234 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [Oct. 



in this, without knowing it, the writer has referred to one of the most 

 interesting facts in the geology of the Gangetic plains. Above 

 Benares we might say, certainly above the junction of the Jumna and 

 Ganges at Allahabad, the prevailing character of the materials form- 

 ing the wide plains in which these rivers flow, is a hard stiff clay 

 abounding in kunkur, which in places forms great beds or sheets. This, 

 associated occasionally, chiefly in the upper portions of the river valleys, 

 with pebbly beds often concreted by lime forms the prevailing charac- 

 ter of the beds. Below Benares, however, the greater portion of the 

 plain of the Ganges from the foot of the hills on the north, to those 

 on the south, is composed of much more recent deposits, the result of 

 the action of the river itself, chiefly composed of soft incoherent beds 

 of fine sand and silt. Here and there, through these, we find standing up 

 portions of the kunkury clays, &c, to which we have referred, under 

 circumstances which shew that they are remnants of a once widely 

 spread and general deposit, now existing as islands in the stream of the 

 more recent Gangetic alluvium. For these other deposits, we have 

 generally used the term first used by the lamented Dr. Falconer, and 

 called them the ' Older Alluvium.' It is, however, a term apt 

 to mislead, inasmuch as the age of these deposits is very widely 

 removed from that of the true alluvium. These kunkuriferous beds 

 in the Jumna, yielded many valuable fossils years since, which 

 Falconer himself identified with those found in similar deposits in 

 the valley of the Nerbudda, and looking to the proximity geogra- 

 phically, and to the great similarity lithologically, of the two deposits 

 coupled with the similarity of the fossils contained, there seems little 

 question that the so-called Older Alluvium of the Jumna and Ganges 

 is of the same general age as the so-called c Pleiocene' deposits of the 

 Nerbudda and Godavery. Below Allahabad but few fossils have been 

 found in these deposits. I have a joint of a thigh bone (probably 

 bovine) which was obtained in sinking a well near Patna, and a few 

 other fragments have from time to time been found. But even in 

 the Nerbudda, where fossils are much more numerous, they are local 

 in their distribution. 



These islands or isolated areas of the older deposits occur as 

 noticed by Mr. Oldham, near Ghazeepore, south of the Ganges ; they 



