I do not attach much importance to the traditions of the Siberians, that the tusks and skeletons which they find belonged to a large subterraneous animal, which could not bear the light; nor to those of the Chinese, respecting a similar burrowing quadruped of prodigious bulk, which they call, by a sort of irony, _tyn-schu_, or the mouse that hides himself. The fables may have easily been formed from the observation of the fossil bones, and do not necessarily imply any memory of the living original. The two examples of the exhumation of _Pachydermata_ in a fresh state, which I have given in detail, are by no means the only cases that have occurred. It is the universally-received belief throughout Siberia, that Mammoths have been found with the flesh quite fresh and filled with blood; probably meaning that the animal juices flowed when thawed. Isbrand Ides mentions a head on which the flesh, in a decaying state, was present; and a frozen leg, as large as the body of a man; and Jean Bernhard Müller speaks of a tusk, the cavity of which was filled with a substance which resembled coagulated blood. Again, in the voyage of Sarytschew, particulars are given of the discovery of a Mammoth on the banks of the Alaseia, a river which flows into the Arctic Ocean, beyond the Indigirska. It had been dislodged by a flood, and somewhat injured; but the carcase was still almost entire, and was covered with the skin, to which in some places long hair remained attached. These statements might reasonably have been esteemed either fables or gross exaggerations, but for the subsequent discovery of the rhinoceros and elephant whose remains have been brought to Europe. Read in the light of these accounts, the earlier stories take the dignity of authentic history; and it is interesting to note how well these details agree with those observed by the accurate Adams;--the long hair, for example, with which the Alaseia carcase was clothed being the very counterpart of that upon the Lena elephant; though _à priori_ we should have looked for a very different condition in the integument of these huge Pachyderms.