J. EF. CAMPBELL ON GLACIAL PERIODS. 113 
streams in the upper zones. The roads go for passes, and the rivers 
do the same. I conversed with many travellers who had explored 
this road. I could not explore it myself; for the way was blocked 
by the Viceregal train. Miss Gordon Cumming has described this 
route up to Chini, near the frontier of Thibet, with the pen and 
pencil of a clever artist, in her book called ‘ From the Hebrides to 
the Himalayas ’ (London 1876). The author of ‘The Abode of Snow’ 
also describes this route. Every river that flows from a high source, 
and every rill that flows on a slope, at some part of its course, has a 
zone of waterfalls. The water there is digging with all its power. 
The steppe from which it falls is gradually worn away. Steps and 
falls grow higher, and recede up stream, till walls of an amphitheatre 
are nearly reached. Scotchmen call it a corrie, Welshmen a comb. 
As the falls retire, the length of the watercourse above them de- 
creases, and the quantity of water and its power of digging. The 
whole process can be watched between tides on asandy beach. The 
“waterfall zone” in the Himalayas is close up to the watershed, 
from which I gather that the watercourses are very old. The water- 
falls at Simla are close to the watershed at the sources of small 
branches of two systems of streams. One flows to the Bay of Ben- 
gal, the other to the Indian Ocean. The waterfall zone of the 
Sutlej, “ the corrie,” is many marches up close to Thibet. So it is 
in the Ganges basin, and so it is in Siccim and in Bhotan. Where 
glaciers end thereabouts streams fall suddenly down into “ corries” 
like the Yosemite valley, on a grander scale *, 
30. Hirdwar.— After waiting for some days, sketching and 
watching the marvellous landscape from Landour, I went down to 
Dehra, and through the Dun to Hirdwar. That is a sacred place, 
where the Ganges leaves the hills. At the sources of the Ganges 
are glaciers, and peaks above them on the edge of the basin are 
visible from Hirdwar. I have sketches of them. If these glaciers 
ever extended far during a Glacial period, some marks ought to be 
found about the place where a river as big as the chief river of Lom- 
bardy at its greatest size escapes from the great basin, whose jagged 
edges and steep sides I had seen from Landour, where frosts and deep 
snows occur frequently. In a like position in Italy, near Turin, are 
ramparts of glacial debris, which are hills higher than hills at Hird- 
war. Ihad seen them from the railway on the way out. I have 
read of them, and I went to look at them on my return. I had seen 
the shape of the dales above the great lakes of the Alps, up to the 
watershed, in 1841. Hirdwar is 1124 feet above the sea. The 
edge of the basin is nearly 20,000 feet higher, and the area is large 
and comparable to the area of the Val d’ Aosta, on the Lago Mag- 
giore. A Glacial period would lower the snow-line everywhere, 
and lengthen all glaciers, and might fill the Ganges basin with ice, 
because a local cold climate filled the Alpine dales. I stayed at 
Hirdwar for several days, and could find no sign of glacial action 
* This account of the Lower Himalayan slopes towards the east coincides 
with that of the country in which the war is now going on, according to trayel- 
lers who have described that region.—January 11, 1879. 
Q.J.G.8. No. 137. ii 
