PREFACE. XIII 
season a British expedition under Colonel C. E. Manifold and a German 
one under Lieutenant Filchner were engaged in exploration in southern 
Shen-si, and to avoid duplicating their observations we took our way further 
to the west than we had intended. We crossed the Ts’in-ling-shan from 
Chéu-chi-hién to Shi-ts’tian-hién, a distance of 100 miles, by a route not 
previously traveled by any foreigner, and from 30 to 50 miles east of von 
Richthofen’s. From Shi-ts’tian-hién we proposed to continue southward 
to Wan-hién on the Yang-tzi, but were advised to avoid the particular 
mountainous district which lay between, as the famine which then pre- 
vailed in parts of southern Shen-si was especially severe in the remote 
and inaccessible districts through which the by-paths led. We therefore 
went by boat a hundred miles down the Han river to Hing-an-fu, whence 
we took a more commonly traveled path for 175 miles across the moun- 
tains, via P’ing-li-hién, to Wu-shan-hién at the head of the Yang-tzi gorges. 
In so doing we unintentionally struck a route surveyed but a few weeks 
before by Colonel Manifold and his associates. 
Having been delayed at Si-an-fu by continuous rain, we did not start 
across the T’s’in-ling-shan until the 21st of April. Shi-ts’tian-hién was 
reached May 10, and Hing-an-fu May 14. We left Hing-an-fu on the 
17th and arrived at Wu-shan-hién June 6. Thence it was three days’ trip 
by boat to I-chang, where the journey of investigation came to an end. 
The geographical and geological observations of the expedition are 
embodied in this volume, which is divided into two parts. Part I 
contains the statement of detailed facts arranged according to regions and 
subordinately according to geological periods. Part II comprises sys- 
tematic petrography and zoological notes by Mr. Blackwelder and a 
syllabary of Chinese sounds by Professor Hirth. 
In a second volume I propose to summarize the detailed presentation 
of our results and to combine them with the work of others in a systematic 
discussion of the geology of southeastern Asia. ‘The fossils which were 
collected have been studied by Dr. Charles D. Walcott, Professor Stuart 
Weller, and Dr. George H. Girty, and are described and discussed by them 
in Volume III, which is devoted to Paleontology. The atlas contains Mr. 
Sargent’s contribution and also the geologic maps. 
This first volume is the joint work of my associates, Eliot Blackwelder, 
R. Harvey Sargent, and myself. Each chapter is credited to the one 
who, in accordance with the plan agreed upon, wrote on that particular 
subject, but no chapter is exclusively the independent work of any one 
of us. Mr. Blackwelder is chiefly responsible for stratigraphic details, 
and Chapter XVI, on petrography, is peculiarly his own work. The 
chapter on topographic methods is more particularly Mr. Sargent’s con- 
tribution. Iam responsible for the chapters on the loess and physiography. 
But, in preparing those on geology, Mr. Blackwelder and I have mutually 
