar Sea, a gigantic 
animal had been washed out of the sand beds of the beach 
in an upright posture, undamaged, with hide and hair. The 
find, however, does not appear to have been thoroughly 
examined.^ 
In 1799 a Tunguse found on the Tamut Peninsula, which juts 
out into the sea immediately south-east of the river-arm by 
which the Lena steamed up the river, another frozen-in mam¬ 
moth. He waited patiently five years for the ground thawing 
so much as that the precious tusks should be uncovered. The 
softer parts of the animal accordingly were partly torn in pieces 
and destroyed by beasts of prey and dogs, when the place was 
closely examined in 1806 by Adams the Academician. Only 
the head and two of the feet were then almost undamaged. 
The skeleton, part of the hide, a large quantity of long hair and 
woolly hair a foot and a half long were taken away. How fresh 
the carcase was may be seen from the fact that parts of the eye 
could still be clearly distinguished. Similar remains had been 
1 Hedenstrom, Otrywld o Sibiri, St. Petersburg, 1830, p. 125. Ermann^s 
Ai'chiv, Part 24, p. 140. 
^ Compare K. E. v. Baer’s paper in Melanges Biologiques, T. V. St. Peters- 
bourg, 1866, p. 691 ; Middendorff, IV. i. p. 277; Gavrila Sarytscliev’s 
Aclitjdhrige Beise in norddstlichen Sibirien, etc., translated by J. H. Busse, 
Til. 1, Leipzig, 1805, p. 106. 
