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 decorated with frescoes by the Piazza family, natives of the town, and four large altar-pieces by Calisto Piazza (died after 1561). There is a fine organ of 1507. The 13th-century Gothic church of San Francesco, restored in 1889, with 14th-century paintings, is also noticeable. The Palazzo Modegnani has a fine gateway in the style of Bramante, and the hospital a cloistered quadrangle. In the Via Pompeia is an early Renaissance house with fine decorations in marble and terra-cotta. Besides an extensive trade in cheese (Lodi producing more Parmesan than Parma itself) and other dairy produce, there are manufactures of linen, silk, majolica and chemicals.

The ancient Laus Pompeia lay 3 m. W. of the present city, and the site is still occupied by a considerable village, Lodi Vecchio, with the old cathedral of S. Bassiano, now a brick building, which contains 15th-century frescoes. It was the point where the roads from Mediolanum to Placentia and Cremona diverged, and there was also a road to Ticinum turning off from the former, but it is hardly mentioned by classical writers. It appears to have been a municipium. No ruins exist above ground, but various antiquities have been found here. From which Pompeius, whether Cn. Pompeius Strabo, who gave citizenship to the Transpadani, or his son, the more famous Pompey, it took its name is not certain. In the middle ages Lodi was second to Milan among the cities of northern Italy. A dispute with the archbishop of Milan about the investiture of the bishop of Lodi (1024) proved the beginning of a protracted feud between the two cities. In 1111 the Milanese laid the whole place in ruins and forbade their rivals to restore what they had destroyed, and in 1158, when in spite of this prohibition a fairly flourishing settlement had again been formed, they repeated their work in a more thorough manner. A number of the Lodigians had settled on Colle Eghezzone; and their village, the Borgo d’Isella, on the site of a temple of Hercules, soon grew up under the patronage of Frederick Barbarossa into a new city of Lodi (1162). At first subservient to the emperor, Lodi was before long compelled to enter the Lombard League, and in 1198 it formed alliance offensive and defensive with Milan. The strife between the Sommariva or aristocratic party and the Overgnaghi or democratic party was so severe that the city divided into two distinct communes. The Overgnaghi, expelled in 1236, were restored by Frederick II. who took the city after three months’ siege. Lodi was actively concerned in the rest of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggle. In 1416 its ruler, Giovanni Vignati, was treacherously taken prisoner by Filippo Maria Visconti, and after that time it became dependent on Milan. The duke of Brunswick captured it in 1625, in the interests of Spain; and it was occupied by the French (1701), by the Austrians (1706), by the king of Sardinia (1733), by the Austrians (1736), by the Spaniards (1745), and again by the Austrians (1746). On the 10th of May 1796 was fought the battle of Lodi between the Austrians and Napoleon, which made the latter master of Lombardy.  LODZ (Lódż; more correctly Lodzia), a town of Russian Poland, in the government of Piotrków, 82 m. by rail S.W. of Warsaw. It is situated on the Lodz plateau, which at the beginning of the 19th century was covered with impenetrable forests. Now it is the centre of a group of industrial towns—Zgerź, Le̮czyca, Pabianice, Konstantinov and Aleksandrov. Chiefly owing to a considerable immigration of German capitalists and workers, Lodz has grown with American-like rapidity. It consists principally of one main street, 7 m. long, and is a sort of Polish Manchester, manufacturing cottons, woollens and mixed stuffs, with chemicals, beer, machinery and silk. One of the very few educational institutions is a professional industrial school. The population, which was only 50,000 in 1872, reached 351,570 in 1900; the Poles numbering about 37%, Germans 40% and Jews 22%.  LOESS (Ger. Löss), in geology, a variety of loam. Typical loess is a soft, porous rock, pale yellowish or buff in colour; one characteristic property is its capacity to retain vertical, or even over-hanging, walls in the banks of streams. These vertical walls have been well described by von Richthofen (Führer für Forschungsreisende, Berlin, 1886) in China, where they stand in some places 500 ft. high and contain innumerable cave dwellings; ancient roads too have worn their way vertically downwards deep into the deposit, forming trench-like ways. This character in the loess of the Mississippi region gave rise to the name “Bluff formation.” A coarse columnar structure is often exhibited on the vertical weathered faces of the rock. Another characteristic is the presence throughout the rock of small capillary tubules, which appear to have been occupied by rootlets; these are often lined with calcite. Typical loess is usually calcareous; some geologists regard this as an essential property, and when the rock has become decalcified, as it frequently is on the surface by weathering, they call it “loess-loam” (lösslehm). In the lower portions of a loess deposit the calcium carbonate tends to form concretions, which on account of their mimetic forms have received such names as lösskindchen, lösspuppen, poupées du loess, “loess dolls.” In deposits of this nature in South America these concretionary masses form distinct beds. Bedding is absent from typical loess. The mineral composition of loess varies somewhat in different regions, but the particles are always small; they consist of angular grains of quartz, fine particles of hydrated silicates of alumina, mica scales and undecomposed fragments of felspar, hornblende and other rock-forming silicates.

