In March, 1770, while a merchant of the name of Lächow was busy collecting fossil ivory about Cape Sviatoinoss, he saw a large herd of deer coming over the ice from the north. Resolute and courageous, he at once resolved to follow their tracks, and after a sledge-journey of seventy versts, he came to an island, and twenty versts farther reached a second island, at which, owing to the roughness of the ice, his excursion terminated. He saw enough, however, of the richness of the two islands in mammoth-teeth, to show him that another visit would be a valuable speculation; and on making his report to the Russian Government, he obtained an exclusive privilege to dig for mammoth-bones on the islands which he had discovered, and to which his name had been given. In the summer of 1773 he consequently returned, and ascertained the existence of a third island, much larger than the others, mountainous, and having its coasts covered with drift-wood. He then went back to the first island, wintered there, and returned to Ustjansk in spring with a valuable cargo of mammoth-tusks. There hardly exists a more remarkable article of commerce than these remains of an extinct animal. In North Siberia, along the Obi, the Jenissei, the Lena, and their tributaries, from lat. 58° to 70°, or along the shores of the Polar Ocean as far as the American side of Bering Strait, the remains of a species of elephant are found imbedded in the frozen soil, or become exposed, by the annual thawing and crumbling of the river-banks. Dozens of tusks are frequently found together, but the most astonishing deposit of mammoth-bones occurs in the Lächow Islands, where, in some localities, they are accumulated in such quantities as to form the chief substance of the soil. Year after year the tusk-hunters work every summer at the cliffs, without producing any sensible diminution of the stock. The solidly-frozen matrix in which the bones lie thaws to a certain extent annually, allowing the tusks to drop out or to be quarried. In 1821, 20,000 lbs. of the fossil ivory were procured from the island of New Siberia. The ice in which the mammoth remains are imbedded sometimes preserves their entire bodies, in spite of the countless ages which must have elapsed since they walked on earth. In 1799 the carcass of a mammoth was discovered so fresh that the dogs ate the flesh for two summers. The skeleton is preserved at St. Petersburg, and specimens of the woolly hair--proving that the climate of Siberia, though then no doubt much milder than at present, still required the protection of a warm and shaggy coat--were presented to the chief museums of Europe. The remains of a rhinoceros, very similar to the Indian species, are likewise found in great numbers along the shores, or on the steep and sandy river-banks of Northern Siberia, along with those of fossil species of the horse, the musk-ox, and the bison, which have now totally forsaken the Arctic wilds.