56 MIDDLKMISS: PHYSICAL GKOLOGY OF SUB-HIMALAYA. 



ists and villagers; the establishment of numerous safeguards against 

 loss by fire and axe ; and the destruction of useless kinds of timber ; 

 not to mention other minutiae of forestry which have helped to bring 

 the forests to their present flourishing condition. 



How the geology of to-day links itself with that of former ages, 

 and how the present time is but a moment of the immeasurable past, 

 and may in future ages come to be regarded rather as a portion of a 

 continuous geological cycle in this region, is very well illustrated in 

 the Recent and sub-Recent gravel deposits of the R£mganga. During 

 the dry rainless season of the year the waters of this river are seen 

 to form a narrow stream in a wide bed of glistening white peb- 

 bles, which marks its expansion in the monsoon, or its periodical 

 changes of the last few years. Next, there are slightly elevated 

 islands or banks of still older gravel which are now in the process 

 of being cut through by the river, and which to some extent have 

 become clothed with vegetation of young sissoo (shisham) and 

 khair, with debris of broken drift-wood, dead trunks and tangled 

 sprawling tree roots. Above these, rising well out of the river-bed, we 

 see still older terraces, spreading in long flat steps one above another 

 over most of the level portions of the dun. They are somewhat 

 covered with soil, and support a dense grass jungle in which a tiger 

 is as easily hidden as a grasshopper among the shoots of a well-kept 

 lawn. Still higher slope the uppermost Siwalik conglomerates, or 

 slightly coherent gravels, gently inclined to the north and flattening 

 out under the gravels ; but marking as plainly as the present river 

 deposits the former existence in this locality of a river, which we can 

 only regard as the direct parent of the Ra*mganga. Looking back 

 in imagination through the ages involved in the accumulation of this 

 sediment, we see an evolution from past conditions into present, as 

 plainly stamped on the features of the earth as we do when we trace 

 back the existing forms of life, the elephants, carnivores, and ungulata, 

 which to-day swarm in these jungles, into their ancestral forms lying 

 embedded in these very deposits. 



Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his fascinating book on the Malay Archi- 

 ( "4 ) 