In Europe and America loess deposits are associated with the margins of the great ice sheets of the glacial period; thus in Europe they stretch irregularly through the centre eastwards from the north-west of France, and are not found north of the 57th parallel. In both regions loess deposits are found within and upon glacial deposits. For this reason the loess is very commonly assigned to the Pleistocene period; but some of the loess deposits of northern Europe have been in process of formation intermittently from the Miocene period onward, and in South America the great loess formations known as the Pampean or Patagonian belong to the Eocene, Oligocene and Pleistocene periods. Most geologists are agreed that the loess is an aeolian or wind-borne rock, formed most probably during periods of tundra or steppe conditions. The capillary tubules are supposed to have been caused by the roots of grass and herbage which kept growing upon the surface even while the deposit was slowly increasing. Others contend that loess is of the nature of alluvial loam; this may be true of certain deposits classed as loess, but it cannot be true of most of the typical loess formations, for they lie upon older rocks quite independently of altitude, from near sea level up to 5000 ft. in Europe and to 11,500 ft. in China; they are often developed on one side of a mountain range and not upon the other, and in a series of approximately parallel valleys the loess is frequently found lying upon one side and that the same in each case, facts pointing to the agency of prevalent winds.

The thickness of loess deposits is usually not more than 33 ft., but in China it reaches 1000 ft. or more; it also attains a great thickness in South America. Numerous proboscidian and other mammalian fossils have been found in the loess of Europe; the tapir, mastodon and giant sloths occur in South America, but the most common fossils are small land shells and such amphibious pond forms as Succinea. Certain loess deposits in Turkestan have been attributed to rain-wash, this is the so-called “lake-loess” (see-löss); according to Tukowski the difference between sub-aerial and lake loess is that the former is porous, dry and pervious, while the latter is laminated, plastic and impervious. Two types of loess have been recognized in Russia, the Hill- or Terrace-loess and the Low-level-loess, a product of the weathering of underlying rocks. In South Germany the following order has been recognized: (1) an upper unbedded, non-calcareous loess, (2) the gehanglöss, mixed with subsoil rocks, and (3) the sand or thal-löss, with some gravel. The effect of vegetation on the upper layers of loess is to produce soils of great fertility, such as the black earth (Tschernozom) of southern Russia, the dark Bordelöss of the Magdeburg district, and the black “cotton soil” (regur) of the Deccan.

 LOFFT, CAPEL (1751–1824), English miscellaneous writer, was born in London on the 14th of November 1751. He was educated at Eton, and Peterhouse, Cambridge, which he left to become a member of Lincoln’s Inn. He was called to the bar in 1775, and left by his father’s and uncle’s deaths with a handsome property and the family estates. He was a prolific writer on a variety of topics, and a vigorous contentious advocate of parliamentary and other reforms, and carried on a voluminous correspondence with all the literary men of his time. He became the patron of Robert Bloomfield, the author of The Farmer’s Boy, and secured for him the very successful publication of that work. Byron, in a note to his English Bards and