1866.] the Western Himalaya and Afghan Mountains. 191 
It is evident that a list of fossils, such as is given here, is 
insufficient to determine the age of a bed. My calling the Kothair 
bed Carboniferous, is therefore only temporary, and it is possible, 
and indeed probable, that the bed is either Permian or Triassic. 
I have often felt inclined to regard it as Triassic ; but the total absence 
of Monotis, Ammonites and other characteristic fossils prevents my 
doing so. I have therefore preferred to represent the Kothair bed 
as the top of the Carboniferous series, until some characteristic forms 
be discovered. The Kothair bed was examined much more super- 
ficially than the others, owing to want of time; yet it is worthy of 
notice that I have never heard of an ammonite having been found 
in the valley of Kashmir, though the mountains of Kothair limestone, 
at the extreme eastern end of the valley, are very often visited by 
tourists and amateur geologists. 
51. The Kothair formation differs from the Zeeawan and Weean 
by the great quantity of shales it contains, these being in thick 
strata between thin beds of limestone. The fauna is, I believe, 
strongly indicative of a low swampy shore bathed by a shallow 
brackish sea. The arrangement of the iron-ore is, I fancy, to be 
explained only by the hypothesis of a clayey shelving sea board: any 
one who has observed hot chalybeate springs issue from the earth, 
near a flat piece of ground, must have noticed the sluggish stream 
divide into rills and rillets, form shallow pools here and there, reunite 
and divide again, meandering over the clayey soil; he will have 
noticed the oxide of iron contained in the water precipitated along 
the rivulets and in the pools as a bright red peroxide, whilst the 
surface of the nearly stagnant water is covered by a many-coloured 
film. This, I would submit, is the very process by which the iron 
of the Kothair shales has been deposited on the flat muddy shore 
of the Carboniferous sea: the rills of chalybeate water have become 
the tabular ribbons of our iron-ore, and we have therefore the iron- 
stone arranged as a main flat vein, or rather in somewhat parallel 
veins, with irregular small shoots on both sides, and occasionally 
a thickened and widened mass representing a pool or a hole in the 
bed of the stream. Many springs, such as I have described, exist 
now-a-days in the Salt Range, near the Kafir Kote hill, and in several 
localities in the Himalaya; the iron mud they deposit would, under 
favourable circumstances, and in the course of long years, form beds 
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