4 MIDDLEMISS: PHYSICAL GEOLOGY OF SUB-HIMALAYA. 



through an argument with the closest attention and often reading 

 several times before his full meaning is grasped. 



As an instance of the misconceptions prevailing, Dr. Geikie 1 

 writes, speaking of the Sivvaliks, or younger tertiaries : "They have 

 M been involved.in the last colossal movements whereby the Himalaya 

 u have been upheaved ;" whereas Mr. Medlicott, in enumerating the 

 principal conclusions to which he was led by the study of the 

 Himalaya, writes 2 " the Himalayan mountain-area was defined before 

 " the deposition of the Sabathu nummulitic rocks " [or older Ter- 

 tiaries]. It is true that in later remarks made in the Manual of the 

 Geology of India? he has qualified this statement to a certain extent 

 by urging that all special Himalayan disturbance was altogether post- 

 eocene [post-nummulitic] ; but he again qualifies this, as regards 

 an earlier pre-nummulitic state of Himalayan elevation, which he 

 likens to a simple protuberance (bossellement), or warp, and which 

 he declares to have been considerable, though probably unplicated. 

 The first of these qualifications, however, — namely, that all special 

 Himalayan disturbance was altogether post-eocene, — is misleading 

 if read loosely. The reader is apt to go away with the belief that 

 Mr. Medlicott thereby meant that the Himalayan range, as a great 

 mountain barrier, was undeveloped at that time : he used the words 

 special Himalayan disturbance; but apparently he has been under- 

 stood by Dr. Geikie to mean special Himalayan upheaval — a very 

 different thing. Unfortunately, in making that statement, the former 

 author was trusting largely to the section across the Lapri and 

 Sangar-Marg ridges in the Jamu area*; where a manifest uni- 

 formity in lie between the nummulitics and the Great Limestone 

 (the probable equivalent of the Krol limestone) gave a strong 

 presumption in favour of the belief that the Himalayan rocks were 

 undisturbed before the deposition of the nummulitics. But it is 



1 Text-book of Geology, p. 879, 1st edn., 1882. 8 P. 569. 



2 Mem. G. S. I., Vol. Ill, p. 174. 



4 He also mentions the section of the Sabathu rocks in the Simla area; but the 

 disturbances of all the strata there are so extreme that I cannot regard the evidence of 

 conformability as sufficiently conclusive. 



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