THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS XXix 
These hills have, however, in the last few years, attained great celebrity, from their containing one of 
the most extensive deposits of Fossil remains, which has any where been discovered, and which have been 
made public by several officers of the Bengal Army, whom I am proud to call my friends: as Dr. Fal- 
coner, my successor at Saharunpore ; Capt. Cautley, Superintendent of the Doab Canal; Lieuts. Baker 
and Durand, of the Bengal Engineers, in a series of excellent Papers in the Researches and Journal of 
the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, and in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London. To the 
two former, this Society, the fountain of Geological honours, awarded two Wollaston Medals, in Feb. 
1837, for their discoveries in Fossil Zoology, especially as displayed in their description of the Sivathe- 
rium giganteum, a huge Ruminant, which, they conceive, serves to fill up the blank which has always 
intervened between Ruminant and Pachydermatous quadrupeds, for it combines the teeth and horns of 
the former with the lip, face, and probably proboscis, of the latter. Lieuts. Baker and Durand are 
entitled to hardly less credit, for their Papers on the Fossil Horse, Hyzena, Bear, &c., and for having 
had the skill to detect, and for being the first to have the boldness to publish, in their Paper in the 
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta for November 1836, the discovery of Fossil Quadrumana. This 
was two months previous to the presentation, on the 16th January 1837, to the Academy of Sciences at 
Paris, of a Memoir, by M. Lartet, respecting the discovery of the lower jaw of an ape, in the tertiary 
fresh water formation of Simorre, Sansan, &c. in the department of Gers, in the south of France, and 
at the foot of the Pyrenees, and which in its genera so closely resembles that of the fossil Sewalik 
Hills, found, it is curious, in the district of Sirmore. These dates are adduced, because Dr. Buck- 
land, in the Supplementary Notes to his Bridgewater Treatise, has announced M. Lartet as the first dis- 
coverer of Fossil Quadrumana. It is highly creditable to the Bengal Army that the only four officers 
in that part of the country should each and all have so highly distinguished themselves, in a science 
foreign to the pursuits upon which they are employed by the Indian Government, but which they have 
treated so as to merit the applause even of those who have made Fossil Zoology the business of their 
lives, v. Mr. Lyell’s Address to the Geological Society in 1837. 
The discovery of Fossils in the Sewaliks is recent, and its history easily traced; but it is difficult to 
ascertain who first discovered them in any part of the Himalayas. The Gunduck has long been known 
to bring down Fossil Ammonites, which are called Saligrammi, and are much esteemed by the Hindoos. 
The Fossils represented in the upper part of Plate 3, from the elevated Jand on the N.E. of the line of 
Snowy peaks, have also been long known in India by the name of Bijli ke har, or Lightning Bones, 
being employed by the natives in medicine. Capt. Webb and Mr. Traill were probably the first to bring 
them to the notice of the public ; the specimens figured are from the collection of the Geological Society, 
having been presented by Mr. Colebrooke, to whom they had been sent by those gentlemen. The fossil 
shells figured in the lower part of the same Plate, are due to the researches of the late Dr. Gerard, who, 
I believe, first discovered them in the elevated valley of the Spiti, N.W. of Kunawur, though the date 
when, is not well ascertained ; several, however, were figured at Calcutta in the Gleanings of Science for 
September 1831, where Capt. Herbert’s paper on the Geology and Fossils of the Himalayas is published. 
_ These fossils are all from the northern face, beyond what may be considered the true Himalayas. 
Nothing had then been discovered on the southern aspect of the mountains, with the exception of some 
at Caribari, in the small state of Cooch Behar, on the banks of the Brahmaputra, which were noticed by 
Mr. Colebrooke, in his account of the Geology of the N.E. border of Bengal. But this point was so 
remote from the parts of the Himalayas usually visited, that it was long before it was discovered that 
they formed a true clue to the nature of the formations at the base of these mountains. The Author 
also, in December 1831, discovered some fossil fragments on the banks of the Jumna, which, though at 
first doubted, were afterwards proved to be such by chemical analysis, v.J.A.S., p. 457. Abundance of 
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