XXVI.—Skeleton of the Mammoth in the St. Petersburg Museum.
Beside the skeleton of this famous Mammoth there is placed that of an Indian Elephant, and another Elephant with skin and hair, in order that the visitor may have a proper appreciation of the vast proportions of the Mammoth, as compared with them. [Plate XXVI.], on the opposite page, represents the saloon of the Museum of St. Petersburg, which contains these three interesting remains.
Fig. 182.—Mammoth restored.
In 1860 a great number of bones of the Mammoth, with remains of Hyæna, Horse, Reindeer, Rhinoceros-megarhinus, and Bison, were found in Belgium in digging a canal at Lierre, in the province of Antwerp. An entire skeleton of a young Mammoth, eleven feet six inches high (to the shoulder), has been reconstructed from these remains by M. Dupont, and is now placed in the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels.[98]
We cannot doubt, after such testimony, of the existence in the frozen north, of the almost entire remains of the Mammoth. The animals seem to have perished suddenly; enveloped in ice at the moment of their death, their bodies have been preserved from decomposition by the continued action of the cold. If we suppose that one of those animals had sunk into a marsh which froze soon afterwards, or had fallen accidentally into the crevasse of some glacier, it would be easy for us to understand how its body, buried immediately under eternal ice, had remained there for thousands of years without undergoing decomposition.
In Cuvier’s great work on fossil bones, he gives a long and minute enumeration of the various regions of Germany, France, Italy, and other countries, which have furnished in our days bones or tusks of the Mammoth. We venture to quote two of these descriptions:—“In October, 1816,” he says, “there was discovered at Seilberg, near Canstadt, in Würtemberg, near which some remarkable discoveries were made in 1700, a very remarkable deposit, which the king, Frederick I., caused to be excavated, and its contents collected with the greatest care. We are even assured that the visit which the prince, in his ardour for all that was great, paid to this spot, aggravated the malady of which he died a few days after. An officer, Herr Natter, commenced some excavations, and in four-and-twenty hours discovered twenty-one teeth or fragments of teeth of elephant, mixed with a great number of bones. The king having ordered him to continue the excavations, on the second day they came upon a group of thirteen tusks heaped close upon each other, and along with them some molar teeth, lying as if they had been packed artificially. It was on this discovery that the king caused himself to be transported thither, and ordered all the surrounding soil to be dug up, and every object to be carefully preserved in its original position. The largest of the tusks, though it had lost its points and its roots, was still eight feet long and one foot in diameter. Many isolated tusks were also found, with a quantity of molar teeth, from two inches to a foot in length, some still adhering to the jaws. All these fragments were better preserved than those of 1700, which was attributed to the depth of the bed, and, perhaps, to the nature of the soil. The tusks were generally much curved. In the same deposit some bones of Horses and Stags were found, together with a quantity of teeth of the Rhinoceros, and others which were thought to belong to a Bear, and one specimen which was attributed to the Tapir. The place where this discovery was made is named Seilberg; it is about 600 paces from the city of Canstadt, but on the opposite side of the Necker.
“All the great river basins of Germany have, like those of the Necker, yielded fossil bones of the Elephant; those especially abutting on the Rhine are too numerous to be mentioned, nor is Canstadt the only place in the valley of the Necker where they are found.”