THE GNEISSIC SERIES. 35 



The beds are thick and numerous, consisting of laminae of quartz 

 and grey iron-ore weathering into the brown or red hematites — more 

 usually the brown peroxide — , the laminse being often thick and 

 very distinct, with occasionally a brecciated character, angular frag- 

 ments of quartz being cemented together in a ferruginous matrix. 

 At the Ircolah end of the outcrop the laminse of iron ore are well 

 weathered out, leaving the surface of the rock curiously roughened by 

 outstanding and wavy little ridges of quartz. Small smelting furnaces 

 are set up at Rasanur and at the neighbouring villages of Con- 

 noor and Mahulpadi, the latter, though some 8 miles to the north- 

 east, obtaining its ore from Rasanur. I did not see that any ex- 

 cavations had been made in the beds of ore ; the people, as in most 

 other iron districts, only work at the debris and more weathered por- 

 tions of the out-crops, where they can get fragments of ore with the 

 smallest cores of the hard grey oxide, and from which the siliceous 

 particles have been well weathered or loosened. 



The neighbourhood of the boundary between the two gneisses, and 

 Great development of again between the newer gneiss and the transition 

 quartz reefs. series, is marked] by an extraodinary development 



of small reefs or veins of quartz which nearly always run for short 

 distances apparently with the strike of the foliation or bedding, though 

 their generally real lie is with an ill-defined north-north-west to south- 

 south-east cleavage, having a low dip to east-north-east. These reefs 

 are more frequent on the schistose side of the gneiss boundary, and they 

 are developed to a most remarkable extent on either side of the 

 line between the foliated gneisses and the transition rocks for a width 

 of 7 or 8 miles. It seems quite evident that this development of quartz 

 followed on or took place during the period of movement or crushing 

 up and fracture of the transition series, though it has not followed 

 the present lie of these rocks. The probability is that the line of disturb- 

 ance was more nearly with the boundary between the gneisses thus strik- 

 ing from Gelacapad to Kalahasti, while the present fainter occurrence of 

 quartz in the gneisses is only the dying out of a southern extension of 



( Mfi ) 



