E. m Hoicorth—The Loess. 355 



offered. Nay, more, as I have shown or tried to show, the only method 

 by which deposits very like the Loess are at the present moment 

 being made is by the very process I postulate, of which Baron 

 Kichthofen writes so lightly. So much for the origin of the Loess. 

 In regard to its distribution I do not speak with the same hesitation. 

 Here the evidence, as I have presented it to your readers, is so 

 consistent, cumulative and overwhelming, that it will require a 

 very great many /ac^s on the other side to disturb it. The evidence 

 that the Loess was spread over the country independently of the 

 drainage — spread like a sheet over hill and dale by a mass of moving 

 waters — is so great that it seems to me conclusive. I have tried to 

 focus a portion of it, as well as the evidence of the correlated deposits 

 and their contents, from many quarters. The proofs are at present 

 ample, that the big mammals were actually drowned, that they 

 perished not singly but in many cases in hecatombs, that they were 

 immediately covered over and protected from the weather in some 

 cases with their skeletons intact, in others with their bones scattered 

 hither and thither, that the loamy deposits wherever we meet with, 

 them and however we sift them bear unmistakable traces of this 

 great wave of waters, which is amply supported again by the ethno- 

 graphic evidence and by human tradition. This and much more 

 ejusdem generis I have partially tried to show in the papers I have 

 printed in the Magazine, and which are not yet concluded. The 

 nature and extent of this diluvial movement, which Baron Richthpfeu 

 produces as a scarecrow, I cannot discuss at present nor until a good 

 deal more of my evidence is published. At present it will suffice to 

 say that I believe it was very widespread in the Northern Hemisphere, 

 and that one of its notable effects was the origin of the Loess by the 

 mixing of the products of a subterranean flood of calcareous mud 

 with the loams forming the land surface where the Mammoth lived 

 in the areas now covered by Loess in Europe, China and America. 

 I hope Baron Eichthofen will forgive any expressions which he 

 may disapprove of in this paper. It is not to be expected that 

 phrases wanting in courtesy can be used by a distinguished writer 

 of one very much his inferior without some resentment. He would 

 not respect me if I consented to such treatment. But I can assure 

 him, if I may be guilty of the presumption, that no one from Cathay to 

 Peru rates more highly than I do his reputation, nor values more his 

 contributions to Eastern Geography and Geology, and no one awaits 

 more impatiently the time when they may be published at a cost 

 that will bring them within the reach of poor men — poor men living 

 in Philistia — overloaded with books and babies, and only very 

 moderately endowed by nature with those qualities that secure 

 success in the struggle for existence. 



I wish to add a postscript on another matter on which Baron 

 Eichthofen could perhaps help me ; or perhaps my appeal might 

 reach some other German geologist. In the fourth volume of Mid- 

 dendorf's Travels, p. 1081, there is a very extraordinary account of 

 the discovery of a Mammoth which, if reliable, is valuable. The 

 notice has been partially translated in one of Professor Dawkins' 



