THE — 
GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 
NEW. SERIES.’ DECADE. V.. VOLZ- Vil. 
No. V.— MAY, 1910. 
ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
a 
I.—Retics or THE Great Ice AGE IN THE PLAINS OF 
Nortruern Inp1a.} 
By T. H. D. La Toucur, Geological Survey of India. 
T may seem strange to dwellers in this country under its present 
conditions to speak of relics of a Glacial Period being visible in 
the plains of the Ganges Valley, where the mean annual average 
temperature is about 77° F. and we all know what the maximum 
may rise to; and at the outset I must guard against misappre- 
hension by saying that I do not mean to imply, by the title 
of my discourse, that the plains of India were ever, within 
geologically recent times, covered with snow and ice. We have 
evidence, it is true, that in long distant ages, at the beginning of the 
period that saw the filling up of the valleys of the old Gondwana 
continent, part of which still exists as the Peninsula of India, that is 
to say, when the deposits of clay and sandstone, supporting a luxuriant 
vegetation, now transformed into the coal of Raniganj and other 
localities, were beginning to be laid down, the higher ground of the 
Peninsula was under snow and ice, and that glaciers descended into 
the low ground and probably sent off icebergs into the surrounding 
seas. ‘Traces of these events, which took place in what is known to 
geologists as the Talchir Period, even the old rock-floors grooved and 
striated by the passage over them of fragments of rock embedded in 
moving ice, have been found at the base of the Coal-measures in the 
Central Provinces and in Rajputana, while a bed containing striated 
and polished boulders, exhibiting unmistakable evidence of ice action, 
is known in the Salt Range of the Punjab. But with these, and with 
traces of what may prove to have been a still older ice age, of which 
Sir T. Holland brought some evidence before this Society in August, 
1908, discovered by him near Simla, I do not propose to deal on the 
present occasion. 
The period of a general lowering of temperature over the northern 
hemisphere, to which the name of the Glacial Period par excellence, or 
of the ‘‘Great Ice Age”, has been given, has left abundant traces of 
its passage over the whole of that hemisphere, wherever the conditions 
are favourable for the preservation of the peculiar features which 
denote the action of large bodies of ice. Naturally these features are 
* A lecture delivered in the rooms of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, on 
February 10, 1910. ; % 
DECADE Y.—VOL. VII.—NO. Y. 13 
