FOSSSIL IVORY.

Colonist, Volume LIII, Issue 13109, 18 May 1911, Page 1

FOSSSIL IVORY.

Siberia furnishes a largo quantity of ivory to the markets of the world, but the production of it belongs to another age and to a species of animal that does not now oxist. The ivory is cut from the tusks of mastodons whoso skeletons are found frozen in masses of ice or buried in the mud of Siberian rivers and swamps. The northern portion of the country abounds in extensive bogs which are called urmans. In these are found the tusks of tho mastodon, from which it is inferred that these animals lost their lives by venturing upon a surface that would not bear tiieir weight.

Even to wild animals these urmans are forbidden ground. The nimble reindeer can sometimes cross them safely in summer time, but most other large animals attempting to do so would be engulfed. In the museum at Tobolsk are numerous specimens of mammoth, and throughout this region they are by no moans rare. When an ice pack breaks down a river bank or the summer thaw penetrates more deeply than usual into th« ground, some of these antediluvian monsters are very likely to be exposed.

In many cases, says "Harper's Weekly," their remains are so fresh and well preserved, with their dark, shaggy hair and under wool of reddish brown, their tufted ears and long, curved tusks, that all the aborigines and even some of the Russian settlers persist in their belief that they are specimens of animals which still * live, burrowing underground like mtoles and die the instant they are admitted to the light.

The further the traveller goes northward, it is said, thr ( more abundant do these remains become. They are washed up with the tides upon the Arctic shores, and some extensive islands off tho coast contain great quantities of fossil ivory and bouts.

Tusks which havo been long or repeatedly exposed to tho air are brittle and unserviceable, but those which have remained buried in the ice retain the qualities of racent ivory and aro a valuablo artic c of merchandise. There is a great market for these mammoth tusks at Yakutsk, on tho Lena, whence they find their way into the workshops of European Russia and to the ivory carvers of Canton.