I have not, indeed, been successful during the voyage of the _Vega_ in making any remarkable discovery that would throw light on the mode of life of the mammoth,[216] but as we now sail forward between shores probably richer in such remains than any other on the surface of the globe, and over a sea, from whose bottom our dredge brought up, along with pieces of driftwood, half-decayed portions of mammoth tusks, and as the savages with whom we came in contact, several times offered us very fine mammoth tusks or tools made of mammoth ivory, it may not perhaps be out of place here to give a brief account of some of the most important mammoth _finds_ which have been preserved for science. We can only refer to the discovery of mammoth _mummies_,[217] for the _finds_ of mammoth tusks sufficiently well preserved to be used for carving are so frequent as to defy enumeration. Middendorff reckons the number of the tusks, which yearly come into the market, as at least a hundred pairs,[218] whence we may infer, that during the years that have elapsed since the conquest of Siberia useful tusks from more than 20,000 animals have been collected. The discovery of a mammoth-_mummy_ is mentioned for the first time in detail in the sketch of a journey which the Russian ambassador EVERT YSSBRANTS IDES, a Dutchman by birth, made in 1692 through Siberia to China. A person whom Yssbrants Ides had with him during his journey through Siberia, and who travelled every year to collect mammoth ivory, assured him that he had once found a head of this animal in a piece of frozen earth which had tumbled down. The flesh was putrefied, the neck-bone was still coloured by blood, and some distance from the head a frozen foot was found.[219] The foot was taken to Turuchansk, whence we may infer that the _find_ was made on the Yenisej. Another time the same man found a pair of tusks weighing together twelve poods or nearly 200 kilogram. Ides' informant further stated, that while the heathen Yakuts, Tunguses, and Ostyaks, supposed that the mammoth always lived in the earth and went about in it, however hard the ground might be frozen, also that the large animal died when it came so far up that it saw or smelled the air; the old Russians living in Siberia were of opinion that the mammoth was an animal of the same kind as the elephant, though with tusks somewhat more bent and closer together; that before the Flood Siberia had been warmer than now, and elephants had then lived in numbers there; that they had been drowned in the Flood, and afterwards, when the climate became colder, had frozen in the river mud.[220]