I8G7.] the Western Himalaya and Afghan Mountains. 25 



second cause of disturbance began to act : the beds of salt are often 

 dissolved and removed by water infiltrating through cracks in the 

 rocks ; a cavity is thus formed under the vault of rocks which covered 

 in the salt and one day the vault falls in. 



This process is to be seen now-a-days in actual existence, on a 

 small scale, in the hillock of Maree on the Indus. 



Thus, from the swelling of the gypsum by its transformation from 

 anhydrite to common gypsum, and from the falling in of the vaults 

 formed by this swelling, the beds of the Saliferian formation in the 

 Punjab have a most broken and turned-over appearance. 



Add to this that these beds have participated in the convulsions 

 produced by the great final upheaval of the Himalaya, and you will 

 have no difficulty in understanding how difficult it is to make out 

 with certainty the stratography of these rocks, and how it is that the 

 Saliferian appears here and there inferior to the Palaeozoic beds. Before 

 quitting the Saliferian formation, let us notice that the beds of it 

 appear to have suffered very great denudation. We can easily, un- 

 derstand that the red marl was very easily denuded, when we see how 

 it crumbles into a powdery, friable, fluid earth, after a few days 

 exposure to the atmosphere. It is on account of this denudation, on 

 account of the very considerable amount of material which this for- 

 mation gave to the Miocene and to the alluvium deposits of Upper 

 India, that the presence of Reh or Kullur in the soil of the Punjab 

 \ and the North- West Provinces is to be credited to the Saliferian. I 

 shall say a- few words about this again, when we explain how the 

 Miocene was made up, in the next chapter. 



As there is yet such incertitude about the age of the salt, I have 

 called the formation " Saliferian," without entering it on the Map as 

 belonging either to the Palaeozoic or to the Mezozoic epoch,* 



The carboniferous limestone is covered in, north of Vurcha, by an 

 Oolitic formation of trifling thickness and containing Oxfordian forms. 



* I have purposely avoided insisting on the mineral characters of the 

 Saliferian formation of India, as it is now-a-days the fashion to undervalue 

 very much these characters ; but it may be as well to remember that in the 

 Salt Range we have beds of gypsum full of rock-crystals of a bipyramidal 

 shape ; that the layers of gypsum are separated by calcareo-magnesian bands, 

 having a cellular disposition (Cargneule of the Swiss, Rankwacke of the 

 Germans) and that the salt is accompanied by a bright red marl without 

 1 fossils. These several characters are found in the Triassic salt and gypsum of 

 Switzerland, of Savoy and of Spain, and, I believe, in no other formation. 



4 



