1844.] from Masulipatam to Goa. 995 



alternation of other beds, and the rock appears one unstratiform trap 

 often cleft by vertical fissures, into columns and pinnacles. 



I have dwelt longer upon the subject of the Beder laterite, than it at 

 first sight might appear to merit, but I may plead in extenuation that 

 it is the first bed seen, beyond the granitic and hypogene area, resting on 

 the overlying trap (a rock and the nature of the rock on which it rested 

 had been differently stated by Malcolmson and Voysey, by the former as 

 granite, the question however by this visit has been set at rest for ever) 

 which probably belongs to the tertiary period. Calder to whom we are in- 

 debted for the only general view of Indian geology hitherto published, 

 and whose ideas have been quoted by some eminent European geologists, 

 terms laterite "a contemporaneous rock associating with trap, and com- 

 mencing only where the overlying trap ends, a little to the N. of Bankote, 

 or Fort Victoria, and thence covering the primitive rocks of the Ghauts 

 and W. coast to Cape Comorin". Now the laterite of Beder, and many 

 other localities, some of which will be described in the course of this 

 paper, lies beyond the area of the rocks termed primitive by Mr. 

 Calder, and rests upon the overlying trap ; it has never been observed 

 underlying or alternating with it, therefore the only proofs available, viz. 

 that of superposition and non-alteration, tend to prove its more recent 

 and non-contemporaneous origin ; a point of great importance. The 

 existence in it of veins of manganese and of large beds of the same 

 mineral I afterwards discovered in the laterite area capping the granitic 

 and hypogene rocks of the Kupputgode range in the S. Mahratta coun- 

 try are remarkable facts worthy of note, for until we find beds and 

 veins of this mineral in the granitic and trappean rocks underlying the 

 laterite we must be slow to admit the theory, advocated by several 

 geologists, of the latter being nothing more than the result of the re- 

 cent disintegration of the former rocks in situ. The beds of lignite 

 discovered by General Cullen and myself in the laterite of Malabar 

 and Travancore, and the deposits of petrified wood in the red hills of 

 Pondicherry in a rock which though differing in structure, I con- 

 sider as identical in age with the laterite, and other facts too long for 

 enumeration here point rather to its detrital origin, like sandstones. 

 I do not ever recollect having seen in the laterite resting on the 

 overlying trap any fragments of the calcedonies or zeolites that of- 

 ten so greatly abound in the rock immediately below it, a fact which 



