THE LOESS-DEPOSITS OF NORTHERN CHINA. 243 



that follows ; or, on the other hand, of a fatalist doctrine of vegetable 

 spores or organisms of the lowest grade making ceaseless war upon 

 mankind. The world has a way of finding out the truth by its ex- 

 periences on the large scale. It settled the inane theoretical objec- 

 tions to the value of cinchona-bark, and it will probably form its own 

 opinion on the relative merits of the vegetable-spore theory of malaria 

 and the theory of exposure and climatic vicissitudes. It will be a 

 regrettable circumstance if in this matter the profession has to follow 

 public opinion instead of leading it. 







THE LOESS-DEPOSITS OF NORTHERN CHINA. 



Br FBEDEEICK W. WILLIAMS. 



SCIENTISTS as well as economists and statesmen are turning with 

 a scrutiny, renewed as each year advances, toward the great re- 

 gion of middle Asia a territory which, if it supplies society with im- 

 migrants much too thrifty for the tastes of our broader-minded Celtic 

 brethren, bids fair in many ways to furnish materials for scientific 

 research that can be compared in interest to no other portion of the 

 world's surface. Without delaying to mention here the recent travel- 

 ers who are rapidly lessening the bounds of that tract, still confessed 

 to be the least known area of the globe, it is our purpose to direct at- 

 tention to a geological phenomenon among the most important as well 

 as peculiar of any hitherto brought to light in this field of investiga- 

 tion : we mean the loess-beds covering a great portion of Northern 

 China. 



The term loess, now generally accepted, has been used to designate 

 a tertiary deposit appearing in the Rhine Valley, along the Danube, 

 and in several isolated sections of Europe. Its formation has hereto- 

 fore been ascribed to glaciers, but its enormous extent and thickness 

 in China demand some other origin. The substance is a brownish-col- 

 ored earth, extremely porous, and, when dry, easily powdered between 

 the fingers, when it becomes an impalpable dust that may be rubbed 

 into the pores of the skin. Its particles are somewhat angular in shape, 

 the lumps varying from the size of a peanut to a foot in length, whose 

 appearance warrants the peculiarly appropriate Chinese name meaning 

 "ginger-stones." After washing, the stuff is readily disintegrated, and 

 spread far and wide by rivers during their times of flood. Mr. Kings- 

 mill, in the " Journal of the Geological Society " (London), states that 

 a number of specimens, which crumbled in the moist air of a Shanghai 

 summer, rearranged themselves afterward in the bottom of a drawer 

 in which they had been placed. Every atom of loess is perforated 

 by small tubes, usually very minute, circulating after the manner of 



