We could hardly expect a poor fisherman to know that it was a valuable scientific discovery, and it was only by accident that the story of the strange animal reached the scientific world. Seven years later a Mr. Adams visited the spot, where he found the mammoth still in the flesh, with the exception of the fore-leg; and, even after this lapse of time, its preservation was remarkable. The pupil of the eye was still intact; and the brain rested in the cranium, the tissues being so perfect that they could hardly be distinguished from those of a living animal. During the interim between its fall upon the beach and Mr. Adams’s visit, it had attracted numbers of wild animals,—bears, foxes, etc.,—that devoured much of the meat, that had been preserved for perhaps thousands of years. The neck of the animal was still covered with a long mane; and next to the skin was a thick brown wool, that was evidently very valuable as a protection against the severe cold. Much of the hair and wool of the huge creature was ground into the soil, but thirty pounds of this reddish wool was recovered. Mr. Adams purchased the tusks, which were nine feet in length; and finally the entire skeleton was removed to St. Petersburg, where it may still be seen.
From the description and measurements of the skeleton, Professor Ward has made a restoration of this ancient giant, which gives a striking idea of the grandeur of its appearance. ([See Plate III.])
Dr. Pallas was the first to describe the mammoth with scientific accuracy; and Blumenbach gave it its present name, Elephas primigenius. In the northern countries it ranged the forests at one time in vast numbers, being especially common in England and Wales, where its remains are generally found in caves and river-deposits. In Yorkshire and Wales it was evidently followed by hyenas, that dragged its bones into the caves. W. Boyd Dawkins says, that, in the spring of 1866, he accompanied Mr. Antonio Brady to the Uphall pit, England, and describes his finds as follows:—
“At the top, there was the surface-soil from one to three feet deep; then an irregularly stratified layer of brick-earth and gravel six feet; and lastly, an irregular layer of flint gravel, underneath which was a fine reddish gray sandy loam, four feet thick. All these had been cleared away, leaving a platform exposed, on which was a most remarkable accumulation of bones carefully left in situ by the workmen. On the right hand was a huge tusk of mammoth, eight feet long, with the spiral curvature undisturbed by the pressure of the superadjacent strata. Across it lay a remarkably fine antler of red deer. At a little distance was the frontal portion of the skull of a urns, with its horn-cores perfect to the very tips; while around, bones of various animals were scattered,—of the Rhinoceros hemitœchus, mammoth, urus, horse, either brown or grisly bear, and wolf. As we gazed down on this tableau, we could not doubt for a moment that the bottom of an ancient river with all its contents lay before our eyes,—a river in which all these animals had been drowned, and by which they had been swept into the exact position which they then occupied. This inference was confirmed by the examination of the thin layer of sandy gravel on which they rested, for it was full of the shells of Corbicula fluminalis, with the valves together just as in life. There were also specimens of the common anodon of our rivers, and of the Helix nemoralis of our hedge-rows. On a continuation of the same platform, now cut away, the skull of a mammoth was discovered in 1864, perfect, with the exception of the tusks, which had been broken away, with their incisive alveoli. That of the right side lay twenty feet away from the skull, while the left has not yet been discovered. Owing to the surprising skill of Mr. Davies, the skull and tusk were taken up and re-united, and now constitute by far the finest specimen of mammoth in the British Museum. In some cases, the mammoth remains have not been deposited by a river. At Lexden, near Colchester, as the Rev. O. Fisher well observes, they were overwhelmed in a bog, the small bones of the feet being found in their natural position, a fact which shows that they sank feet foremost through the peat into the subjacent clay.”
That the sea has greatly encroached upon the land of England, and that the old grazing-grounds of the mammoth are now under water, is evident from the fact that the teeth of elephants are often dredged up by fishermen; and ivory-hunters in some localities have literally fished for these teeth with drag-nets. A tusk dredged at Scarborough was as fresh as when the animal was alive, and was cut up and used for the various purposes to which ivory is put.
In its day, the mammoth also wandered through the forests of France, and to the south as far as Rome. Portions of its skeleton have been found in the volcanic gravel of Ponte Molle and Monte Sacro, a fact showing that it flourished here when the site of Rome was a bed of lava that flowed from the volcanoes of Central Italy.
Germany was a famous grazing-ground for the mammoth. At Seilberg near Constadt on the Necker, a heap of thirteen tusks and teeth were found “heaped close upon each other,” as if they had been packed artificially. A like find was made in the village of Thiede, four miles south of Brunswick: in a heap of soil ten feet square, there were found eleven tusks, one eleven and another fourteen and three-quarters feet long; thirty molar teeth, and numbers of large bones; “mixed with these were the bones and teeth of rhinoceros, horse, ox, and stag; they all lay mixed confusedly together; none of them were rolled or much broken; and the teeth, for the most part, separate and without the jaws: there were also some horns of stag.”
The borders of the Arctic were, however, the favorite pasturage for these giants; and the store of ivory there may be said to be practically inexhaustible, though the trade in the tusks has been going on with the Jakuti and Tungusians from time immemorial.
The Siberian islands are a favorite locality for collectors, where the tusks have been found protruding from the sand in vast numbers. After Adams, the most valuable find was made by Dr. Middendorf, a famous Siberian explorer, in 1843. It was discovered in latitude 66° 30´, between the Obi and Yenesei, near the Arctic circle. Shortly after, the body of a young one was found in a bed of sand and gravel fifteen feet or so above the sea, near the river Taimyr; and in the former the eye was so perfectly preserved, that the bulb, now in the St. Petersburg museum, looks as though it had been taken from a recent animal.
One of the most interesting mammoth discoveries in late years was made by a young Russian engineer named Benkendorf, who was employed in 1846 by the government to survey the coast off the mouth of the Lena and Indigirka rivers. The discovery is of such great interest and value, that I give it in his own words, the account being an abstract from a letter written to a friend in Germany:—