HISLOP AND HUNTER NAGPUR. 347 



History of the Geological Observations of the District. — The 

 geological structure of the territory, whose extent and natural fea- 

 tures have been thus briefly described, has for some time engaged 

 the attention of scientific men in India. Dr. Voysey and Captain, 

 now Colonel, Jenkins were the first who examined it. From the 

 result of their investigations, as published in the Bengal Asiatic 

 Society's Transactions, Part I. for 1829, it would seem that they 

 were unsuccessful in their search for fossils. The lamented Voysey, 

 indeed, who was the first in India to find shells in a stratum enclosed 

 in trap, thought he had discovered, on the journey hence to Calcutta, 

 which terminated his distinguished career, bivalves in a bed of lime- 

 stone near Rayepur within the Nagpur State, though on the east of 

 our district* ; but I have since ascertainedf that the appearances, 

 which he regarded as organic, are the consequence oiP the rock 

 having been brecciated. The next observer within our field of 

 investigation was Dr. Malcolmson, who in 1833 worthily following 

 up Voysey's discoveries within the Nizam's dominions in 1819 and 

 1823, pointed out new localities for the formation in the same part 

 of the country, and traced it into this kingdom to Chikni and Hin- 

 ghanghat. At the former of these places, which is sixty miles south 

 of the city of Nagpur, he met with TJnio Deccanensis, Physa Prin- 

 sepii, Paludina Deccanensis, and Melania quadrilineata : at the 

 latter, which is sixteen miles nearer the capital, he found an abun- 

 dance of silicified wood. But though he lived in this neighbourhood 

 for some years, he does not appear to have been aware of the exist- 

 ence of similar organic remains here ; and, while with Voysey and 

 Jenkins he enlarged on the mineralogy of Sitabaldi Hill, like them 

 he failed to advert to the two rocks which are its most interesting 

 features, — his own trap-imbedded stratum with Physas and Melanias 

 towards the top, and an unfossiliferous member of the sandstone 

 formation resting on gneiss at the bottom. In 1842 Lieut. Munro, 

 of H.M.'s 39th Regt., brought to light in the sandstone quarries 

 near Kampti, nine miles N.E. of Nagpur, the impressions of ferns, 

 which were forwarded to Malcolmson as having previously discovered 

 the first vegetable remains in the sandstone of the Hyderabad country, 

 by whom they were figured and described as resembling Glossopteris 

 DancBoides of RoyleJ. As this species of fern is now understood to 

 be a TcBniopteris, it seems likely, that the comparison of the Kampti 

 specimens with it was incorrect, and that they belonged to a Glosso- 

 pteris, whose species, owing to the fragmentary state of the fronds, 

 cannot be determined. 



In 1845 I procured a few fossils of the same kind from the 

 Kampti sandstone, and two years subsequently my esteemed col- 

 league the Rev. R. Hunter and myself fell in with them in the 



* Beng. As. Soc. Journ. vol. xiii. p. 856. 



t The first person singular here refers to Mr. Hislop, by whom the memoir is 

 for the most part written, with the exception of the description of the Plants and 

 Insects of the Tertiary deposits, which is from the pen of his fellow-labourer Mr. 

 Hunter. For a previous notice of the " Geology of the Nagpur State," by the 

 Rev. S. Hislop, see Journ. Bombay Asiat. Soc. No. 18, July 1853, p. 58, &c. — En. 



X Bomb. Br. R. As. Soc. Journ. vol. i. p. 249. 



