About 40,000 lbs. of fossil ivory--that is to say, the tusks of at least
100 Mammoths--are bartered for every year in New Siberia, so that in a
period of 200 years of trade with that country, the tusks of 20,000
Mammoths must have been disposed of--perhaps even twice that number,
since only 200 lbs. of ivory is calculated as the average weight
produced by one pair of tusks. As many as ten of these tusks have been
found lying together, weighing from 150 to 300 lbs. each. The largest
are rarely sent out of the country, many of them being too rotten to be
made use of, while others are so large that they cannot be carried away,
and are sawn up in blocks or slabs on the spot with very considerable
waste, so that the loss of weight in the produce of a tusk before the
ivory comes to market is of no trifling amount. A large portion of this
ivory is used by the nomad tribes in their sledges, arms, and household
implements, and formerly a great quantity used to be exported to China;
a trade which can be traced back to a very distant period.
Notwithstanding the enormous amount already carried away, the stores of
fossil ivory do not appear to diminish; in many places near the mouths
of the great rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean, the bones and tusks
of these antediluvian pachyderms lie scattered about like the relics of
a ploughed-up battlefield, while in other parts these creatures of a
former world seem to have huddled together in herds for protection
against the sudden destruction that befell them, since their remains are
found lying together in heaps. In 1821, a hunter from Yakutsk, on the
Lena, found in the New Siberian Islands alone 500 poods (18,000 lbs.
English) of Mammoth tusks, none of which weighed more than 3 poods; and
this, notwithstanding that another hunter on a previous visit in 1809
had brought away with him 250 poods of ivory from the same islands.
Entire mammoths have occasionally been discovered, not only with the
skin (which was protected with a double covering of hair and wool)
entire, but with the fleshy portions of the body in such a state of
preservation that they have afforded food to dogs and wild beasts in the
neighbourhood of the places where they were found. They appear to have
been suddenly enveloped in ice, or to have sunk into mud which was on
the point of congealing, and which, before the process of decay could
commence, froze around the bodies, and has preserved them up to the
present time in the condition in which they perished. It is thus they
are occasionally found when a landslip occurs in the frozen soil of the
Siberian coast, which never thaws, even during the greatest heat of the
summer, to a depth of more than 2 feet; and in this way, within a period
of a century and a half, five or six of these curious corpses have come
to light from their icy graves. A very perfect specimen of the Mammoth
in this state was discovered in the autumn of 1865, near the mouth of
the Jenissei; an expedition was despatched to the spot by the Imperial
Academy of Sciences in the summer of 1866, and the result of that
expedition, it is considered, will be the disclosure of some interesting
facts in the natural history of a former creation.--_Mr. Lumley's Report
on Russian Trade._
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