1867.] Dr. Verchere on the Geology of Kashmir. 83 



Kashmir, the Western Himalaya and the Afghan Mountains, a — • 

 A Geological paper, by * 



Albert M. Verchere, Esq. M. D. 



Bengal Medical Service, with a note on the fossils by 



M. Edouard de Verneuil, 



Membre de 1'Academie des Sciences, Paris. 



(Continued from page 50, of No. III. 1867.) 



Chapter IV. — General Remarks, Geognostic History, and Conclusion. 



81. In the preceding chapters I have often insisted on the 

 parallelism of the several chains of the Himalaya ; this parallelism is at 

 once evident by reference to the map. Between the great parallels, we 

 have seen that smaller, catenated chains make their appearance, filling 

 up, as it were, with their spurs and branches, the great troughs 

 formed by the principal parallel ridges. All the peaks and sinuosities 

 of these catenated chains appear to present the same arrangement, viz. 

 a highly crystalline and porphyritic variety of volcanic rock, passing 

 gradually into others less crystalline, such as Trachyte, Felstone and 

 Greenstone, and finally covered by ash, cinders, agglomerate, laterite, 

 and compact azoic slate : these beds of ejecta, together with their 

 interstratified layers of slate and sandstone, are all conformable to the 

 fossiliferous strata by which they are covered, and have behaved like 

 those at the final upheaval of the great system. But the more crystalline 

 rocks, the several porphyries, the hornblende rocks, &c. do not appear 

 to have been displaced laterally in any way to the same extent as the 

 stratified layers; they rather seem to have been upheaved from 

 underground as a solid mass, breaking through the beds of superficial 

 trap and of volcanic ejecta. A similar disposition is likewise usual 

 in granitic mountains, the granite supporting gneiss, schist, me- 

 tamorphic slate and marble, and these being covered by fossiliferous 

 rocks. 



To explain the cause of this arrangement, let us consider what 

 is the section of a volcano, as far as it is known at present 

 from a study of active and extinct ones. We have under the surface of 

 the country, in which the volcano occurs, enormous masses of trachyte, 

 becoming more and more crystalline and prophyritic as we proceed 

 deeper, and probably passing gradually into granite. In some 



