DETAILED ACCOUNT OF SOME RECENT EXPERIMENTS, 69 



any success. The only record of this boring which I could obtain 

 was in a letter from the Arracan Company to the Akyab Municipal 

 Commissioners, in which they write that at 421 feet they reached 

 a stiff clay and could make no further progress, and that long before 

 they reached the clay they went through several layers of sand and 

 gravel, but there was no sign of water anywhere. This is very in- 

 definite as it does not show how much of this depth was bored in the 

 alluvial beds or whether it was even entirely in the alluvium. Wells 

 sunk close to the ridge of rocks get down through the alluvium to 

 the underlying rock at a very moderate depth, but there is evidence 

 to show that the thickness of the recent deposits increases as one 

 gets away from this ridge, and the increase is possibly very rapid," 



{4) Gujarat. 



A large portion of GujaVit is covered with alluvium, but not to 

 any depth comparable with that of the Indo-Gangetic plain. The 

 subject of artesian wells has received a certain amount of attention 

 in that province because irrigation is needed to supplement 

 occasional deficiency of rainfall, and also on account of the fact 

 that in many places the water of the wells is hard and brackish. 

 Although the depth of the alluvium is inconsiderable, very little is 

 known concerning the older rocks underlying it. So far as can be 

 made out, the Gulf of Cambay seems to occupy a shallow basin of 

 disturbance ; the various strata, both to the east 



Structure in the neigh- 

 bourhood of the Gulf of and west, dipping at low angles under the 

 Cambay. . 



alluvium. The structure therefore is favourable 

 to the formation of an artesian reservoir, provided that some of the 

 strata have a capacity for transmitting water. In all probability 

 the rocks underlying the alluvium are basaltic strata of the "Deccan 

 trap" overlaid by tertiary strata If, as is not improbable, the 

 lowest strata of the tertiariesare coarse gravel beds resting upon t'ie 

 surface of the volcanic layers, thi circumstance combined with the 



i 69 ) 



