and criticized in an admirable paper published more than twenty years ago by Von Olfers, of Berlin.[1]
The Siberians are constantly finding bones and teeth of mammoths imbedded in the faces of cliffs or river banks at some depth below the surface. Often a mass of earth or gravel falls away from such a cliff, and exposes such remains. How could they have got there? A plausible explanation suggested itself, that the creature was a huge burrowing animal, and lived underground. Not only the skeleton, but the body in tolerable preservation with flesh and skin being found in a frozen state in high Northern latitudes, the notion grew up that it was a monstrous kind of burrowing rat, and it is described in Chinese books under such names as fen-shu, or "digging rat," yen-men, or "burrowing ox," shu-mu, "mother of mice," and so on. A difficulty which suggested itself to the native Siberian geologists was met in a characteristic manner. It was strange that whenever they came upon a mammoth imbedded in a cliff, it was always dead. It must be a creature unable to bear the air or the light, and when in the course of its subterranean wanderings it breaks through to the outer air it dies immediately. With so much knowledge of the natural history of the creature to start from, other details grow round it in the usual way. Yakuts and Tunguz have seen the earth heave and sink, as a mammoth walked beneath. It frequents marshes, and travels underground, never appearing above the surface of the earth or water during the day, but has been seen at dawn in lakes and rivers, just as it dived below. The account of it given in the Chinese Encyclopædia of Kang-hi is as follows:—
"Fen-shu.—The cold is extreme and almost continual on the coast of the Northern Sea, beyond the Tai-tong-Kiang; on this coast is found the animal Fen-shu, which resembles a rat in shape, but is as big as an elephant; it dwells in dark caverns, and ever shuns the light. There is got from it an ivory as white as that of the elephant, but easier to work, and not liable to split. Its flesh is very cold, and excellent for refreshing the blood.
- ↑ J. F. M. v. Olfers, 'Die Ueberreste vorweltlicher Riesenthiere in Beziehung zu Ostasiatischen Sagen und Chinesischen Schriften' (Berlin Acad., 1839); Berlin; 1840.
