Note 6 — Chapter XXIV · THE LENA.

In December, 1771, a party of Yakutes hunting on the Vilui, near its junction with the Lower Lena, discovered an unknown animal half-buried in the sand, but still retaining its flesh, covered with a thick skin. The carcase was too much decomposed to allow of more than the head and two feet being forwarded to Irkutsk; but they were seen by the great traveller and naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas, who pronounced the animal a rhinoceros, not particularly large of its kind, which might perchance have been born in Central Asia.

In the year 1799 a bank of frozen earth near the mouth of the Lena broke away, and revealed to a Tunguse, named Schumachoff, the body of a mammoth. Hair, skin, flesh and all had been preserved by the frost; and seven years later Mr. Adams, of the Petersburg Academy, hearing of the discovery at Yakutsk, visited the spot. He found, however, that the greater part of the flesh had been eaten by wild animals and the dogs of the natives, though the eyes and brains remained. The entire carcase measured 9 ft. 4 in. high, and 16 ft. 4 in. from the point of the nose to the end of the tail, without including the tusks, which were 9 ft. 6 in. in length if measured along the curves. The two tusks weighed 360 lbs., and the head and tusks together 414 lbs. The skin was of such extraordinary weight that ten persons found great difficulty in carrying it. About 40 lbs. of hair, too, were collected, though much more of this was trodden into the sand by the feet of bears which had eaten the flesh. This skeleton is now in the Museum of the Academy at Petersburg.

Again, in 1843, M. Middendorf found a mammoth on the Taz, between the Obi and the Yenesei, with some of the flesh in so perfect a condition that it was found possible to remove the ball of the eye, which is preserved in the Museum at Moscow.