70 MIDDLEM1SS: PHYSICAL GEOLOGY OF SUB-HIMALAYA. 



slopes, void of good roads, will meet him every day in place of the 

 gentler slopes and more softened country which he is leaving behind. 

 At the outset of this subject some difficulties appear. There are 

 no such good natural sections among the rocks of the zones we are 

 now entering upon as there were in the Sub-Himalayan zone. Al- 

 though the Pela*ni R. is better off in this respect than many others 

 which flow through corresponding country, still, owing to the nature 

 of the rocks, such continuous sections cannot often be found. The 

 geologist must gird up his loins and go to work with all his observing 

 faculties awake if he would obtain a rational result. 



I have, in another place, 1 partly described the geology of the 

 Himalayan zone in this neighbourhood as divisible, for the purposes 

 of classification, into an inner and outer set of formations ; the inner 

 being composed of schists and other crystalline rocks ; and the outer 

 in ascending order, of a slate and volcanic breccia series, a massive 

 limestone, a lower and upper T£l (mesozoic) series, and a thin band 

 of nummulitic rocks. To a stranger or novice in Himalayan geology 

 (as I can testify by my own experience), the section we are now 

 called upon to examine would be full of pit-falls and obstacles. As he 

 advanced, step by step, tracing the geology as it would be provision- 

 ally laid down on a working map, he would be puzzled by a great 

 similarity in the dips among different formations ; so that less indur- 

 ated appear to underlie more hardened, and less metamorphosed 

 under more metamorphosed strata. No trace of strike faults or thrust 

 planes would be manifest, as they are in the younger Tertiaries ; no 

 conspicuous crushing along junctions, nor apparent unconformability. 

 True he would eventually be certain that some of the outer formations 

 must be younger than the very metamorphosed schists in the Jhar 

 (Thel) gadh (36), but he would be at a loss to fix the position of the stra- 

 tigraphical hiatus. He would be further hampered by an appearance 

 of passage from the uppermost nummulitics into the southern beds 

 of the purple slate and volcanic breccia series ; for the former have 

 become much more hardened here than I have elsewhere seen them, 



1 Records, Geological Survey of India, Vol. XX, p. 26. 



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