Geological researches in China, Mongolia, and Japan, during the years 1862-1865.

108 GEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES IN
South of Yokohama the ridge of the peninsula of Sagami also furnishes fragments of serpentine. The western side of the peninsula, as well as the island of
Enosima, are of a firm, fine-grained gray sandstone and conglomerate, in apparently
horizontal strata.
Previous to the elevation of the recent beds, the peninsula of Sagami, and probably
also the highland east of the Bay of Yedo, were islands.
The existence of these recent marine terraces along the Japanese coast, from
Yesso to Kiusiu, and of similar deposits on the China coast, as at Chifu and along the
western edge of the great delta plain, point to widely extended changes, in recent
times, in the relative position of land and water. A careful study of their characters, as regards the organisms they contain-a study that should include the recent
deposits of the Amur system,l and perhaps also those of the Manchurian riverswould probably throw much light on the age of the Gobi desert deposits, and
through this on some of the most important questions of quaternary and younger
tertiary geology.
1 M. Schmidt observed, almost everywhere on the Amur, between Strelka and Blahowestschensk,
terraces of fresh-water tertiary rising nearly 200 feet above the river.-Peterman's Mittheilungen,
1861, p. 315.