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civilised man. To judge from the comparatively limited
regions more or less explored, it is probable that great
natural resources are to be found in the forests and in the
mountains by the explorers of the future. Besides the
gold-fields on the rivers Vitim and Olekma, which have
been worked since 1840, both gold and silver have been
found on the river Aldan and elsewhere. Rich iron ore
has been discovered in several places, and in the middle
and northern parts of Yakutsk there is plenty of coal. The
Lena and some of its tributaries yield precious stones of
various kinds, and the existence of malachite and graphite
has also been ascertained in more than one spot.
I have already spoken of the abundance of fish. The
quantity of fur obtained, on the other hand, has grown
smaller and smaller, the valuable sable having diminished
greatly or entirely disappeared over wide regions, probably
not only on account of the war of extermination carried
on against it, but also because of the great forest fires,
which annually lay waste hundreds of square miles. One of
the natural resources of Yakutsk, which has been worked
for ages, belongs to the extinct animal kingdom—namely,
the valuable mammoth tusks. Middendorff calculated in
the forties that, during the period of two hundred years
previous to that time, the tusks of at least twenty thousand
mammoths had been obtained in northern Siberia. At the
present day, within the province of Yakutsk alone, about
17 tons of mammoth tusks are annually collected.
This does not, however, represent the total of the finds,
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