The Antiquity of Man

by Sir Charles Lyell

(FIGURE 44. Succinea oblonga.)
(FIGURE 45. Pupa muscorum.)
(FIGURE 46. Helix hispida, Lin.; H. plebeia, Drap.)

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 three shells most frequently met with are those represented in the annexed figures (44, 45 and 46). 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.

This underlying gravel consists in the valley of the Rhine for the most part of pebbles and boulders of Alpine origin, showing that there was a time when the rivers had power to convey coarse materials for hundreds of miles northwards from Switzerland towards the sea; whereas at a later period an entire change was brought about in the physical geography of the same district, so that the same river deposited nothing but fine mud, which accumulated to a thickness of 800 feet or more above the original alluvial plain.

But although most of the fundamental gravel was derived from the Alps, there has been observed in the neighbourhood of the principal mountain chains bordering the great valley, such as the Black Forest, Vosges, and Odenwald, an admixture of detritus characteristic of those several chains. We cannot doubt therefore that as some of these mountains, especially the Vosges, had during the glacial period their own glaciers, a part of the fine mud of their moraines must have been mingled with loess of Alpine origin; although the principal mass of the latter must have come from Switzerland, and can in fact be traced continuously from Basle to Belgium.

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE LOESS.

It was stated in the last chapter that at the time of the greatest extension of the Swiss glaciers the Lake of Constance and all the other great lakes were filled with ice, so that gravel and mud could pass freely from the upper Alpine valley of the Rhine to the lower region between Basle and the sea, the great lake intercepting no part of the moraines whether fine or coarse. On the other hand the Aar with its great tributaries the Limmat and the Reuss does not join the Rhine till after it issues from the Lake of Constance; and by their channels a large part of the Alpine gravel and mud could always have passed without obstruction into the lower country, even after the ice of the great lake had melted.

It will give the reader some idea of the manner in which the Rhenish loess occurs, if he is told that some of the earlier scientific observers imagined it to have been formed in a vast lake which occupied the valley of the Rhine from Basle to Mayence, sending up arms or branches into what are now the valleys of the Main, Neckar, and other large rivers. 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. Strictly speaking it must be placed much farther north, or in the 51st parallel of latitude, where the limits of the loess have been traced out by MM. Omalius D'Halloy, Dumont, and others, running east and west by Cologne, Juliers, Louvain, Oudenarde, and Courtrai in Belgium to Cassel, near Dunkirk in France. This boundary line may not indicate the original seaward extent of the formation, as it may have stretched still farther north and its present abrupt termination may only show how far it was cut back at some former period by the denuding action of the sea.

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. The extent to which the valley has there been the receptacle of fine mud afterwards removed is most remarkable.

The loess of Belgium was called "Hesbayan mud" in the geological map of the late M. Dumont, who, I am told, recognised it as being in great part composed of Alpine mud. M. d'Archiac, when speaking of the loess, observes that it envelopes Hainault, Brabant, and Limburg like a mantle everywhere uniform and homogeneous in character, filling up the lower depressions of the Ardennes and passing thence into the north of France, though not crossing into England. In France, he adds, it is found on high plateaus 600 feet above some of the rivers, such as the Marne; but as we go southwards and eastwards of the basin of the Seine, it diminishes in quantity, and finally thins out in those directions.*

(* D'Archiac, "Histoire des Progres" volume 2 pages 169,
170.)