344 H. H. Eoworth—The Loess. 



d'Hi&tQlre JSaturelle, are very widely known, has travelled over 

 perhaps quite as extensive a tract in China, and has examined the 

 problem of the Loess there with a special view to Baron Kichthofen's 

 theory, and has not only written about it, but has written very 

 strongly, as Mr. Kingsmill has, against it; while if we turn to 

 America, where the Loess deposits, the consideration of which I 

 wished to postpone to a later paper, are so extensive, there has been 

 a very wide discussion of the same problem, and with the exception, 

 perhaps, of Mr. Clarence King and Professor Pumpelly, a general 

 consensus of opinion completely adverse to Baron von Eichthofen. 

 If authority " qua authority " were of any avail in such a con- 

 troversy, this would be a fair way of meeting the position he main- 

 tains ; but for one heretic to quote authority against another is not 

 very conclusive. Let us, therefore, brush aside these appeals on 

 either side, and grapple more closely with the problem itself, which 

 is admittedly a very difficult one. 



With the first pages of Baron Eichthofen's paper I have 

 virtually no controversy. He merely condenses and states in 

 clear tabulated form, what I urged in more diffuse, and perhaps not 

 such clear language. About the twelve characteristic peculiarities 

 of the Loess which he refers to there is no difference of opinion, save 

 in regard to the first and the eleventh, to which I shall refer 

 presently, and I mostly completely agree with the dictum that 

 neither the sea, nor lakes, nor rivers, could deposit the Loess at 

 altitudes of 8000 feet on hill-sides. This was the burden of 

 three-fourths of my paper, which I reiterated more than once, and 

 which seems to me to be incontrovertible. 



Again, when the term subaerial is used by Baron Eichthofen as 

 covering his position, there must be no mistake about my own 

 meaning. I have no doubt whatever that the Mammoth and his 

 companions, that the land shells and the debris of vegetables found 

 in the tufas, are as clear proofs that the conditions in which they 

 lived were subaerial, as the same series of remains is in the case 

 of the brick-earths and the loams. In all these cases the 

 remains prove the existence of subaerial conditions, and not 

 subaqueous ones, where the animals and plants lived. I believe, 

 further — and the view is fully held both by French and American 

 as well as by our own geologists — that the animal and vegetable 

 contents of the Loess, as well as its stratigraphical position, prove 

 that it belongs to precisely the same horizon geologically as 

 the loams, brick-earths, and the so-called diluvium. All this I have 

 never hesitated to urge. The ground I have taken is, that at the 

 epoch when Pal£eolithic man lived, there was a tolerably uniform 

 deposit over central and southern Europe, representing the old land 

 surfaces on which the Mammoth and his companions passed their 

 lives, represented as to texture, ingredients, and contents in its most 

 unsophisticated form by our lower brick-earths and the diluvium 

 gris of the French writers. The whole being of subaerial origin, 

 this homogeneous deposit was presently sophisticated in two ways. 

 When the catastrophe came — which I have adduced a very con- 



