1 877.] The Loess of the Rhine and the Danube . 73 
60 feet without its base being seen. Many bones of the 
mammoth have been found in it, and it is related that when 
in the thirty years’ war the Swedes were besieging Krems 
they found in one of their trenches the skeleton of a mon- 
strous animal, and that besiegers and besieged ceased from 
their warfare for a time to gaze on the huge teeth of the 
giant that had been dug up.* Some bones were shown to 
me at the Imperial Museum, by Prof. Fuchs, which bore 
cuts and indentations apparently produced by a cutting in- 
strument, and which are supposed to have been made by 
man. There is no reason to question this inference, as a few 
palseolithic implements have also been found ; and that 
man was a contemporary of the mammoth is now fully 
established. 
In ascending one of the many roads leading up the vine- 
covered slopes I found deep sections of the loess exposed, 
and it often rises like a wall on each side to a height of from 
20 to 40 feet. The roads appear to have been purposely cut 
down deep, to allow not only wine-cellars but dwelling-houses 
to be excavated in them. The loess at Krems is compact, 
and almost like chalk in its homogeneous consistency, with- 
out the joints and fissures of the latter. It contains patches 
and seams of gravel, and pebbles of quartz are irregularly 
scattered throughout it. It is unstratified, but occasionally 
lines of division are seen separating portions of slightly dif- 
ferent colour and composition. At its base I saw much 
gravel, and some boulders resting on the denuded top of 
stratified sands and clays. At one point I found that it had 
been banked up against a pre-diluvial precipice, as shown at 
A in Fig. 3. 
In some parts patches of miocene gravels lie below the 
stratified sands or clays, and in these the remains of Mastodon 
longirostris have been found. Prof. Suess informed me that 
he had determined that these gravels were heaped up in 
Miocene times in the same parts of the valley where in the 
Quaternary times the loess was most thickly deposited, and 
he thinks that at that early period the valley had assumed 
in a great measure its present configuration. 
The loess is by no means confined to the valleys of the 
great rivers and their tributaries. Sir Charles Lyellfi and 
Mr. Godwin- Austen | both follow the Belgian geologists in 
identifying it with the “Limon de Hisbaya, ’’which covers much 
* I am indebted to Prof. Edward Suess for this anecdote. 
f Antiquity of Man, p. 329. 
I Quarterly Journ. Geol. Soc., vol. xxii., p, 251. 
