136 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [DcC. 23, 



besides by water that most of the streams flowing down the sides of 

 the hills take by preference subterranean courses. These beds are 

 likewise unstratified, but seem to be roughly divisible into three 

 layers, the upper and lower containing a considerable quantity of 

 calcareous matter distributed through the mass, so as to effervesce 

 violently with acids, while in the middle the lime and other soluble 

 salts have, for the most part, segregated into long irregular nodules, 

 curiously twisted and contorted, and most of them having their longer 

 axis vertical. By means of this intermediate layer the beds may be 

 noticed to dip at extremely small angles, and generally towards the 

 south of east. Like the former, this series has suffered considerable 

 denudation ; but patches of it may be seen here and there upon the 

 sides of the adjacent hills to a height of about 500 feet. In Shan- 

 tung a similar clay seems to form the surface -of the higher plains, 

 specimens in my possession from that locality being precisely similar 

 in appearance and structure. With this exception, I do not know 

 of its occurrence elsewhere in China. I have met with no fossils of 

 any sort in these clays, nor do I know of any which can with any 

 reasonable probability be referred to them. Similar clays in India 

 have, I believe, been referred to a Pleistocene date. 



Of still later date, and at the present day proceeding in their 

 formation, are the alluvial deposits of the great rivers, more espe- 

 cially the Hwangho and Yangtse. Within historical times the 

 growth of their united delta has been so rapid, and the changes of 

 the coast-line and the river- channels so numerous, that the ancient 

 history of these regions seems almost incomprehensible till studied 

 by the light of modern research. With the continual advance of the 

 coast-line the level of the rivers in the interior seems to have been 

 continually raised ; and from this cause, in many localities in the inte- 

 rior of the country, alluvial deposits of modern date cover up the older 

 clays. In the plains of Hupeh and Anhwei the Yangtse overflows 

 annually, forming large lakes, sometimes fifteen or twenty miles in 

 breadth. In Kiangsi, in the basin of the Poyang lake, and in Hunan 

 in that of the Tungting, similar floods occur. But it is along the course 

 of the Yellow Eiver that the effects of the gradual elongation of the 

 channel are most apparent ; and in these districts, from the earliest 

 dawn of history, we find the care of the embankments uppermost 

 in the minds of Chinese statesmen. Tradition hands down the half- 

 heroic Yu, the model of Chinese emperors, less as a politician 

 or a successful general than as an engineer. The semifabulous 

 Yu-kung, apparently a record more of his political arrangements than 

 of his engineering labours, has, by the glosses of later commentators, 

 been made to represent his struggles with and final victory over 

 the two great rivers. The entire subject, however, is too wide and 

 of too great importance to be taken up at the tail-end of a paper such 

 as this. Count D'Escayrac de Lauture, in the ' Proceedings of the 

 Societe de Geographic' for 1862, and more recently Mr. Pumpelly, 

 as I learn in ^ Silliman's Journal,' have treated more or less fully 

 of the changes of the Yellow Eiver ; while the Bev. J. Edkins, in 

 the second volume of the * Transactions of the North China Branch 



