100 Mr. Verchére on the Geology of Kashmir, [No. 2, 
geological epoch by the river-terraces, raised lacustrine deposits and 
other indications of diminished rain-fall.* 
10. Examining the porphyry of the Kaj Nag mountains in hand 
specimens, we find it composed of the following minerals :— 
a.—Paste of granular, white, opaque albite, fusing before the 
blowpipe without much difficulty or = 44 of Von Kobell’s scale of 
fusibility. 
b.—Small transparent crystals of quartz-like rock-crystals. 
c.— large crystals of glassy shining albite, with a vitreous lustre 
and a lamellar cleavage. Sections of the crystals are sometimes as 
much as five inches long. 
d.—Plates of white mica; sometimes grey. 
e.—Dark augite (or Horneblende ?) with an Iodine lustre and a dark 
greenish grey colour. It fuses = 4, without swelling or boiling. 
/.—Garnets ; red, brittle and cracked. 
g-—Grains of magnetic iron ore ; metallic lustre ; black. 
h.—Gold; in invisible scales. 
The paste of granular albite is hardly to be seen in the most 
crystalline specimens of the porphyry; but it increases very much as 
the several crystals are less abundant and less well defined, forming 
rocks in which we see, beside it, only a few specks of dark augite and 
spangles of white mica; even these occasionally disappear, and we 
have a rock having a saccharine appearance, and entirely composed of 
minute shining grains of albite. Specimens are found in all the 
stages of transition, from the highly crystallized porphyry to the 
saccharine rock. 
The quartz is not very abundant in the most perfect porphyry, 
but it increases in some specimens, rows of small rock crystals appear- 
* The diminished rain-fall is the result of the filling up with diluvial deposits 
of the great troughs situated between the Himalaya, the Affehan mountains 
and the mountains of Central India once covered by the sea, and now repre- 
sented by the valleys of the Ganges and Indus. This filling up of the 
sea-communication once existing between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian 
Sea, converted the Himalaya’s climate, then insular, or at least littoral, to an 
eminently continental one. The tremendous rain-fall at Cherra-Poonjee 
(504 feet during S. W. Monsoons) enables us to form an idea of what the 
snow-fall must have been on the high summits of the Himalaya in the days 
when the Bay of Bengal extended to the foot of the Siwalik hills, and the 
Arabian Sea bathed the Salt Range, 
