Glaciated Surface in the Himalayas. 403 



The lowest direct records of glacial action in the Himalaya 

 appears to be those by the late General C. A. McMahon, who 

 described ice-scratched and grooved rock-surfaces in the N.W. 

 Himalaya, near Dalhousie in the Pangi Valley, at the level of 

 7,500 feet (McMahon, 1881, p. 310), and a moraine in the same 

 district at the height of 4,740 feet at Mamul (McMahon, 1882, 

 pp. 49-50). Mr. Middlemiss (1896, p. 46) mentions 5,000- 

 6,000 feet as the lowest level at which he has seen reliable traces 

 of glaciers in North-Western India. There appears to be no definite 

 evidence of striated rock-surfaces in the North-Western Himalaya as 

 low as that at Chakung in Sikkim. 



The evidence of low-level Boulders and Drifts. — The extension of 

 some form of ice to low-levels in India has been advocated to 

 explain various large boulders and drift deposits. Thus Theobald 

 attributed to transport by floating ice (Theobald, 1877, p. 141) 

 some enormous boulders, as much as 40 feet in circumference, 

 embedded in fine silt and overlying beds of sand and gravel, at the 

 level of below 2,000 feet on the plains of the Potwar near llawal 

 Pindi in N.W. India. The extension of the same agency to below 

 1,000 feet above sea-level is claimed in his later paper (Theobald, 

 1880, p. 221), on the evidence of some large boulders at Attock, 

 where they are marked on his map at a level of a little below 1,000 feet. 

 Theobald (1874, p. 87) claimed the extension of glaciers to the 

 level of about 2,000 feet on some huge erratics, as much as 140 feet 

 in girth (ibid., p. 91), associated with some ridges of drift that he 

 described as moraines, in the Kangra Valley, which is over 200 miles 

 south-east from Potwar, and to the south-east of Dalhousie. 



The boulders recorded by Theobald have been often accepted as 

 due to some form of ice transport. Thus Mr. li. D. Oldham (1893, 

 p. 484) remarks that " the erratics of Potwar show that ice in large 

 quantities was not unknown there at one time". Mr. A. P>. Wynne 

 (1881, pp. 153-4) accepted the blocks as ice-carried but not as 

 glacier-carried. Mr. Vredenburg has kindly referred me to the 

 memoir on Hazara by Mr. Middlemiss, in which the boulders are 

 explained, from their alignment, as the remains of a local ridge of 

 gneiss, the crest of which had fallen to pieces before it was 

 smothered by silt. Mr. Middlemiss (1896, pp. 46, 241-5) has 

 shown that the erratics of the Sirun and Indus Rivers are outcrops 

 of the Hazara gneissose granite, and he suggests that those of 

 Potwar also are probably "blocks weathered out nearly in situ 

 from a ridge of crystalline rocks covered sparingly by, or protruding 

 through, the Upper Tertiary Sandstones ". Middlemiss (ibid., p. 245) 

 adopts the same explanation for the Attock erratics. He concludes 

 (Middlemiss, 1896, p. 46), " I am bound to say that no reliable 

 traces of glaciers at low levels (say below 5,000 or 6,000 feet) have 

 ever come before my notice." 



The Kangra Valley Moraine of Theobald is referred to by 

 Medlicott (1876, p. 56) as "the supposed glacial deposits of the 

 Kangra Valley". He regarded the moraine as a ridge left by 

 erosion, though both he and Lydekker felt unable to explain the 

 erratics except by glacial action; and Lydekker (1876, p. 158) 



