A. B. Wynne — The Glacial Period in Upper India. 99 



Otherwise a slow elevation might be supposed to have taken 

 place nearly at the same rate as the river cut its channel, or the 

 result might be ascribed to the vast and continuous operation of 

 aerial denudation, in reducing the altitude of the ground. 



If either the first or the last of these suppositions be correct, the 

 greater elevation of the mountains would bi'ing the regions of glaciers 

 and perennial snows under existing climatic conditions nearer to 

 the area now covered by the transported blocks. 



The Indus is famous for its debacles, and these, carrying in their 

 rush fragments of glaciers laden with rock masses from the high 

 regions into a lake (which there is reason to suppose once covered 

 much of the Northern Punjab Steppe), it appears to^ me would 

 account very simply for the transport southwards of the blocks 

 referred to, and also for their distribution. 



The lacustrine character of the silt or loess, extensively spread 

 over the Raw^ul Pindi plateau, is in favour of the former existence 

 of a lake or lakes in much the same relative position to the mountains 

 as the Terai swamps at their foot further eastward, and in its waters 

 the ice-floated blocks could have been impelled for some distance in 

 the currents caused by floods. 



As the natural consequence of the ordinary glaciers of the 

 mountains approaching nearer to the plains, owing to greater alti- 

 tude, traces of these glaciers might still be found in ice-borne 

 blocks resting where glaciers no longer exist beyond the area occu- 

 pied by the supposed lake or lakes. Where such blocks rested on 

 softer material than themselves, sub-aerial denudation would reduce 

 their stability till they might be rolled into the deepest Khiids and 

 river-courses, as is the case along the Upper Indus, the Upper 

 Jhelum in Kashmir territory, or along its tributary the Nainsuk 

 from Kaghan. 



It would thus appear that either within or beyand the area where 

 floating-ice could move them, great transported rock fragments such 

 as these could find their way into their present positions without 

 the necessity for imagining that enormous glaciers spread in recent 

 times from the Himalaya Mountains out over the plains of India, to 

 elevations not more than 2000 feet (or even less) above the sea, or to 

 distances of 40 or 50 miles away from these mountains — in the 

 Upper Punjab. 



To any one familiar with the appearance of the "Drift" of Ireland 

 and the glacial features of many of its hill regions, the great differ- 

 ence between these features and the supposed glacier work in the 

 Upper Punjab is so palpable, that the strongest possible doubts 

 suggest themselves as to the probability of extensive glaciation at 

 low levels in the north of India, and certainly when the circum- 

 stances urged in favour of this bear any other interpretation, the 

 alternative supposition gathers force from the comparison. 



