PAINKANDA SECTIONS. 87 



beds of Hundes any such changes have taken place, which could have 

 lifted the high plateau of Tibet to its present sea-level, although 

 evidences in neighbouring areas x point to the probability of the 

 folding process being still continued to the present day. It is pro- 

 bable that the ossiferous deposits are lacustrine ; both the confined 

 situation which must have existed since middle tertiary times and the 

 nature of the deposits seems to point to lacustrine origin as the only 

 likely mode of its deposition. Also, in all parts of Central Asia 

 hitherto examined, the change from marine to fresh-water conditions 

 had set in in pliocene times, and the inference seems clear that also 

 here the change of physical conditions had not been delayed into 

 later tertiary times. 



Assuming, therefore, a later pliocene and even pleistocene age 

 for the ossiferous deposits of Hundes, as Lydekker has done with a 

 good show of reason, it follows that no great change in physical 

 conditions had taken place since that period ; the structural relations 

 of these deposits to the underlying beds preclude the theory of their 

 having been disturbed on a large scale since the time of their 

 formation. 



PART IL 



DESCRIPTION OF SECTIONS AND SUMMARY. 



Chapter V.— Painkanda Sections (Garhwal). 

 When I started work in the higher Himalayas in 1879, I began 

 First season's work w * tn tn€ examination of the sections of the 

 in the Niti area. Painkanda district. The area which I visited 



at first, namely, the ground between Malari and Niti, remained almost 

 unintelligible to me at the time. Fossils I found many, but few of them 

 were characteristic ones, and the mass of debris which obscure all the 

 lower slopes, together with the inaccessibility of most of the peaks 

 above them, left me in great uncertainty about the true succession of 



1 See " Field notes," Rec. Geol. Surv. Ind., Vol. XIX, pp. 260, &c. ; XX, p. 101. 



( 87 ) 



