304 Voysey’s Report on the Geology of Hyderabad. _  [Junz, 
ef panicum, the holcus saccharatus, maize, zea, &c. from its power of 
retaining moisture, which enables it without artificial irrigation to 
produce fine crops during the dry season. The plasticity, as found a 
foot below the surface in the month of March, is such that it could be 
kneaded into balls with the haud. In some places where the black 
cotton soil isintermixed with that from the decomposition of the granite, 
three crops are produced, two of rice and one of dry grain, the latter 
on the ground from which the first crop of rice has been cut. 
This soil is first met with at Patancherii, where it is intermixed with 
the debris of the granite, and has been no doubt deposited there by 
the floods of the Manjera, from which it is distant about ten miles. A 
corresponding change also takes place in the appearance of the country, 
which assumes a richer aspect: the natural productions of each soil 
being there intermixed. 
The hills from which this soil proceeds have formerly been culti- 
vated even to their summits. In most places small piles of stones, 
formerly cleared from the land, and occasionally the remains of a stone 
boundary, were the only memorials of former cultivation. The poa 
cynosuroides (Cusa grass) grows in the greatest profusion; it is ren- 
dered so dry in the months of March and April, that a very slight 
ignition will cause it to burn with inconceivable rapidity and fury. 
Our camp was once in considerable danger from this circumstance. 
The vegetable productions most frequently met with are, the 
Butea frondosa, Ficus, three species, 
Cassia Malabarica, Tectona grandis, 
Semecarpus anacardium, Tamarindus Indica, 
Averrhoa carambola, Mangifera Indica, 
Dalbergia acuminata, Spondias Mangifera. 
Mimosa, six species, and many others which my botanical knowledge 
did not enable me to name without the aid of their flowers. All these 
seem to acquire their greatest perfection in the places where the two 
above-mentioned soils are intermixed. 
It only remains to notice some anomalous appearances in the trap 
at Medcondah, and in the wacken at Shivalingapah. 
At the former of these places was observed in numerous detached 
masses, flint with a very rough external surface, varying from a few 
inches to a foot and a half in diameter, some of them deeply connected, 
so that their size may be supposed much greater; also numerous pieces 
of a siliceous stone containing shells*, the specific gravity of which varies 
* Turbo cyclostoma, land-shells. 
