76 Address. [Feb., 



between the marine limestones and the Pokaran boulder bed. Explora- 

 tions are now being made to test this conjecture. In this connection, 

 as fuel, mention may also be made of successful borings for petroleum 

 lately carried out by Mr. R. A. Townsend in the hills east of Sibi. The 

 oil occurs, as in the Pan jab, in lower tertiary strata. 



For many years past, we have known of one occurrence of Gond- 

 wana coal-measures outside the Peninsula, in the carboniferous beds 

 that seem to underlie the schists and gneiss at the base of the Sikkim 

 Himalaya. Uppermost Gondwana rocks have also been long since 

 identified as occurring at the top of the marine Jurassic series in Kachh ; 

 and now the typical bottom Gondwana group has been found in western 

 Rajputana at the base of another section, high up in which these same 

 Jurassic strata occur. Another similar discovery has been made in the 

 past year by Dr. Warth, who, when examining the coal-measures of the 

 Salt Range, found on the top of a boulder bed some fossils which have 

 been pronounced by Dr. Waagen to be of distinct palaeozoic types, some 

 of them identifiable with carboniferous marine fossils in Australia. 

 This at once suggested to Dr. Waagen that this glacial boulder bed of 

 the Salt Range probably represented the well-known Talchhir rock at 

 the base of the Gondwana system : for Indian geologists had from the 

 beginning contended that the lower Gondwana deposits were palaeozoic, 

 because of the association of Gondwana plants with marine carboni- 

 ferous fossils in Australia. We have therefore nearly arrived at the 

 conclusion of a discussion that has lasted for nearly thirty years, as to 

 the homotaxis of the Gondwana system and its place in the universal 

 scale of formations. The contention on the other side was based on 

 the undoubted fact that the Gondwana flora is distinctly of mesozoic 

 type, and every conjecture was hazarded to throw doubt on the asso- 

 ciation of Gondwana plants with palaeozoic fossils. Further evidence 

 is due to a visit paid to Australia by Mr. Oldham, where he confirmed 

 the fact of interstratification of the two kinds of fossils and brought 

 . more prominently to notice a glacial boulder deposit there, associated 

 with these beds. Perhaps the most important result of this discovery 

 is the refutation of the commonly received dogma that fossils of such 

 diverse types could not have co-existed. The actual demonstration haa 

 now for the first time been made, on an adequate scale from the geology 

 of India, that a triassic flora has been contemporaneous with a carbo- 

 niferous marine fauna, and, as the comparative scale of formations has 

 to be based upon the most wide-spread class of organisms, the marine, 

 it can now be taken as settled that the period represented by the 

 Gondwana system of rocks extended from middle carboniferous to top 

 Jurassic. 



