S. S. Hoioorth — A Great Post- Glacial Flood. 15 



did he find the fresh-water form Limnceus truncatulus. Similar land 

 shells are found in the Loess of the Danube Valley of Lower Austria, 

 Hungary, the Carpathians, and Poland. 



Mr. Belt tells us that he examined the Loess in the valleys of the 

 Ehine, Main, Danube, and the steppes of Southern Eussia, yet he had 

 never seen a fragment of a river-shell. 



Baron Kichthofen expressly says of the Chinese Loess : " The land 

 shells are distributed throughout the whole thickness of the Loess ; 

 and their state of preservation is so perfect that they must have 

 lived on the spot where we now find them " (Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. 

 xxvii. p. 377, note). 



The well-known French missionary in China, David, who has 

 done so much for the Natural History of that Empire, speaking- of 

 the Loess in the valley of the Yellow Eiver and in North-Western 

 China, saj's: " I never saw a trace of an aquatic shell in it, but merely 

 the remains of certain small species of Helices, many of which exactly 

 resemble those still living in the country." These shells, he says, 

 are found at different depths, but chiefly in the upper part of the 

 formation (Journ. etc., vol. i. p. 93). We may take it, therefore, as 

 an absolute feature of the Loess that it contains virtually no river 

 shells ; for, as Mr. Belt says, the Limnceus truncatulus had its habitat 

 most probably in small meres rather than in a river. 



What is the inference from this ? Why, surely, that the deposit 

 which we are discussing is not a fluviatile deposit at all ; for, as 

 Mr. Belt says, all our larger rivers abound in shells. The shells of 

 the Loess are not only land shells, but they are shells loving the 

 deep shade of trees and the damp recesses of woods, which woods 

 could not exist where the banks of a river were continually 

 depositing warp on a great scale. Nothing can be argued from 

 the amphibious forms, the Succineas ; for, as Lyell most frankly 

 says, the shell is not strictly aquatic, but lives in damp places, and 

 may be seen in full activity far from rivers, in meadows where the 

 grass is wet with rain or dew (Antiquity of Man, p. 375). The 

 other contents of the Loess tell the same story ; both the animal 

 remains and the relics of man, including the Palaeolithic imple- 

 ments which are found in the Loess, and their presence is most 

 inconsistent with the fluviatile origin of the deposit. As we 

 have shown, they occur as nearly as may be under precisely the 

 conditions which exist in Siberia. We could imagine in a narrow 

 rapid river that carcases of Mammoths, etc., might be borne along 

 and be overwhelmed and covered with gravel and other debris 

 if they stopped at any point and thus formed a barrier to the 

 flow of the water. But how, in the case of a slow river — much 

 slower than the present Rhine — which is Lyell's own postulate — 

 these remains as they are found at Cannstadt and elsewhere, could 

 be covered over and preserved in skeletons and in hecatombs, without 

 dispersal by gradually accumulating annual layers of warp, is 

 difficult to imagine. Why, again, primeval man should amuse 

 himself" by sowing specimens of his flint tools at intervals in the 

 warp of the river, or in the river itself, is equally hard to realize. 



