Fakoner and /i is Labours in India 331 



the Ganges they are about eight miles in horizontal breadth, and 

 they there attain their greatest height of 2000 feet above the plains 

 at their base, or 3000 feet above the sea. 



"They rise at once against the plains with an abrupt mural front ; they are 

 serrated across their direction, forming a succession of scarcely parallel ridges, 

 with a steep face on one side and a slope on the other. The strata are inclined 

 at an angle of from 25° to 30°, they are of recent tertiary or alluvial formation, 

 and consists of friable sandstone or gravelly conglomerate, agglutinated by a 

 calcareous cement containing subordinate beds of clay. The upper strata are 

 entirely gravel. Beyond these plains lies the valley of Deyra, 1200 or 1400 

 feet above the sea, and then the great chain of the Himmalayahs." — (Vol. i., p. 19.) 



Hitherto they had been considered by Captain Herbert to be 

 of the same age as the New Red Sandstone. The discovery of 

 beds of lignite and dicotyledonous wood by Lieutenant Cautley, 

 coupled with the mineralogical characters of the strata, led Dr 

 Falconer to infer that they belonged to the miocene group of 

 rocks, and that they are closely analogous to the molasse of 

 Switzerland. 



We shall do well if we sift the ground for this conclusion, 

 which has been accepted by the whole of the scientific world 

 without question. One reason which he assigns is altogether 

 inscrutable ; because there is broken gravel on the northern 

 flanks of the Siwalik hills, therefore they are of miocene age, 

 which is equivalent to saying that because the gravel, on which 

 London stands, rests on the London clay, therefore the latter 

 belongs to the oxfordian zone. Nor, indeed, are the other two 

 reasons of much greater weight. Lignites and fossil woods are 

 not confined to the molasse of Switzerland, but are to be found in 

 nearly all the older rocks dating back from the pliocene of 

 Auvergne. The mineral character is of little or no value in the 

 correlation of widely remote areas of deposit. All arenaceous 

 rocks are more or less alike, the only difference between the older 

 and the newer being the greater consolidation of the former, re- 

 sulting from the pressure of a heavier mass of superincumbent 

 rock. While a river is depositing in one place gravel, it forms a 

 sand-bank in another, and is carrying out fine sediment to sea to 

 compose beds of clay. There seems, therefore, to us no solid 

 reason to be deduced from the mineralogical character or fossil 

 botany of the Siwalik hills that they correspond geologically with 

 the miocenes of Europe. Nor, indeed, is this latter view corro- 

 borated by the subsequent discovery of a large fossil fauna. 



Captain Cautley in 1827 had made a collection of bones from 



