and the teeth consequently exposed: the neck was furnished with a long mane; the skin was covered with long hair and a reddish wool; the portion of skin still remaining was so heavy, that ten men could scarcely carry it: according to Mr. Adams, more than thirty pounds weight of hair and wool was collected from the wet sand into which it had been trodden by the white bears while devouring the flesh.—Mr. Adams took the greatest pains in collecting what remained of this unique specimen of an ancient creation, and procured the tusks from Jakutsk. The Emperor of Russia purchased the skeleton, which is now in the Museum of the Academy of St. Petersburgh. The height of the creature is about 9 feet, and its extreme length to the tip of the tail about 16 feet. Portions of the skin and hair were presented to most of the continental museums, as well as to the College of Surgeons in London.
The figure at the head of this article is confessedly ideal, but combines the characters which the observations of naturalists seem to have ascertained as being possessed by this extraordinary relic of an antediluvian world. We are accustomed to the shells and even bones of animals that lived in long-past ages; we find them converted into stone, and becoming part and parcel of the earth on which we tread; but here we have an animal, preserved in pristine freshness, handed down to us by the intervention of frost, from a period too remote to contemplate, and yet in that perfect state of preservation which ice and amber have alone achieved. The mammoth seems a link connecting the past and the present worlds—a being whose body has outlived its destination. All the arguments which have been used to prove that the earth has undergone some great convulsion since this huge animal was endowed with life, appear perfectly untenable. In the first place, it is evident that its life became a sacrifice to a sudden snow-storm, by which it was overtaken, overwhelmed and suffocated. The suddenness of the storm might have been accidental; the winter might have set in earlier, it might have been more severe than usual: but the animal was well adapted for such winters; its long, warm and shaggy coat proclaim it a denizen of Arctic countries, and is admirably adapted to exclude the severest cold: such a clothing would have been intolerable in tropical regions, where elephants now abound. We learn from Bishop Heber, that in some of the mountainous and colder districts of northern India, hairy elephants still exist, thus showing that this clothing is provided as an especial protection against the climate; and at the same time leading to the obvious conclusion, that the well-clad mammoth, like the polar bear
