110 CORRELATION OF THE MATSAP SERIES 



Matsap rocks do not give rise to white and black sandy 

 soils like those of the southern ranges, but yellow or 

 reddish soil lies between the stones. The Matsap beds 

 weather into large and small rounded fragments, but 

 they do not yield so unequally as the Table Mountain 

 sandstones and quartzites, hence the strangely shaped 

 crags and cliffs met with in the mountains made of the 

 latter beds are not found in the northern ranges. 



The Matsap series is supposed to belong to the Water- 

 berg system of the Transvaal, but up to the present 

 time the rocks in the two areas have not been connected 

 by mapping. There is a general resemblance between 

 the Matsap and Waterberg rocks, for they are both 

 arenaceous formations, and both are intermediate in age 

 between the Griqua Town (Pretoria) beds and the Dwyka. 



The Matsap series has been correlated with the Table 

 Mountain series ; the reasons for that correlation are 

 the arenaceous character of both groups, the fact that 

 both are older than the Dwyka, and a desire to simplify 

 the table of South African formations. The correlation 

 is difficult to accept, in spite of its convenience, because 

 the structure of the two areas is so different ; in the 

 south there is a conformable succession from the Cape 

 into the Karroo system, and the farther north one 

 follows the succession, i.e., towards the country where 

 mountain building of the southern period did not extend, 

 the two formations become less and less disturbed while 

 the Cape system gradually disappears owing to denuda- 

 tion in Dwyka and Pre-Dwyka times ; in the north, on 

 the contrary, although the Dwyka is as little disturbed 

 as it is in Calvinia, where it lies on the nearly horizontal 



