256 F. R. C. Reed— Fossils from Nepal. 



IV. — Sedgwick Museum !Notes. 



Notes on some Fossils from Nepal. 



By F. R. CowPEH Reed, M.A., F.G.S. 



AMONGST the foreign Jurassic fossils in the Sedgwick Museum, 

 acquired or presented many years ago and but rarely referred 

 to, some specimens labelled " Himalayan Lias " recently came under 

 my notice. They were marked as having been presented by Mr. J. 

 Leckenby in 1872, and had been carefully kept together with the old 

 label, giving the locality and history. Some of them had at some 

 subsequent date been mounted and identified with well - known 

 European Liassic species. 



The old label accompanying them bore the following inscription : — 

 " Ammonites from the Salagrammi lliver near Mooktinath, 18,000 ft. 

 above the level of the sea. Presented to me by Dr. Wallich. April, 

 1822. [Signed] T. F. C." The whole label is in the same hand- 

 writing as the initials T. F. C, and Mr. Daydon Jackson, General 

 Secretary of the Linnean Society, to whose kind assistance I owe 

 much information about Dr. Wallich, considers it almost certain that 

 the person thus signing himself was Major-General Thomas Frederick 

 Colby, R.E., F.E.S., F.G.S. (1784-1852), Director of the Ordnance 

 Survey, after whom Portlock ^ named the well - known trilobite 

 Remopleurides Colhii, and who was actively interested in geology 

 in his time. The present Director of the Geological Survey of India 

 has also made to me the same suggestion as to the identity of T. F. C. 



Dr. Wallich (1786-1854), whose full name was Nathan Wolfe 

 Wallich, though during his scientific career he called himself simply 

 Nathaniel Wallich, was born in Copenhagen in 1786, went out to 

 India in the Danish service in 1807, and entered the service of the 

 N.E.I. Company in 1813, becoming Superintendent of the Calcutta 

 Botanical Garden in 1815, and retaining that post till his retirement 

 in 1846. He travelled extensively in India and Nepal, and con- 

 tributed various papers to the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of 

 Bengal, dealing with the plants he discovered. His name first appears 

 in the list of members of that Society in the year 1820, and on 

 several occasions he presented fossils to the Society's collection, but 

 none apparently from Nepal, though many plants were collected and 

 described by him from that country. The type-set of his great Indian 

 collections is in the possession of the Linnean Society, but the geo- 

 graphical indications of the localities are stated to be of the scantiest. 

 It is therefore of especial interest that the precise locality where 

 these fossils were found was recorded at the time on the label 

 accompanying them. 



Mooktinath or Muktinath is situated on the upper part of the river 

 Kali or Buria Gandak, on the north side of the main Himalayan range 

 and south of Lob Mantang ; it is also known as Ihochumigarsa, and 

 has the altitude 13,100 feet against it, according to a recent (1891) 

 official map of India, published in Calcutta. The apparent discrepancy 



1 Portlock : Geol. Rep. Loudond., p. 256. 



