390 S. V. Wood—Origin of the Loess. 
distance of several miles from the sea,” the northern end of which 
ridge abutted in the cliffs thus described on the shore of the bay. 
‘There were no mountains or other high land about this ridge in 
any direction, all the surface around being lower than the ridge 
itself.” About half a mile from the sea, and ‘perhaps 250 feet 
above high-water mark,” at the depth of a foot, was a solidly frozen 
stratum of bog moss and vegetable mould, containing good-sized 
Jumps of clear ice; and “there seemed no reason to doubt that an 
extension of the digging would have brought them to solid clear ice, 
such as was visible at the face of the bluff below.”  ['This inference, 
IT may remark, seems scarcely warranted ; for nothing beyond lumps 
of ice in the moss and vegetable mould appeared to show that at this 
height, and still less at the higher parts of the ridge rising to 300 
or 400 feet, there was not rock or other strata in the place of the ice, 
as had been observed to the west, where the breccia and rock 
appeared along the beach, and rose inland to hilly slopes of this 
elevation.| ‘There was much less clay over the top of the upper 
ice face than was visible over the lower one, or over the single face 
where there was but one and the land and bluff were low near the 
beach. There also seemed to be Jess vegetable matter. Near the 
beach six or eight feet of clay were observed in some places, without 
counting what might be considered as talus matter from further up 
the hill-side.” In places the ice was penetrated with deep holes into 
which the clay and vegetable matter had been deposited in layers ; 
and here the clay had a peculiar smell “as of rotting animal matter, 
burnt leather and stable manure combined,” leading to the supposi- 
tion ‘‘ that these might be the soft parts of the Mammoth and other 
animals, whose bores are daily washed out by the sea from the clay 
talus.” There was no high land from which a glacier might have 
been derived, and then covered with débris from their sides, and 
“the continuity of the mossy surface showed that the ice must be 
quite destitute of motion.” 
From this description, it seems to me that the coat of clay with 
mammialian remains over the ice can have arisen by no other process 
than that of slide from higher ground, where (this stationary ice 
giving place to soil and rock which was perennially frozen beneath 
the upper layer, which alone thawed,) the material originated; and that 
moving thus, it passed over the ice, where its motion continued in 
the same way, and from the same cause; the perennial ice taking 
‘the place of the perennially frozen ground. In no other way can 
I see how such clay could have overspread this ice, which Mr. Dall 
observes, ‘takes upon itself the functions of a regular stratified 
rock ;” and it is to be observed that no ice was actually exposed 
above the elevation of about 80 feet, though the land behind it, as 
well as the land behind the banks of rock which skirted the shore 
before the ice bank was encountered, rose continuously to 300 or 400 
feet. The layers, in which the clay had accumulated in holes in the 
ice, are worthy of notice in connection with the “ bedding planes ” 
said to occur often in the Loess. 
How this ice, which Mr. Dall says “has a semistratified ap- 
