GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA. 265 



courses. The section was found to correspond with that observed in 

 the Daphla hills to the east by Colonel Godwin Austen, and 

 with that described by Mr. Mallet in the Bhutan Duars to the 

 west. Inside the tertiary zone there is a belt of carboniferous 

 Damuda strata bordering the schistose rocks of the higher hills. 

 Here too, as elsewhere, along the foot of the Himalayas, the coal 

 is so crushed as to be unserviceable. Later on Mr. La Touche 

 examined the Longrin coal field on the south-west edge of the Garo 

 hills. His report, which is published with a map in Vol. XVII. of 

 the " Records," Part 3, shows that the field offers an abundant supply 

 of very fair coal easily accessible on the very borders of the plain of 

 Sylhet. 



In connexion with the record of Indian geological progress, men- 

 tion may be here made of a very instructive discussion of geological 

 homotaxis given by Mr. W. T. Blanford in -his address as 

 President i.o the Geological Section of the British Association on 

 the occasion of their meeting at Montreal. Being mainly illustrated 

 from Indian geology the paper was reprinted in the " Records." 

 Mr. Blanford is inclined to modify Professor Huxley's statement 

 that " for anything that geology or palaeontology is able to show 

 " to the contrary, a Devonian fauna and flora in the British Islands 

 " may have been contemporaneous with Silurian life in North 

 " America, and with a carboniferous fauna and flora in Africa."* 

 Granting such conditions to be possible for a terrestrial fauna or 

 flora, Mr. Blanford considers that the marine fauna would give 

 a much nearer approximation to synchrony. Mr. Oldham also 

 dealt with the same subject in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of 

 Bengal for 1884 (Part II., p. 187), and illustrated from Indian 

 palaeontology the great discrepancies in correlations of time from 

 fossil evidence. He also .endeavoured to establish synchronous 

 relations of distant formations through the evidence of periods of 

 glaciation, and arrived at the conclusion that in early secondary 

 times the crust of the earth did not occupy the same position with 

 respect to the axis of rotation as it does now. 



Two memoirs were published in 1884, Mr. Bose's on the Lower 

 Narbada valley between Nimawar and Kawant, and Mr. Fedden's 

 on Kathiawar, each with a map. They form Parts 1 and 2 of Vol. 

 XXL In the " Palgeontologia Indica," five parts of ISeries X., the 

 Indian Tertiary and Post Tertiary Vertebrata by Mr. Lydekker, 

 were published during the year, forming a very valuable addition to 



• Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, Vol. XVIJI., p. xlvi. 



