292 W. H HOBBS — GUADIX FORMATION OF GRANADA, SPAIN 



saturated with water until one of the earthquakes so characteristic of the 

 province sets loose a large mass to slide down and be soon dispersed by 

 the torrent below. The banks of many fmrnari present great scars, the 

 freshness of whose surfaces furnishes an indication of their relative age. 

 On the fiumare Oliveri, between the Calabrian village of Aiello and the 

 Tyrrhenean coast (a distance of about 10 kilometers), a number of these 

 great scars were seen, the largest caused by a landslide during the past 

 year. In this category must be placed also the mass of soft rock (which 

 has been estimated at 7,000 cubic feet) which was precipitated from the 

 castle rock upon the town itself by the earthquake of September 8, 1905. 

 The torrential deposits which border southern Italy between the moun- 

 tains and the sea appear to be in part of Quaternary age (especially those 

 bordering the straits of Messina) ; they are also in part Recent, and in 

 part they are pre-Quaternary. Cortese, who has furnished the best re- 

 port upon the region,* ascribed much of the Recent and some of the 



Figure 3. — Faulted torrential Deposits at Rossano, Calabria. 



Quaternary deposits to a fluviatile origin through the agency of the 

 torrenti, and stress is laid upon the difficulty of delimiting the several 

 formations. The occurrence of these deposits in distinct pianos or shelves 

 on the seaward side of the Apennines he explains by the existence of such 

 topographic forms in the surface of the underlying crystalline terrane; 

 and with this view the writer is in full accord. f 



Within the extensive arid regions of the western United States the 

 present-day importance of the torrent and the desert lake in filling the 

 valleys and fashioning the topography has been generally recognized by 

 the geologists who have studied the region. 



Probable torrential Origin of many Sandstones and Conglom- 

 erates 



A terrane as heavy and as extensive as the Guadix formation, when 

 buried beneath later deposits and cemented into sandstone or quartzite, 



* E. Cortese : Descrizione geologica della Calabria. Meraorie descrittive della carta 

 geologica d'ltalia. vol. ix, 1805. pp. xxviii and 310, map and 4 plates. 



t See the colored plates of the work cited for the topographic character of the piani 

 and figure 10a, on page 185, for a hypothetical section. 



