246 PROF. G. F. WRIGHT ON RECENT GEOLOGICAL [May ipOI^ 



in tlie interior the loess is being washed away by the streams 

 much faster than it is deposited by the wind. Long, deep, im- 

 passable channels in it frequently obstruct the traveller in his 

 endeavour to cross any level section of it. Everywhere in the 

 mountainous region it is clear that the rock-erosion had been 

 mainly accomplished before the deposition of the loess, and that 

 already a large fraction of this has been removed. 



Pinding no signs of Glacial action in South-eastern Mongolia, we 

 returned to Peking, and left for Tientsin at noon on May 26th. On 

 the 27th the revolution broke out, and the railway was destroyed, 

 so that if we had started a day later we should have been cooped 

 up in Peking during the summer, instead of pursuing our geological 

 studies. All unconscious of the impending troubles, we went to 

 Port Arthur, to make a section from that point along the line of 

 the Chinese Eastern Railway to Harbin, on the Sungari River. 

 This is a distance of about 750 miles through the heart of Manchuria, 

 and would take us through the cuttings in a newly-constructed 

 railway across seven degrees of latitude. Of this distance 550 miles 

 was travelled on construction-trains, and 200 in Chinese carts. The 

 entire region traversed consists of a valley 50 miles or more in 

 width. Everywhere this is deeply covered with alluvium, while 

 the slopes both up and away from the centre are exceedingly 

 gentle. Por the most part the sediment seemed purely residual, or 

 such as had been brought into position by the streams now in 

 possession of the field. At Kwan Chentse, 100 miles south of the 

 Sungari River, the watershed between that and the Laoho, whose 

 valley we had been ascending for 300 miles, was less than 500 feet 

 above sea-level, and was approached by a gradient so gentle that 

 we could not detect it as we drove over it. Specimens of soil from 

 freshly-dug wells showed evidences of fine stratification to a depth of 

 50 feet. The lines of drainage from here to the Sungari River were 

 exceedingly sluggish, and the small stream which we followed for 

 most of the way occupied a valley several miles wide, covered with 

 peat-bogs. This sluggish drainage characterizes all the tributaries 

 of the Sungari River in the central part of Manchuria. The 

 troughs of all the streams in that region are very old, and show a 

 recent depression of land resulting in an extensive filling up of the 

 channels. Wells at Harbin brought up fine alluvium at a depth of 

 80 feet. 



The Amur has many resemblances to the St. Lawrence, the two 

 rivers being in nearly the same latitude, and both emptying 

 into ice-clogged seas above the 50th parallel. In America we 

 have abundant evidence that the St. Lawrence was dammed up by 

 Glacial ice, so that the drainage was temporarily turned into the 

 Champlain and Mississippi Valleys. But no evidence of this sort 

 could be found in Eastern Asia, though we searched diligently for 

 it along the southern watersheds of the Sungari and IJssuri Rivers. 

 The conclusion seems indubitable that there was no general glaciation 



