NUMMULITIC SERIES. 11 



From the southern edge of the table-land, for eight to ten miles 

 to the north, the strata, and with them the surface, have a steady rise. 

 At Cherra it is about one in twenty, or nearly 3°. It is not certain that 

 this slope has anything to say to the rapid bending down of the same beds 

 that takes place along the Hne of the scarp ; it may well be an original 

 feature, a natural slope of deposition, for, as has been before described, 

 there is a rapid thinning out of the beds in the same direction. This 

 decrease is particularly well seen in the cretaceous group. In the 

 nummulitic it is not so observable, as there is no covering rock on the 

 plateau, and the group is greatly denuded. We shall see that very 

 important changes take place in the composition of the strata, nunmiulitic 

 as well as cretaceous, from south to north, suggestive of a general thin- 

 ning out in this direction ; but it cannot here be shown that the bottom 

 bands of the former series, those only which occur on the plateau here, 

 suffer any diminution of thickness. 



The southernmost outher of the nummulitic deposits on the plateau 

 occurs just to south-west of the station of Cherra Punji. There are 

 about eighty feet of limestone, capped by about the same thickness of 

 softish sandstone. The well known Cherra coal with subordinate shales 

 occurs at about ten feet over the limestone. The limestone is very 

 conspicuous, forming sheer cliffs at many places round the base of 

 the hill. At the two points, near the north and south extremities of 

 the ridge and more than a mile apart, where I examined the actual 

 contact with the cretaceous sandstone, there was no sign of any peculiar 

 separating layer ; the strong finely granular Hmestone is firmly united 

 to the sandstone ; and there are associated strings of sand and layers of 

 sandy Hmestone. This junction is in fact quite similar to that of the 

 limestone with the overlying sandstone, which, without fossil evidence, is 

 almost demonstrably nummuhtie. The feature that has been described 

 as an erosion of the limestone prior to the deposition of the sandstone is, 

 I rather think, a case of underground erosion subsequent to the formation 



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