Valley Loess of Lansing, Kan. — Upham. 31 
This locality was visited by Prof. N. H. Winchell and myself, 
with others, August 9th. Six weeks later, September 20th, it 
was visited by Profs. W. H. Holmes, T. C. Chamberlin, R. D. 
Salisbury, and Samuel Calvin, with others; and a long- article 
by Chamberlin, with short statements from Calvin and Salis- 
bury, has been since published.* Extensive excavations were 
made there within the next month by Mr. Gerard Fowke, 
under the direction of Prof. Holmes, to obtain additional ob- 
servations of the characters of the deposits overlying the skel- 
eton. The result of this investigation is regarded by Cham- 
berlin, Calvin, and Salisbury, as adverse to the conclusions 
before announced by Winchell and the present writer, which 
referred the fossil man of Lansing to the lowan stage of 
the Glacial period. Instead, they consider him to be of much 
less antiquity, the 'overlying 20 feet of silt being thought to 
be Postglacial alluvium from the drainage area of a little trib- 
utary ravine which there joins the great Missouri valley. 
Against this view I see two decisive objections, which 
seem to me sufficient to necessitate the reference of the Lansing 
man to the loess-forming Towan stage of glaciation. . First, 
the overlying silt, regarded by Winchell and myself as loess, 
is predominantly calcareous in nearly the same degree as av- 
erage loess, though it has some scanty portions that have very 
little calcareous matter or none; whereas if it were a Postgla- 
cial deposit, whether by the Missouri river or the adjoining 
ravine, or by both together, its material, derived from the 
weathered and leached superficial part of the loess, from the 
old Kansan drift thinly spread in that region, and from the 
weathered Carboniferous strata, would be mostly destitute of 
its calcareous ingredient. But the proximity of the ravine, 
of the Kansan drift, and of the Carboniferous limestone and 
shale beds, gives an ample explanation of the scanty inter- 
mingling of materials of local derivation with the otherwise 
typical loess. While the old floodpain of the lowan time was 
being deposited at the horizon of the Lansing skeleton and for 
the next twenty feet upward, exceptionally heavy local rains, 
and the snow melting in spring, would sometimes carry down 
an alluvial deposit of silt from the ravine, or pebbles and larger 
* Journal of Oeoloffv. vo). x, pp. 745-779, with 1 3 illustrations in tlie text 
Oct. -Nov., 1902 (issued'about Dec. 5). 
