64 eoote: geological structure op the eastern coast. 



It was the discovery~of this Eryon on a loose piece of shale that led 

 me to look for the peculiar and, till then, unobserved bed it must" have 

 come from ; by excavating I procured many of the finest and most im- 

 portant specimens collected at Vemavaram, including nearly all the fish 

 remains obtained there. The missing parts of the Eryon could unfortu- 

 nately not be found, though most carefully searched for. 



By some mistake or other, Dr. Feistmantel has unfortunately des- 

 cribed the Eryon as having been obtained from the Sripermatur group 

 west of Madras, a series of beds which probably represent a rather higher 

 horizon than at the Vemavaram shales. The error of locality is consider- 

 able as the two places are rather more than 200 miles apart. The 

 remarkable lithological similarity between the typical Sripermatur and 

 Vemavaram shales must have contributed not a little to the possibility of 

 such a mistake having been made. 



The highest known member of the Vemavaram group is a hard, 

 coarse, white shale, breaking into large flaggy masses (which, as already 

 mentioned, are largely quarried to the south of the 

 village) . They contain a f ew, mostly ill-preserved, 

 fossils, consisting of undeterminable stalks of plants, of bivalve shells 

 allied to Leda, and of thin-shelled Ammonites, too much flattened by 

 pressure for satisfactory determination of their specific characters. These 

 coarse shales occur to the south-east of the Vemavaram section first 

 described, and would, if that section were extended sufficiently to the east, 

 be seen to lie above, and probably immediately upon, the purplish shales 

 No. 8, though it is possible that a small thickness of finer grained whitish 

 shales might intervene. 



Very similar coarse flaggy shales form a thick bed exposed in numer- 

 ous quarries close around the village of Razpudi, a 

 Flaggy beds at Eaz- Htfle more than a m{[e north of Vemavaram ridge. 



They are very likely a continuation of the Vema- 

 varam flags, the only difference they show being in colour, which is not 

 pure white, but white variegated with delicate bands of red, pink, mauve, 

 ( 64 ) 



