1867.] the Western Himalaya and Afghan Mountains. 105 



humidity they had sucked from the sea in the Southern Hemisphere, 

 descend again and become under or lower currents, keeping their 

 N. E. direction.* Before proceeding far, these winds meet a couple 

 of ranges of mountains forming a great everted V, opening to 

 the south, and on these ranges they poured such a quantity of rain 

 that a denudation began to take place to an amount nowhere else 

 exemplified. The only approach to this rain-fall is that now observed 

 in Patagonia, a high country which happens to be situated in the 

 Southern Himisphere, somewhat in a position analogous to that of 

 the Himalaya in the Northern Hemisphere during the Miocene epoch. 

 In Patagonia " Captain King found the astonishing rain-fall of 

 " nearly thirteen feet (151 inches) in forty-one days ; and Mr. 

 " Darwin reports, that the surface water of the sea, along this part of 

 " the South American coast, is sometimes quite fresh, from the vast 

 " quantity of rain that falls. "f 



We are now therefore prepared to anticipate a formation composed 

 of coarse debris of the older mountains, washed down by violent 

 torrents ; we understand how it is that the waters of the sea lost their 

 saltness, and that marine shells deserted these regions, and are therefore 

 not to be found as fossils, or are at any rate excessively rare. The 

 continual and violent rushing of streams, charged with mud and 

 boulders, did not allow of the development of fluviatile animals ; and thus 

 we find the lower Miocene a mass of clay, sand and large boulders, in 

 beds considerably false-bedded and totally free of fossils, with the excep- 

 tion, in a few protected localities, of some bulrushes imbedded in salt. 

 These torrents occasionally tore up forests from the mountain sides in 

 their headlong course, and thus it is that we find here and there 

 small niduses of semi-carbonized wood, interred in the sandstone. The 

 masses of conglomerate, accumulated in certain places, are of tremendous 

 size, and probably mark the exit from the hills of the principal torrents 

 of the Miocene Himalaya. The deposit of this coarse debris of the 

 old volcanic chain and of the several deposits which had become 

 gradually accumulated round it, attains a thickness of no less than 

 5,000 feet, and probably in some places much more. This mass of 



* See for a general explanation of the routes of the winds and the causes 

 which alter these routes, the work of Captain Maury, L. L. D., U. S. N. entitled, 

 " The Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology." 



f Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteox'olgy. Page 129 



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