426 Prof. E. E. L. Schicarz — The Waterberg Sandstone. 



from the Table Mountain Sandstone. If Drs. Hatch & Corstorphine 

 are right in correlating the Waterberg Sandstone with the Natal 

 Palaeozoic Sandstone, then it seems likely that these Nieuwerust Beds 

 may turn out to be the western equivalents of the Waterberg Series. 



In Prieska we have red sandstones which Stow called the Matsap 

 Beds, and which are undoubtedly the equivalents of the Waterberg 

 Sandstone ; all geologists are agreed on this. The Dwj'ka Con- 

 glomerate rests on the upturned edges of the Matsap Beds, and it 

 also rests on the eroded edges of the Table Mountain Sandstone of the 

 south ; therefore Drs. Hatch & Corstorphine and Dr. Voit say they 

 must be equivalent. But the Dwyka Conglomerate in the south rests 

 on beds of Table Mountain Sandstone which had been very little 

 disturbed, and the two epochs left out in the unconformity, the 

 Bokkeveld and Witteberg, are of no very great geological extent. 

 On the other hand, the Matsap Beds were buried and metamorphosed, 

 were exposed again by denudation, thrust up into high mountain 

 ranges, and cut into peak and valley before the Dwyka Conglomerate 

 was laid down. The glacial boulder-clay is in Prieska extraordinarily 

 fresh and unaltered, and rests in the valleys cut in the Matsap Hills 

 as if the Ice Age during which it was formed was but a short time 

 past, and we can find in the till boulders of Matsap Sandstone altered 

 and metamorphosed, thus proving the vast lapse of time which must 

 have intervened between the laying down of the Matsap sediments 

 and the Dwyka Conglomerate. 



The AVaterberg (Matsap) Sandstone, then, is a series of rocks with 

 a prevalent reddish or butf colour like the Torridon Sandstone, the 

 Table Mountain Sandstone a blue quartzite weathering grey. The 

 Dwyka Conglomerate rests on the Table Mountain Sandstone with an 

 unconformity represented elsewhere by a conformable series of beds 

 (Bokkeveld and Witteberg) 4,000 feet thick ; it rests on the 

 Waterberg Sandstone with an unconformity representing a lapse 

 of time during which the Waterberg Sandstone was buried, meta- 

 morphosed, folded into mountain chains, and denuded. Judged by 

 European standards, the Table Mountain Sandstone - Dwyka un- 

 conformity would mean the leaving out of the Devonian and 

 Carboniferous epochs, quite time enough many would say for the 

 changes to have gone on in the Matsap (Waterberg) Beds, but where 

 the series is conformable there was a steady process of sedimentation 

 from Table Mountain Sandstone times to the Dwyka, whereas between 

 the Matsap Beds and the Dwyka there was sedimentation certainly 

 equivalent in extent to the Bokkeveld and Witteberg epochs, in order 

 to procure ' cover ' for the folding to take place, then the period of 

 crushing, and finally a prolonged land period ending in the Permian 

 Ice Age, and this lapse of time to my mind must have been immeasurably 

 longer than the other, so much so that I still think the Waterberg 

 (Matsap) Beds should be put into the Pal-Afric group. If the 

 Nieuwerust Beds turn out to be the equivalents of the Waterberg 

 Sandstone, the question will be settled definitely, for the outcrops of 

 the two rock-systems are close enough in Bushmanland to enable one 

 to make sure that there is a great unconformity between them. 



