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Updated: June 17, 2025
It is very difficult to build roads in the loess of northern China; and the war-chariots that required roads had only just been introduced. Under such conditions, the simplest way of administering the empire was to establish garrisons of the invading tribes in the various parts of the country under the command of their chieftains. Thus separate regions of the country were distributed as fiefs.
The loess is generally devoid of fossils, although in many places they are abundant, consisting of land-shells, all of living species, and comprising no small part of the entire molluscous fauna now inhabiting the same region.
The table-land in that region, composed of Carboniferous and Devonian rocks, is about 450 feet high, and is not overspread with loess. A terrace of gravel covered with loess has been mentioned as existing on the right bank of the Meuse at Maestricht.
The slug, called Succinea, is not strictly aquatic, but lives in damp places, and may be seen in full activity far from rivers, in meadows where the grass is wet with rain or dew; but shells of the genera Limnaea, Planorbis, Paludina, Cyclas, and others, requiring to be constantly in the water, are extremely exceptional in the loess, occurring only at the bottom of the deposit where it begins to alternate with ancient river-gravel on which it usually reposes.
The fine waste of the Sahara has been identified in dredgings from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taken hundreds of miles from the coast of Africa. Loess mantles the recently uplifted mountains to the height of eight thousand feet and descends on the plains nearly to sea level.
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.
At length, whenever a re-elevation of the Alps at the time of the second extension of the glaciers took place, there would be renewed denudation and removal of such loess; and if, as some geologists believe, there has been more than one oscillation of level in the Alps since the commencement of the glacial period, the changes would be proportionally more complicated and terraces of gravel covered with loess might be formed at different heights and at different periods.
At their bases nestle mud-roofed cottages and Chinese inns, but farther up the river the low hills are all of loess brown, wind-blown dust, packed hard, which can be cut like cheese. Deserted though they seem from a distance, they really teem with human life.
I am the more inclined to embrace this view after having seen the junction of granite and loess on the steep slopes of some of the mountains bounding the great plain of the Rhine on its right bank in the Bergstrasse. Thus between Darmstadt and Heidelberg perpendicular sections are seen of loess 200 feet thick, at various heights above the river, some of them at elevations of 800 feet and upwards.
A theory, therefore, which attempts to account for the position of the loess cannot be satisfactory unless it be equally applicable to the basins of the Rhine and Danube.
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