551.79 197 
Vv 
The Facetted Pebbles of India 
T is now nearly forty years since the first account (1) of evidence 
of ice action in Palaeozoic times and within the tropics was pub- 
lished, and though the concept of a Permian glacial period is now one 
of the accepted results of geological research, the opposition to its 
acceptance is by no means dead. Some ten years ago this opposi- 
tion received an access of strength by the arrival and exhibition in 
England of certain peculiar fragments of rock, first discovered by Dr 
Warth (2) in the Permian boulder beds of the Salt Range, which 
did not merely show a striation like that produced by glaciers, but 
bore several surfaces or facets which met in obtuse angles, and some- 
times completely surrounded the stone. A number of these were 
sent home, unaccompanied by stones of other types, and an idea 
seems, perhaps not unnaturally, to have sprung up that these were 
the normal type of boulder, and not, as was the case, curiosities 
which were strange to geologists in India, and sent by them to their 
colleagues in Europe, with a view to enlightenment as to the mode 
of origin of a feature with which they were not acquainted as a 
result of ice action. 
Specimens were exhibited at the Geological Society (3), the 
British Association (4), and elsewhere, and the general opinion may 
be expressed in the words of a letter by Dr W. T. Blanford to the 
Geological Magazine (5), that “ the great difficulty in accounting for 
the origin of these facetted blocks is that whilst the smoothed sur- 
faces are in every respect similar to those on stones worn by glacial 
action, no fragments from moraines, from boulder-clay, or from other 
glacial deposits, are known to exhibit the peculiar facetting charac- 
teristic of the present specimens.” 
Such was the general opinion held by most, if not all, of. those 
who saw the specimens, and in the museum at Zurich one of these 
very facetted stones may be seen, with an endorsement on the label, 
by Professor Heim, to the effect that he had seen nothing like it in 
recent glacial deposits. 
In these circumstances, the facetted stones being supposed to be 
the evidence on which was based the claim for a glacial origin of 
the beds in which they were found, it was natural that the opposi- 
tion to the claim should be strengthened. In reality, however, the 
