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Updated: June 17, 2025
In part the loess seems to have been washed from glacial waste and spread in sluggish glacial waters, and in part to have been distributed by the wind from plains of aggrading glacial streams. In some regions the ancient valleys were completely filled with drift.
M. Ami Boue, well known by his numerous works on geology and a well-practised observer in every branch of the science, disinterred in the year 1823 with his own hands many bones of a human skeleton from ancient undisturbed loess at Lahr, nearly opposite Strasburg, on the right side of the great valley of the Rhine.
I have visited the localities referred to; but, before giving an account of them, it will be desirable to explain what is meant by the loess, a step the more necessary as a French geologist for whose knowledge and judgment I have great respect, tells me he has come to the conclusion that "the loess" is "a myth," having no real existence in a geological sense or as holding a definite place in the chronological series.
Although the loess, when traced from the valley of the Rhine into that of the Neckar, or into any other of its tributaries, often undergoes some slight alteration in its character, yet there is so much identity of composition as to suggest the idea that the mud of the main river passed far up the tributary valleys, just as that of the Mississippi during floods flows far up the Ohio, carrying its mud with it into the basin of that river.
Several perfect skeletons of the marmot have been disinterred from the loess of Aix-la-Chapelle. But much remains to be done in determining the species of mammalia of this formation and the relative altitudes above the valley-plain at which they occur. If we ascend the basin of the Neckar, we find that it is filled with loess of great thickness, far above its junction with the Rhine.
They placed the barrier of this imaginary lake in the narrow and picturesque gorge of the Rhine between Bingen and Coblenz: and when it was objected that the lateral valley of the Lahn, communicating with that gorge, had also been filled with loess, they were compelled to transfer the great dam farther down and to place it below Bonn.
We may therefore be sure that the valley bounded by steep hills of granite existed before the tranquil accumulation of this vast body of loess.
Even if the imbedded fossil shells of the loess had been lacustrine, instead of being, as we have seen, terrestrial and amphibious, the vast height and width of the required barrier would have been fatal to the theory of a lake: for the loess is met with in great force at an elevation of no less than 1600 feet above the sea, covering the Kaiserstuhl, a volcanic mountain which stands in the middle of the great valley of the Rhine, near Freiburg in Breisgau.
Instead of brick-walled houses we found dwellings made of clay like the "adobe" of Mexico and Arizona. Sometimes whole villages were dug into the hillside and the natives were cave dwellers, spending their lives within the earth. All north China is spread with loess.
These dirt-cliffs, or "loess," to give them their scientific name, are remarkable banks of brownish-yellow loam, found largely in Northern and Western China, and rising sometimes to a height of a thousand feet. Their peculiar yellow tinge makes every thing look "hwang" or yellow, and hence yellow is a favorite color among the Chinese.
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