The naturalist was able to discover that his specimen was a male. Its head weighed four hundred pounds. It had a long black mane, the hair measuring at least a foot and a half, and its whole body was covered with a thick coating of reddish wool five inches in length. The tail and the trunk were gone, but the eyes were still preserved; so also was the brain. Professor Adams had no difficulty in stripping off three-quarters of the skin, though this was found to be so heavy that when he attempted to take it away it required fully ten men to carry it.
The hairs which the polar bears and other beasts of prey had trodden into the damp ground were collected, and amounted to some thirty pounds. Specimens of these were afterward shown in almost all the museums of Europe.
The lucky naturalist, having no fear of death like poor old Ossip, had everything carefully packed together and carried up the Lena, then across the country for more than four thousand miles, to the distant city of St. Petersburg, where the skin and skeleton form to-day the most valuable specimen of its famous museum. He also brought home some of the flesh, which, in spite of its age, was still fresh enough to be eaten, and the St. Petersburg Academicians and other gentlemen tasted this remarkable roast. The Academy gave the naturalist eight thousand rubles for his travelling expenses, besides a professorship in Moscow.
And this is the story of the great mammoth discovery that caused so much excitement in all the scientific circles of Europe. But how this ancient elephant strayed in the first place into so uncongenial a climate as that within the arctic circle, or what he could have found to eat when there, remains, I think, a mystery to the present day.
There are many theories advanced, but who can tell which one of them all is right?
We read that the tribes who live in the northern parts of Siberia, upon the thawing of the ice in summer, are constantly finding some immense skull, with its strongly bowed tusks in a perfect state of preservation, or some other skeleton remains (of the same animal apparently), with the red flesh still clinging to them.
And indeed these discoveries seem to have been long a source of revenue to the poor wandering people of the north. As early as 1707 a certain gentleman named Isbeaud Ides, who made a journey to China as ambassador to that distant country, declared that the Tunguse carried on a considerable business with the tusks discovered from time to time in the melting ice.
He further says that the animal known to us as the mammoth was called mammont by the wild tribes of Siberia, and that they believed it to be living still somewhere deep down in the ground, burrowing in the mud in the neighborhood of the river. According to their theory, if in the course of its dark wandering the animal by any possibility struck upon the sand, it immediately sank therein and died. So, too, it was inevitably lost when it came into the air of the upper world upon a bank of the river, because it could bear neither air nor light.
But this was only a theory of ignorant people—one to make the wise men of the earth smile in scorn—and still the question remains unanswered, I think, how it is that the bones and remains of a tropical animal are found in such numbers throughout the region of ice and snow.