STRATIGRAPHICAL FEATURES. 53 



with pink shaly partings, the whole as far as 1 know quite unfossili- 

 ferous. Together these beds are not more than 250 to 500 feet in 

 thickness. They are so constant in lithological character that they 

 form one of the most valuable guides for unravelling these very 

 often extremely difficult sections. 



The lower of these two bands is formed by bright red to pink 

 quartz shales, which form a distinct and easily recognized horizon, 

 but are evidently closely connected with the underlying phyllites, 

 between the upper strata of which similar thin bands of red quartz 

 shales appear as, for, instance, near Gweldung, north of Niti. Some- 

 times some thin limestone bands are intercalated between the quartz 

 shales, but they also are coloured densely red. They pass upwards 

 into thin-bedded whitish green quartz shales and grey quartzite, with 

 which the red shales alternate to a certain extent. These two hori- 

 zons are never absent from any lower palaeozoic section ; the passage 

 from the underlying haimanta quartzites into the red shales and the 

 absence of fossils seemed to indicate the desirability of including the 

 red shales with the haimantas, rather than with the overlying lower 

 Silurians. In all the figured sections in this memoir, I have indicated 

 this horizon of red shales as 3. 



Long ago Dr. F. Stoliczka 1 described the palaeozoic rocks of 

 The haimanta system Spiti and identified certain micaceous slates, 

 in Spiti. quartzites and conglomerates (Babeh series) 



with General Strachey's azoic rocks of Kumaon. The latter are the 

 haimantas of this memoir, and when I visited the Spiti valley in 1883, 

 I could verify the correctness of Stoliczka' s conclusions with regard 

 to the correlation of the haimanta horizon both in Spiti and Kumaon. 

 The boundary between the crystalline rocks of the Babeh pass and 

 the haimanta system is not sharply defined ; in fact intrusive granite 

 obscures the actual contact where 1 have seen it, and left me very 

 much in doubt -whether it would not be found that here, as in the 

 easternmost sections, a passage exists between the two rock systems 

 The difference in the dip, mentioned by Stoliczka, of the gneiss of the 



1 Mem., Geol. Surv. Ind., Vol. V. 



( 53 ) 



