1877. ] The Chinese Loess Puzzle. 709 
material. These dwellings vary in character from mere holes in 
the ground to commodious mansions. The largest houses for the 
entertainment of travelers are sometimes excavated to a distance 
of two hundred feet into the ground, with corresponding breadth 
and height, so that numerous guests, with their vehicles and an- 
imals, can be housed with comfort, small side apartments being 
cut out adjacent to the large one for sleeping quarters. The 
walls of these extraordinary dwellings are lined with cement 
made from the calcareous nodules which the loess often contains ; 
this arrangement tends to cleanliness and durability, and dwell- 
` ings thus protected sometimes last for hundreds of years, being 
warm in winter and cool in summer. It must be a most curious 
experience to travel over the surface of a highly cultivated loess 
district, and to see no signs of any inhabitants, until one comes 
to some point where the vertical wall of yellow earth is exposed 
to view, in and out of the holes in which the people are seen 
swarming like bees around a bee-hive. To the traveler looking 
down from an adjacent elevation on to one of the loess basins, 
the surface seems uniform in character with a gently descending 
slope, easily accessible and green with vegetation ; from the bot- 
tom of one of the gorges, on the other hand, only the bare, verti- 
cal loess walls are visible, while the whole mass is found to be 
intersected with a labyrinth of deep and, from the general level, 
-inaccessible gorges. 
uch are some of the more striking peculiarities of the loess 
formation. But, besides its tendency to vertical cleavage, it ex- 
hibits a more or less complete arrangement in thick layers, and 
this has been taken by some observers for a real stratification, 
which, however, as Richthofen considers that he has clearly es- 
tablished, it is not. This pseudo-stratification depends for its ex- 
istence on horizontal lines of caleareous concretions, like what we 
call clay-stones, the Loessmdnnchen of the dwellers on the Rhine, 
and which the Chinese call by a name which means “ stone gin- 
_ ger,” from the resemblance of these concretionary forms to the 
roots of the ginger plant. That these loessminnchen have 
= been formed in the loess by infiltration along the lines of cleay- 
age and resultant chemical action on calcareous matter occurring 
in large quantity along certain planes, and that they are not the 
product of anything like deposition from water, is clearly shown 
by their vertical position in the material in which they are found ; 
had they been swept into their places by a current of water, they 
must have been laid upon their flat surfaces. These imperfectly 
