The Banks of the Yang-tse at Hankow

Abstract

AT the end of January, 1878, when the waters of the Yang-tse occupied their lowest level, I had the opportunity of examining the left bank of the river immediately below the foreign settlement. The bank, which varied from thirty to thirty-five feet in height, did not present a single perpendicular face, but was cut up into two or more terraces formed by the lingering of the waters at those levels for some extent of time. A calcareous loam, homogeneous in appearance and dark in colour, composed the entire bank with the exception of the upper portion, where a layer of sand a few inches in thickness separated two layers of laminated loam, each of them of similar thickness. After a little trouble I was enabled to observe that the apparently homogeneous loam was made up of fine horizontal layers varying from one-thirtieth to one-tenth of an inch in thickness; but the lamination was often concealed; and it was only where the loam had been freshly broken away that the layers were sufficiently distinct to be counted. Shells were embedded in the loam, but mostly in the lower half of the bank; those of the genus “Paludina” were the most abundant, whilst bivalves of the genus “Corbicula” occurred, but not in any numbers. The upper three feet of the river-bank were riddled with the burrows of annelids, and these burrows were often filled with little rounded masses of loam, evidently the excrementitious droppings of the worms.