200 GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF THE ROCK SYSTEMS 



the earlier Geological periods. Unfortunately, however, even this dis- 

 covery, all important as it is, does not yet give a definite horizon, inas- 

 much as it is not settled whether these " Dicynodont strata" should be 

 considered Triassic or Permian, and the doubt will (so far as the rep- 

 tilian evidence goes) still hang over our Indian rocks. But while this 

 may be the case, (and we shall refer to the question again), the evi- 

 dence seems conclusive, and generally admitted, that these beds con- 

 taining Dicynodont remains are not more recent than Triassic, and 

 inasmuch as their representatives in India are above, and rest uncon- 

 formably on beds which are, so far as now known, the upper beds of 

 our coal-bearing rocks (the " Daruuda" series of our classification) in 

 India, it follows immediately that the opinion hitherto held by most 

 geologists who have written on the subject (McCoy, D'Archiac, Carter, 

 Hislop, &c, &c), that the coal strata of India were of Jurassic age, 

 must be abandoned. 



In the paper previously referred to, I have endeavored to give an 

 idea of the several steps by which I had been led from one point to 

 another in this investigation. I do not think it necessary here to repeat 

 these, but simply to notice that, while I was at first disposed to consider 

 these beds as Oolitic, misled by supposed identifications of plants, (and 

 so misled, until an opportunity occurred for the re-examination of our 

 collections), I also from the first expressed doubts as to the correctness 

 of this view. So long since as 1853,* I said that " some of the fossils 

 have a Triassic aspect, and probably indicate a period a little more 

 ancient than the Oolitic." Again in 1854 (September) I said that we 

 might " provisionally consider the coal-bearing rocks of Bengal as 

 belonging rather to the mesozoic than to the palaeozoic period" — and as 

 being "probably Oolitic, possibly carboniferous."! This notice of these 

 rocks in a great measure led to the publication of a paper in the same 



* Jour. Asiat. Soc. Bengal, vol. xxiii. p. 273. 

 f Ibid, vol. xxiii. p. 620. 



