1848.] The Turaee and Outer Mountains of Kumaoon. 601 



kisses of the faithful. The surface of Runsila also presents certain 

 other marks and diagrams, on which the gods amused themselves at 

 whist, pucheesee, &c. Both boulders and fissures are indeed sufficient- 

 ly extraordinary to warrant some superstitious legends in an ignorant 

 population. Humboldt adopts the opinion of Von Buch that these 

 wildernesses of granitic boulders, as well as the fissures, originated in 

 " a contraction of the distended surface of the granitic when first up - 

 heaved." McCulluch, Herbert, &c, seem more inclined to attribute 

 the boulders to the existence of hard and highly crystallized nuclei, 

 which have resisted the decomposition going on all around, caused pro- 

 bably by the action of water on the superabundant felspar. Many of 

 the boulders are also perishing, but somewhat differently ; large and 

 thick concentric coats scale away, and crumble, by the process which 

 Herbert terms, " desquamation," which is equally remarkable in the 

 trap rocks. The fissures appear to be too fresh and sharp to allow of 

 the supposition that they are coeval with the elevation of the rock : 

 they are probably due to the unequal cooling of the mass when a frosty 

 night has succeeded a very hot day. 



This granitic ridge extends continuously from Dernath near Fort 

 Hastings to Sour Phutka, within three miles of Dol ; Herbert's map 

 gives a wrong idea of its area by a single patch only : at Sour Phutka 

 the road leaves it, but the formation is probably continues to Syahee 

 Devee, as the granite re-appears on the west and south faces of Ban- 

 dunee and Motesur mountains ; in the bed of the small stream which 

 joins the Koomnia below Peorah, and on both sides of the Koomnia 

 up to Kupleshwur. In this great outburnt of granite in central Ku- 

 maoon, and the equally important one of greenstone along the line of 

 the Gagur, we are probably to seek the true origin of the curious 

 reversal of the dip by which the gneiss and mica slates of the snowy 

 range have been brought to rise towards the plains. We may suppose 

 that the primitive eruption of the granite in the snowy range originally 

 raised them more or less parallel to itself: and that the subsequent out- 

 burst in central and outer Kumaoon, forced out laterally by the insis- 

 tence of the main range, tilted up their inferior edges into the extraordi- 

 nary position in which we now see them : (T. E. S.). Isolated instances 

 of the original dip remain to countenance this view : thus Binsur and 

 Jagessur mountains are composed of gneiss and mica slate in highly in- 



