THE 



GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 



NEW SERIES. DECADE II. VOL. VIII. 



No. III.— MARCH, 1881. 



I. — On the Connexion between Travelled Blocks in the Upper 

 Punjab and a supposed Glacial Period in Upper India. 



By A. B. Wynne, F.G.S., etc. 



THE transported blocks of the Indus Valley are not without 

 some interest in connexion with the theory of an Indian 

 Glacial Period akin to that of Europe, and with regard to the 

 support they do or do not give to that supposition. 



I do not propose to enter into the whole question of this Glacial 

 Period, one much affected by observations made in regions which 

 I have not explored, but only intend to discuss facts within my 

 knowledge concerning a district with which I am better acquainted. 



The district is the Upper Punjab, the northern part of " the land 

 of the five rivers," and is almost entirely included in the local 

 portion of the basin of the largest of these, the Indus or Abba Sin. 



From the last gorge of this great river, where it issues from the 

 Himalayan Mountains, down to within a few miles of where it breaks 

 through their furthest outworks in a southerly direction, a quantity 

 of crystalline masses derived from the Himalayan ridges, and often 

 of huge size up to 50 or 100 feet girth, are distributed for forty or 

 fifty miles, chiefly on its left bank, and so far as twenty miles from 

 the river itself. Similar blocks also occur locally along smaller 

 tributaries of the Indus and of the Jhelum, which is one of its 

 affluents, but these blocks are not known at any great distance from 

 the hills. 



The blocks in question were noticed many years ago in one of Dr. 

 Yerchere's papers,^ and subsequently in the publications of the 

 Geological Survey of India, where I have attributed their distribution 

 to the agency of floating-ice ; but my friend and colleague Mr. 

 Theobald claims that they are additional evidence in support of his 

 view that extensive glaciers once descended from the Himalayas and 

 left their detritus on the plains of India at elevations of and under 

 2000 feet, where the climate has so much changed that snow is now 

 never known to fall. 



Mr. Theobald's last paper on the subject appears in the Geol. Surv. 



1 A. S. Beng. 36. pt. 2. 



DECADE II. — VOL. Till. — NO. III. 7 



