228 Re-ports & Proceedings — Geological Society of London. 



the geological formations of Southern Indin, which consist very 

 largely of a highly folded and foliated complex of Archaean gneisses 

 and schists, followed by some considerable patches of pre-Cambrian 

 slates, limestones, and quartzites ; with these are associated basic 

 lava-flows and ferruginous jaspers. The remaining formations 

 consist of remnants of the Gondwana Beds (Coal-measures of Permo- 

 Carboniferous age), a few patches of Cretaceous rocks, some Tertiary 

 and Pleistocene deposits, and recent sands and alluvium, all situated 

 along the coastal margins of the Peninsula. He contrasted the 

 scanty post-Arclisean record of Southern India, the apparent non- 

 submergence of the greater portion of the area, and its freedom from 

 great earth-movements since Archaean times, with the widely 

 extended formations of Northern India, which recorded oft-repeated 

 movements of depression and elevation, culminating in the rise of 

 the Himalaya in Tertiary times and accompanied by igneous activity 

 on a gigantic scale, as proved by the outpourings of the Deccan Trap. 



In discussing the Archaean complex, the Lecturer traced the 

 history of the various views which have been held. Newbold (1850) 

 regarded the complex as formed of Protogene schists and gneisses 

 intruded into by granites. Bruce Foote (1880) separated the schists 

 (to which he gave the name " Dharwar System ") from the gneisses, 

 and regarded them as laid down unconformably upon the gneisses 

 and granites which, for many years thereafter, were embraced in the 

 term " Fundamental Gneissic Complex ". He regarded the Dharwar 

 System as transition-rocks between the old gneisses and the older 

 Palajozoic rocks (Cuddapa, etc.). Holland (1898) differentiated the 

 Charnockites, showing that they formed a distinct petrographical 

 province with intrusive relations to the main members of the 

 gneissic complex, and in 1906 he proposed to regard the Cuddapa 

 System as pre-Cambrian, and separated by a great Eparchaean 

 Interval from the Dharwar System, which, together with the gneissic 

 complex, he classed as Archaean. In 1913 Holland added a group 

 of post-Dharwar eruptive rocks, and produced a classification of the 

 pre-Cambrian rocks of India which exhibits a remarkable parallelism 

 with that given by Lawson (1913) for the pre-Cambrian of Canada. 



The work of the Mysore Geological Survey from 1899 to 1914 had 

 gradually eliminated the Fundamental Gneissic Complex, and shown 

 that within the area of the Mysore State — representing some 29,000 

 square miles of the Archaean complex — the oldest rocks were the 

 Dharwar System, which had been intruded into by at least four 

 successive granite-gneisses, namely: the Champion Gneiss, the 

 Peninsular Gneiss (forming the greater part of the area), the 

 Charnockites, and the Ciosepet Granite Series. If we compared 

 this succession with Holland's 1913 classification, without assuming 

 any real correlation with the Canadian rocks, but viewing the 

 Dharwar rocks as Huronian, as suggested by Holland, then his 

 post-Dharwar eruptive series (Algoman) included the whole of the 

 gneisses of Mysore, while equivalents of the Laureutian and Ontarian 

 formations were wanting. On the other hand, if the Dharwar rocks 

 were regarded as Keewatin, then the gneisses of Mysore might 

 represent Laurentian and, possibly, Algoman formations, while 



