28 KING: KADAPAH AND KARNÜL FORMATIONS. [PART i. 
feet or like traces which might have been left on deposits often so ca- 
pable of receiving and retaining them. Many of the rocks, as the lime- 
stones and shales, are such as might have been expected to contain fossil 
evidence of some kind; while the metamorphie action has not been 
always so strong as to have totally obliterated organic structure, if it had 
ever existed. Even in the most altered beds of conglomerate, although 
in freshly broken masses there is not the least trace of granular struc- 
ture, much less of a pebble, still on weathered surfaces, the coarsest con- 
elomeratie structure is plainly to be seen, many of the huge enclosed 
boulders being conglomeratic themselves. There are hundreds of feet 
of the finest laminated shales, weathered and unweathered, as recent- 
looking as the latest deposits of such rock, without a trace of a fossil ; 
and the thicknesses of earthy limestone are wonderfully remarkable in 
this same absence of organic structure. The wind and the water only 
seem to have had their free play in the Cuddapah Gulf, for all that is 
left to us now among these rocks recording the period in whieh they 
were formed are the frequent <“ ripplings" wherever the early constitu- 
tion or the position of the rock were such as to receive and retain the 
impressions which the play of the winds or waves, or both, had furrowed 
on them. 
Having then no paleontological evidence by means of which these 
rocks may be compared with any others in India, or in the European 
geologic scale—or their own relations be traced out among themselves, 
we were necessarily driven to the two other data out of the three that 
are usually considered necessary in working out the history of the earth's 
crust, namely, superposition and lithological constitution, for the solving 
of these questions. 
This is likewise the state of things in the elucidation of the great 
VINDHYAN FORMATION of Northern India, to which some of the rocks 
in question bear a strong resemblance; so that even to clear up satis- 
factorily whether or not there be such resemblance in fact, appears 
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