108 Dr. Verchere on the Geology of Kashmir, [No. 2, 



the inundations of great rivers added continually to the thickness of 

 the deposit. 



97. There is no evidence of any violent action having taken place 

 during the Eocene and Miocene epochs. There had been risings 

 and sinkings of the whole country, but these were imperceptible to 

 the senses, and were probably not more active than the same pheno- 

 mena which now occur in many parts of the world, unknown to the 

 Inhabitants. The belt of flat land had increased to a good breadth, 

 and the coast had become sufficiently distant from the mountains to 

 enable the animals to live in peace and plenty, away from the storms 

 and torrents of the hills, when the whole of the portion of the 

 earth we have been considering was raised into an immense vault, by 

 the forcing up of granite assisted by gases. When the gases con- 

 densed or escaped, the arch settled down by fracturing its sides, and 

 these faulted sides of the arch are now, what we call the Himalayas 

 and the Afghan chains of mountains. 



When the settle-down began to take place, and the sides of the arch 

 or vault were being broken, the direction of the linear volcanoes of 

 the Silurian epoch compelled the new fractures to conform to it. On 

 the eastern slope of the vault, the fractures ran from N. W. to 

 S. E., on the western slope from N. E. to S. W. As is generally 

 the case in an anticlinal, the highest portion of the vault settled 

 down again to a level much lower than the sides, and we have there- 

 fore, in the northern Punjab, low hills, whilst on each side we have 

 mountains towering to the sky. 



It is not necessary to enter here into all the details of the complica- 

 tions which the masses of porphyry, trachyte, granite and other 

 rocks, which had been cooling ever since the middle of the Palaeozoic 

 epoch, caused in the upheaval of the Afghan- Himalayan vault and in 

 its settle-down. These details have already been sufficiently indicated 

 in paras. 81 to 87. But I will insist on the effect of these masses 

 being forced up like wedges through the rocks which covered them, 

 and by their filling up a great deal of the space once occupied by 

 these covering rocks, they compelled these last to be either folded or 

 broken into pieces and packed edgeways. 



It is not necessary to imagine that the top of the vault was raised 

 to the same height as we now see the great peaks of the Himalayas 



