ch yearly come into the market, as at least a hundred pairs,[218]
whence we may infer, that during the years that have elapsed since
the conquest of Siberia useful tusks from more than 20,000 animals
have been collected.

The discovery of a mammoth-_mummy_ is mentioned for the first time
in detail in the sketch of a journey which the Russian ambassador
EVERT YSSBRANTS IDES, a Dutchman by birth, made in 1692 through
Siberia to China. A person whom Yssbrants Ides had with him during
his journey through Siberia, and who travelled every year to collect
mammoth ivory, assured him that he had once found a head of this
animal in a piece of frozen earth which had tumbled down. The flesh
was putrefied, the neck-bone was still coloured by blood, and some
distance from the head a frozen foot was found.[219] The foot was
taken to Turuchansk, whence we may infer that the _find_ was made on
the Yenisej. Another time the same man found a pair of tusks
weighing together twelve poods or nearly 200 kilogram. Ides'
informant further stated, that while the heathen Yakuts, Tunguses,
and Ostyaks, supposed that the mammoth always lived in the earth and
went about in it, however hard the ground might be frozen, also that
the large animal died when it came so far up that it saw or smelled
the air; the old Russians living in Siberia were of opinion that the
mammoth was an animal of the same kind as the elephant, though with
tusks somewhat more bent and closer together; that before the Flood
Siberia had been warmer than now, and elephants had then lived in
numbers there; that they had been drowned in the Flood, and
afterwards, when the climate became colder, had frozen in the river
mud.[220]

The folk-lore of the natives regarding the mode of life of the
mammoth under ground is given in still greater detail in J.B.
MUeLLER'S _Leben und Gewonheiten der Ostiaken unter dem Polo arctico
wohnende_, &c. Berlin, 1720 (in French in _Recueil de Voiages au
Nord_, Amsterdam, 1731-38, Vol. VIII. p. 373). According to the
accounts given by Muller, who lived in Siberia as a Swedish prisoner
of war,[221] the tusks formed the animal's horns. With these, which
were fastened above the eyes and were movable, the animal dug a way
for itself through the clay and mud, but when it came to sandy soil,
the sand ran together so that the mammoth stuck fast and perished.
Muller further states, that many assured him that they themselves
had seen such animals on the other