356 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 
at which the Ganges now emerges from the hills. ‘Then followed the folding 
movements that culminated in the present Himalayan range, the elevation 
developing first on the Bengal side, and extending rapidly to the north-west 
until the folds extended in a great arc for some 1,400 miles from south-east to 
north-west. 
New streams developed on the southern face of the now rising mass, and 
although the arm of the sea that existed in early Tertiary times became choked 
with silt, the process of subsidence continued, and the gradually subsiding 
depression at the foot of the hills as fast as it developed became filled with 
silt, sand, gravel, and boulders in increasing quantities as the hills became 
mountains and the range finally reached its present dimensions, surpassing in 
size all other features of the kind on the face of the globe. 
Now, it is important to remember that for ages before the great outburst of 
Deccan Trap occurred there was a continual unloading of Gondwanaland, and 
a continual consequent overloading of the ocean bed immediately to the north; 
that this process went on with a gradual rise on one side and a gradual depres- 
sion on the other; and that somewhere near and parallel to the boundary line 
the crust must have been undergoing stresses which resulted in strain, and, as 
I suggest, the development of those fissures that let loose the floods of Deccan 
Trap and brought to an end the delicate isostatic balance. 
During the secular subsidence of the northern shore line of Gondwanaland, 
accompanied by the slow accumulation of sediment near the shore and the 
gradual filing away of the land above sea-level, there must have been a gradual 
creep of the crust in a northerly direction. Near the west end of the Himalayan 
arc this movement would be towards the north-west for a part of the time; 
at the east end the creep would be towards the north-north-east and north-east. 
Thus there would be a tendency from well back in Paleozoic times up to the 
end of the Cretaceous period for normal faults—faults of tension—to develop 
on the land, with a trend varying from W.S.W.-E.N.E. to W.N.W.-E.S.E. 
across the northern part of Gondwanaland. We know nothing of the evidence 
now pigeon-holed below the great mantle of Gangetic alluvium, while the 
records of the Himalayan region have been masked or destroyed by later fold- 
ings. But in the stratified rocks lying just south of the southern margin of the 
great alluvial belt we find a common tendency for faults to strike in this way 
across the present Peninsula of India. These faults have, for instance, marked 
out the great belt of coalfields stretching for some 200 miles from east to west 
in the Damuda valley. On this, the east side of India, the fractures of tension 
have a general trend of W.N.W.-E.S.E. We know that these faults are later 
than the Permian period, but some of them certainly were not much later. 
If now we go westwards across the Central Provinces and Central India and 
into the eastern part of the Bombay Presidency, we find records of this kind 
still more strikingly preserved; for where the Gondwana rocks, ranging from 
Permo-Carboniferous to Liassic in age, rest on the much older Vindhyan series, 
we find three main series of these faults. One series was developed before 
Permo-Carboniferous times; another traverses the lower Gondwanas, which 
range up to about the end of Permian times; while the third set affects the 
younger and Upper Gondwanas of about Rhetic or Liassic age. Although 
the present topography of the country follows closely the outlines of the geo- 
logical formations, it is clear fromthe work of the Geological Survey of India 
that these outlines were determined in Mesozoic times, and that the movements 
which formed the latest series of faults were but continuations of those which 
manifested themselves in Paleozoic times. According to Mr. J. G. Medlicott 
the field data showed ‘that a tendency to yield in general east and west or 
more clearly north-east and south-west lines existed in this great area from the 
remote period of the Vindhyan fault.’7* The author of the memoir and map 
on this area was certainly not suspicious of the ideas of which I am now un- 
burdening my mind; on the contrary, he attempted and, with apologies, failed 
to reconcile his facts to views then being pushed by the weight of ‘authority ’ 
in Europe. This was not the last time that facts established in India were 
found (to use a field-geologist’s term) unconformably to lie on a basement of 
** Mem. Geol. Surv. Ind., vol. ii, 1860, part 2, p. 256. 
