﻿Geological Society of London. 127 



above the sea. This the author regarded as very improbable. He 

 assumed that the President, rejecting the evidence adduced by 

 various writers in favour of the glacial origin of the Talchir and 

 Karoo Boulder-beds, was inclined to fall back upon the notion of 

 their being of volcanic origin, and quoted a letter from Mi'. King, 

 who had described the Talchir rocks of Kamaram as trappean, in 

 which that gentleman stated that the rocks so interpreted by him 

 prove to be dark green and brownish mudstone. He cited furtlier 

 evidence of like nature, and concluded that the ascription of a 

 volcanic origin to these boulder-beds was probably in all cases due 

 to similar misinterpretations. 



The President, having quitted the chair, stated that in the remarks 

 he had made he had no wish to dogmatize, as the author seemed to 

 think ; and further, that those remarks were not made by him as 

 President, but as a simple Fellow of the Society, in a paper written 

 before he had the honour of filling the office of President. In 

 connexion with the assumed improbability of a change of level to 

 the extent of 14,000 or 15,000 feet, required, according to the 

 author, by the hypothesis that the beds referred to were formed by 

 local glaciers, he noticed that there was in the immediate neigh- 

 bourhood of some of these deposits a fault with a downthrow of 

 12,000 feet, so that such changes were at all events not impossible. 

 He remarked that as Professor at Cooper's Hill he had prepared an 

 abstract of all that had been written on the geology of India, and 

 in so doing had made a selection of the different views that had 

 been expressed by Indian geological surveyors as to the nature of 

 the beds in question, but found their opinions so strikingly divergent 

 that he was forced to go back to the facts. He described the range 

 of the great Talchir formation from the Sone river in the north to 

 Hyderabad in the south-east and the Nerbudda in the north, and 

 stated that throughout the whole region the plant-bearing series is 

 underlain by crystalline rocks, except in one instance by Vindhyan 

 rocks. The Coal-bearing series is found in basins or broken seg- 

 ments between great faults, the whole country, in fact, being much 

 broken. The succession of the beds he described as follows : — At 

 the top the Panchet beds, then the Barakar, and at the bottom the 

 Talchir deposits about 500-800 feet thick, having as their lowest 

 member a bed consisting of boulders united by a sandy silt. To- 

 wards the Nerbudda it was possible to trace within a few miles the 

 source from which the blocks had been derived. The boulder-bed 

 presented a close resemblance to an old shore-deposit, but to this 

 might be objected the large size and angularity of the blocks, many 

 of which must have travelled far, and some of which are scratched. 

 The underlying rocks are sometimes grooved. The deposit occurs 

 over an immense area, and its formation must have occupied much 

 time, and some forces must have been at work to bring the blocks 

 down and scratch them. Some Indian surveyors have referred their 

 presence to the action of shore-ice. He maintained that scratching 

 and angularity do not necessarily imply ice-action. With regard to 

 the grooving of the underlying rock, he remarked that on rocky 



