16 H. H. Hoicorth — A Great Post-Olacial Flood. 



If we turn from tlie contents of the Loess to its distribution, we 

 shall be compelled to the same conclusion. In the first place, then, 

 it occurs quite independently of the drainage of the country. It 

 covers the plateaux as well as the flanks of the valley. The river 

 that could overflow these plateaux has surely ceased to be a river. 

 How, by any mechanical theory, can we account for the water of a 

 slowly moving river with a small fall, even with the greatest winter 

 floods, depositing such masses of Loess, not only 600 feet above its 

 present level, but choking its own lateral valleys up to their very 

 heads with it ? What possible river could have deposited the Loess 

 of Poland, or the far more important Loess of China, 6,000 feet above 

 the sea-level ? Assuredly, in every way we view the problem, the 

 fluviatile origin of the Loess seems incredible. Which ever way we 

 view the fluviatile origin of the Loess, the difficulties of the explana- 

 tion are overwhelming. Professor A. Geikie, Mr. Belt, and others 

 have more recently than Lyell started another theory, which 

 virtually amounts to a combination of the fluviatile and lacustrine 

 views. According to them, the waters of the Ehine and other rivers 

 flowing northwards were dammed back by a wer de glace occupying 

 the North Sea, and thus made to overflow their upper reaches, like 

 the Obi does now. This theory has all the objections which have 

 been urged against the lacustrine and fluviatile origin of the Loess, 

 with some additional ones. How is the Loess of the Danube Valley 

 and of Hungary, and more especially that of China, to be exjDlained by 

 such a bringing down of the Glacial period almost to our own day ? 

 Where was the mer de glace, and where the rivers which were 

 dammed back so as to deposit those vast masses of Loess on the 

 Chinese plateaux 6000 feet above the sea-level ? How, again, with 

 the proposed mer de glace in the North Sea, involving a climate like 

 Greenland or the Polar shores of Siberia, could the Mammoth and 

 his contemporary, the Hippopotamus, could the Ficiis carica and the 

 Cyrena jliiminalis have lived in Northern France and Germany ? 

 These objections seem to ns overwhelming. 



We are, therefore, bound to discard this modification of the older 

 hypotheses, and to conclude that every theory requiring a marine, 

 lacustrine, or fluviatile origin for the Loess is inconsistent with the 

 evidence. Let us now turn to another theory, which has received 

 the sanction of Richthofen and Pumpelly in China, and has been 

 indorsed by Professor Ramsay, namely, that the Loess is a subaerial 

 formation. Richthofen's position may be best stated in his own 

 words. " Unbiassed observation," he says, " leads irresistibly to the 

 conclusion that the Loess of China has been formed on dry land. 

 The whole of that vast country, which was covered by a continuous 

 sheet of Loess before this had undergone destruction, was one 

 continuous prairie, probably of greater elevation above the sea than 

 the same region is now. The Loess is the residue of all inorganic 

 matter of numberless generations of plants that drew new supj)lie8 

 incessantly from those substances which ascend in moisture and 

 springs, carried in rotation to the surface. This slow accumulation 

 of decayed matter was assisted by the sand and dust deposited 



