1867.] the Western Himalaya and Afghan Mountains, 93 



The fissures just described being once formed, we have no difficulty 

 in understanding how the slices of crust between them were compelled 

 to remain in an oblique position, viz. dipping N. E. and N. W. 

 respectively, when the settlement took place, if we remember, that a 

 great deal of granite, lignite, porphyry, trachyte, &c. buried under the 

 surface before the upheaval, had now been forced up and occupied 

 a great portion of the room ; unable to find space enough to resume a 

 horizontal position, these bands of the earth's crust became impacted 

 in the position we now see them. 



89. Coming down from the high regions of the Himalaya and of 

 the Afghan mountains to the Salt Range and the hills of the district 

 of Bunnoo, we notice the interesting phenomenon of the tilting up of 

 the angular extremity of the piece of crust that had been broken off, 

 between the converging fissures of the Sub- Himalaya and the Sub- 

 Afghan hills. This crop-fracture is just such as we see near the 

 point of an angular piece of a window-pane which has been starred 

 by a blow. The dip of the Salt Range and the Bunnoo hills is 

 consequently disposed in a somewhat converging manner, such as is 

 indicated by the arrows in PI. XI. ; the crop fracture is not a straight 

 line ; it is a succession of segments of a circle, and the dip of each 

 segment is converging more or less towards the centre of its circle. 



It is, however, possible that this breaking of the tip of the triangular 

 piece of crust is only apparent, and that the segmentary and converging 

 dip of the beds may be due to a complexity of resultant forces, at the 

 place where the N. W. and N. W. dips meet. 



To the south of the Salt Range extend the vast plains of the Punjab, 

 Ajmeer and Marwar, covered mostly with clay and sand, often a desert 

 without a hill or even a mound to relieve the monotony, and with 

 hardly a pebble to be found for some hundreds of miles. So far south 

 as Lat N. 27° these great plains extend without a break, and then 

 we find the volcanic rocks of Central India, supporting here and there 

 beds of sandstone with mammalian bones* similar to those which are 

 so well developed in the Sab-Himalaya and Sub-Afghan ranges. 

 Whether the whole, a portion, or none of the volcanic rocks of Central 

 India are contemporaneous to those of the Himalaya, I know not, 



* Bones of extinct, mammals have been found in the Valley of the Nerbudda, 

 ' South of Lat. N, 21°, no Miocene has ever been found. 



