310 W. J. McGee—The Laterite of India. 
the cutting out of the lower beds of the Keuper shown in the 
railway cuttings, are certainly due to Keuper overlap: This also 
will account, in part at least, for the rapid attenuation of the Lower 
Mottled Sandstone. 
The lower portion of the Lower Bunter Sandstone may, perhaps, 
be excluded by a rising of the old Carboniferous surface on the 
north (for we must not forget that we are here dealing with a double 
unconformability—one at the base of the Keuper, and the other at 
the bottom of the Bunter). If so, the breccias at Morley village 
may represent the upper breccias at Morley tunnel, with which, by 
the way, they appear to agree, both in textural characters and in 
consisting of a double band of breccia separated by mottled sand- 
stone. In any case the Keuper Marls must very soon have over- 
lapped the whole of the Bunter Series in a northerly direction, and 
come to rest directly on Carboniferous rocks. 
Now, at Nottingham, ten miles east of Morley, Bunter Pebble 
Beds attain a thickness of over 200 feet, the Lower Keuper Sand- 
stone (Waterstones) is about 100 feet thick, and beneath the latter 
is a fluctuating deposit of Keuper Basement Beds. The Lower 
Mottled Sandstone in the Morley tunnel cutting, where the Pebble 
Beds are so meagrely represented, is quite as thick, indeed somewhat 
thicker than it is at Nottingham, and the Middle and Lower Bunter 
Sandstone Series are clearly conformable to each other, whereas the 
dip of the Bunter is, as we have seen, appreciably greater than that 
of the Keuper. The above very decided overlap, then, is evidently 
due, not to contemporaneous attenuation, but to upheaval and 
denudation during the great interval of time which separated the 
close of the Bunter from the commencement of the Keuper epoch. 
V.—Tue “Larerite” or THE INDIAN PENINSULA. 
By W. J. McGrx, 
of Farley, Iowa, U.S.A. 
ee paper may be regarded as a notice of those portions of 
the recently published “ Manual of the Geology of India,” by 
Messrs. Medlicott and Blanford, which describe, or in any way 
relate to, the extensive lateritic deposits of Peninsular India. The 
hypothesis (or, more properly, the modification of an antecedent 
hypothesis) herein offered, in the hope that it may be tested by the 
Indian geologists, is based on extended examinations of deposits 
believed to be analogous, and has been found to satisfactorily explain 
the phenomena observed. 
Description, ete.—Laterite is essentially a highly ferruginous clay. 
The iron is a peroxide, is irregularly disseminated, and often occurs 
in pisolitic nodules—more rarely in tortuous tubes or pipes of variable 
size. The rock often contains 25 to 35 per cent. or more of metallic 
iron; and it may contain sand or other detrital materials. It re- 
cements itself, when broken, into a mass closely resembling the 
original rock; and clays underlying it seem to be gradually con- 
verted into the same substance—the superimposed laterite merging 
