Sea. There he would winter and go down the river at the
opening of next summer, and catch the steamship that calls there once
a year.

"If this proves impracticable, he will have to wait until the winter
of 1902-1903, and take the remains overland by sledges to Irkutsk. It
would be impossible to make this tremendous journey in summer,
through a roadless country, where there are thousands of square miles
of swamps.

"Numerous relics of mammoths have been discovered in Siberia,
including pieces of skin, and all the bones. On more than one
occasion a complete animal has been found preserved in the ice,
but a complete animal has never been secured in its entirety and
brought back to civilization. That is exactly what the Imperial
Academy of Sciences now proposes to do. According to the last report
from Irkutsk, it is in a fair way to accomplish this.

"It is, perhaps, one of the most marvellous facts in the whole realm
of nature that the body of a mammoth should be preserved exactly as
it existed in life thousands and thousands of years ago, but there is
every reason to believe that this happened in countless cases.

"The mammoth was a gigantic species of extinct elephant. It
flourished in past geological ages, and also survived into the days
of early man. When the Palaeolithic or Old Stone man flourished on
earth two hundred thousand years ago, the mammoth was as common as
the horse to-day. In no part of the world were mammoths more abundant
than in Northern Siberia. They must have roamed about there as freely
as the buffalo did in North America fifty years ago.

"Though similar in structure to the modern elephant, the mammoth was
very different in habits. He was a northern animal, and with this in
view was provided with a very long, thick hair, reddish in color,
like that of the camel. He had extraordinary teeth and stomach, so
that he was able to masticate and digest, not only plants, leaves and
so forth, but wood and the trunks of trees. His stomach has been
found full of young fir trees. His teeth were built in layers and
renewed themselves ceaselessly through life.

"Sometimes the mammoth would become mired in a soft spot of earth,
and there sink in, die, become frozen and preserved forever. Another
mammoth, while walking across a glacier, would fall into a crevasse,
and there become frozen in a gigantic block of ice. That is what
happened in the case of the animal recently discovered in
Siberia. The soil is