IX.] 
MAMMOTH FINDS. 
409 
found two years before, a little further beyond the mouth of the 
Lena, but they were neither examined nor removed.^ 
A new find was made in 1839, when a complete mammoth 
was uncovered by a landslip on the shore of a large lake to the 
west of the mouth of the Yenisej, seventy versts from the Polar 
Sea. It was originally almost entire, so that even the trunk 
appears to have been preserved, to judge by the statement of 
the natives that a black tongue as long as a month-old reindeer 
calf was hanging out of the mouth; but it had, when it was 
removed in 1842, by the care of the merchant Teofimov, been 
already much destroyed.^ 
Next after Trofimov’s mammoth come the mammoth-^7^<is of 
Middendorff and Schmidt. The former was made in 1843 on the 
bank of the river Tajmur, under 75° N.L.; the latter in 1866 
or the Gyda tundra, west of the mouth of the Yenisej in 70° 13' 
N.L. The soft parts of these finds were not so well preserved 
as those just mentioned. But the finds at all events had a 
greater importance for science, from the localities having been 
thoroughly examined by competent scientific men. Middendorff 
arrived at the result that the animal found by him had floated 
from more southerly regions to the place where it was found. 
Schmidt on the other hand found that the stratum which con¬ 
tained the mammoth rested on a bed of marine clay, containing 
shells of high northern species of Crustacea which still live in the 
Polar Sea, and that it was covered with strata of sand alternat¬ 
ing with beds, from a quarter to half a foot thick, of decayed 
remains of plants, which completely correspond with the turf 
beds which are still formed in the lakes of the tundra. Even 
the very beds of earth and clay in which the bones, pieces of 
1 Adams’ account is inserted at p. 431 in tlie work of Tilesius already 
quoted. Von Baer gives a detailed account of this and other important 
finds of the same nature in the above-quoted paper in Tome V. of Melanges 
Biologiques, St. Petersbourg, pp. 645-740. 
2 Middendorff, IV. 1, p. 272. 
