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Updated: June 17, 2025
Such monuments of a cold climate in latitudes so far south as Syria and the north of Sicily, between 33 and 38 degrees north, may be confidently referred to an early part of the glacial period, or to times long anterior to those of Man and the extinct mammalia of Abbeville and Amiens. Nature, Origin, and Age of the Loess of the Rhine and Danube.
Below the loess of Canstadt, in which bones of the mammoth are so abundant, is a bed of gravel evidently an old river channel now many feet above the level of the Neckar, the valley having there been excavated to some depth below its ancient channel so as to lie in the underlying red sandstone of Keuper.
Professor Hull, in a recent paper on the subject, states the fact of the plains of Hungary being "overspread by sands, gravels, and a kind of mud called loess, or by alluvial deposits underlaid by fresh-water limestones, which may be considered as having been formed beneath an inland lake, during different periods of repletion or partial exhaustion, dating downwards from the Miocene period."
To what depth the mud extends is not known, but it resembles the loess in being generally devoid of stratification, and of shells, though containing occasionally land shells in abundance, as well as calcareous concretions, called kunkur, which may be compared to the nodules of carbonate of lime sometimes observed to form layers in the Rhenish loess. I am told by Colonel Strachey and Dr.
"What I object to is her wasting time on this stuff, of which nobody will ever be able to read a word if she fiddles around with those lists till there's another hundred feet of loess on this city, when there's so much real work to be done and we're as shorthanded as we are." That was the first time that had come out in just so many words.
In Europe, where they have best been studied, human relics occur chiefly in peat bogs, in loess, in caverns where man made his home, and in high river terraces sometimes eighty and a hundred feet above the present flood plains of the streams.
At Canstadt near Stuttgart, loess resembling that of the Rhine contains many fossil bones, especially those of Elephas primigenius, together with some of Rhinoceros tichorhinus, the species having been lately determined by Dr. Falconer. At this place the loess is covered by a thick bed of travertine, used as a building stone, the product of a mineral spring.
Between the loess and the mould there was a layer from 3 to 6 inches in thickness, consisting of "cores, implements, flakes, and chips, all manufactured from hard basaltic rock." It is therefore probable that the aborigines, at some former period, had left these objects on the surface, and that they had afterwards been slowly covered up by the castings of worms.
We have evidence in the loess of the Rhine of considerable changes of level in the land within a very recent geological period, and when the surface was peopled by existing land and fresh-water shells.
In these instances it does not appear to me that the volcanoes were in eruption during the time of the deposition of the loess, as some geologists have supposed. The interstratification of loam and volcanic ejectamenta was probably occasioned by the fluviatile mud having gradually enveloped the cones of loose scoriae after they were completely formed.
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