There are not perhaps many counties in England in which some of these
remains have not been found, and generally not far below the surface of
the soil. About London, and at Woolwich in particular, a great many
specimens of the fossil tusks have been collected; they are chiefly of
about the consistency of chalk, but if you break them across and look
at the end, you can see the grain of the ivory, just as you do on a
billiard-ball, or at the end of a knife-handle.
Before anatomy was understood so well as it is at present, the bones of
the Elephant, and those of several other large extinct animals, were
confounded together under the name of Mammoth. There is a remarkable
account of the discovery of what was at the time called a Mammoth, (but
which was, doubtless, an Elephant,) imbedded in ice in Siberia, which
I shall relate to you, as it is very well written and of undoubted
veracity.
"In the year 1799, a Tungusian fisherman observed a strange shapeless
mass projecting from an ice-bank, near the mouth of a river in the
north of Siberia, the nature of which he did not understand, and which
was so high in the bank as to be beyond his reach. He next year
observed the same object, which was then rather more disengaged from
among the ice; but was still unable to conceive what it was. Towards
the end of the following summer, 1801, he could distinctly see that
it was the frozen carcass of an enormous animal, the entire flank of
which, and one of its tusks, had become disengaged from the ice. In
consequence of the ice beginning to melt earlier, and to a greater
degree than usual, in 1803, the fifth year of this discovery, the
enormous carcass became entirely disengaged, and fell down from the
ice-crag on a sand-bank, forming part of the coast of the Arctic Ocean.
In the month of March of that year, the Tungusian carried away the two
tusks, which he sold for fifty rubles, about fifteen pounds sterling.
"Two years afterwards this animal still remained on the sand-bank where
it had fallen from the ice; but its body was then greatly mutilated.
The peasants had taken away considerable quantities of its flesh
to feed their dogs; and the wild animals, particularly the white
bears, had also feasted on the carcass; yet the skeleton remained
quite entire, except that one of the fore-legs was gone. The entire
spine, the pelvis, one shoulder-blade, and three legs, were still
held together by their ligaments, and by some remains of the skin;
and the other shoulder-blade was found at a short distance. The head
remained, covered by the dried skin, and the pupil of the eyes was
still distinguishable. The brain also remained within the skull, but
a good deal shrunk and dried up; and one of the ears was in excellent
preservation, still retaining a tuft of strong bristly hair. The upper
lip was a good deal eaten away, and the under lip was entirely gone, so
that the teeth were distinctly seen. The animal had a long mane on its
neck.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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