72 The Loess of the Rhine and the Danube. [January, 
loess. On the northern slope of the hill I found a thin 
layer of characteristic loess, beneath local debris , up to a 
height of 880 feet above the sea. On the hill-tops it occurs 
to 1100 feet or more, and Dr. Sandberger informed me that it 
is sometimes thick on the hill-tops, and contains the charac- 
teristic loess shells, though not so abundantly as lower down 
in the valley. I am inclined to think that it was originally 
deposited continuously over the slope up to the tops of the 
hills, but has since been removed by denudation, as the 
places where it is absent are just those where it would be 
most likely to be washed off, and it appears to be present 
wherever the ground.becomes flatter. 
In the basin of the Danube the loess is more generally and 
thickly spread out than even in the watershed of the Rhine. 
Prof. Edward Suess has kindly furnished me with much in- 
formation respecting its distribution. It is found up to a 
height of at least 1300 feet above the sea in the upper part 
of the valley of the Danube. Where the river issues from 
the narrow gorges that it has cut through the crystalline 
rocks that range southwards from Bohemia, and again 
through the northern prolongation of the Alps above Vienna, 
the loess is heaped up as if deposited at the head of a lake, 
and just as the mud of the Rhone is now being deposited at 
the upper end of the Lake of Geneva. I visited Krems, 
where the valley — greatly contracted above where the river 
passes through gneiss and other crystalline rocks — widens 
out into a great plain, and there I found, as Prof. Suess 
had before informed me, the loess heaped up in a cone 
around the expanding mouth of the gorge. A little below 
the town of Krems, on the left bank of the Danube, I got 
the following section ; — 
Section near Krems. 
2. Loess, with gravel and boulders at base and reconstrudted loess on top. 
3. Stratified sands and clays. 8. Old gravels, Miocene. A. Ravine 
showing pre-diluvial cliff. 
The low hills bounding the valley are all covered with 
loess, and sections are exposed showing a thickness of over 
