It Has No
Stratification, But Tends To Cleave Vertically, And Is Traversed In Every
Direction By Sudden Crevices, Almost Glacier-Like, Narrow, With Vertical
Walls Of Great Depth, And Infinite Ramification.
Smooth as the loess basin
looks in a bird's-eye view, it is thus one of the most impracticable
countries conceivable for military movements, and secures extraordinary
value to fortresses in well-chosen sites, such as that of Tung-kwan
mentioned in Note 2 to chap.
Xli.
Agriculture may be said in N. China to be confined to the alluvial plains
and the loess; as in S. China to the alluvial plains and the terraced
hill-sides. The loess has some peculiar quality which renders its productive
power self-renewing without manure (unless it be in the form of a surface
coat of fresh loess), and unfailing in returns if there be sufficient rain.
This singular formation is supposed by Baron Richthofen, who has studied it
more extensively than any one, to be no subaqueous deposit, but to be the
accumulated residue of countless generations of herbaceous plants combined
with a large amount of material spread over the face of the ground by the
winds and surface waters.
[I do not agree with the theory of Baron von Richthofen, of the almost
exclusive Eolian formation of loess; water has something to do with it as
well as wind, and I think it is more exact to say that loess in China is
due to a double action, Neptunian as well as Eolian.
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