168 Mr. Verchere on the Geology of Kashmir, [No. 3, 



not visited that long chain of hills, and have not travelled up the 

 Kohew valley, I was enabled in following these ribbons, to see 

 that it is composed of the variety of limestone which I have called 

 the Weean Bed. 



We shall observe these ribbons wherever the Weean limestone 

 is well developed ; they are to be seen in the section I have 

 given, between Zeeawan and Koonmoo, on the southern aspect of 

 the Zebanwan. I did not mention them there, because they 

 make but little show near these localities ; but we shall see them 

 well marked near Mutton, in the eastern portion of the valley of 

 Kashmir. 



32. I will now try to characterise the Weean Bed of carboniferous 

 limestone. 



It is a very arenaceous and argillaceous limestone, the sand being 

 either in thin grey bands, or mixed with the general paste of 

 the rock. A sandy, marly clay, yellow, dirty-yellow, pale brown 

 or brown, forms thin and very false-bedded films in the rock, so 

 that this is striped when bisected vertically, and patchy bluish and 

 yellow when divided horizontally. The hardest beds are brittle, flesh- 

 coloured and generally full of bright red minute crystals of haematite, 

 and the fossils are here replaced by a powdery or semi-crystalline 

 haematite which, however imperfectly, preserves their outlines. The 

 harder rock is never blue, and the blue variety of rock is suffici- 

 ently muddy to have a soft, velvety, lustreless appearance like a 

 fine clay, and not the clean brittle fracture of a pure and hard 

 limestone. It has in places all the appearance of a very dirty dark- 

 grey mud dried up, and it is then full of fossils and extremely foetid. 

 It contains lenticular beds of a very pale, nearly friable limestone, 

 containing black specks which are the rings of stems of very minute 

 crinoids, and this variety of soft limestone is the habitat of large 

 bivalves. One single bed of limestone may be mistaken for Zeeawan 

 limestone, bluish-grey, coarse hard and semi-crystalline, but it 

 contains innumerable Foraminiferce transformed into yellow ochre 

 very large Pectens, and an incredible quantity of fragmentary 

 Crinoidea. Indeed, it is the great number of those small rings of 

 crinoid stems, always crystallized, which causes the rock to resemble 

 the limestone of the Zeeawan Bed. 



