CHAPTER VIII. 



SILURIAN SYSTEM. 

 Zebingyi Stage. 



The next formation to be dealt with is perhaps one of the 

 ^ most interesting to be found in the whole 



of the Shan States, although it is very re- 

 stricted in area, and of slight thickness, even where it is most 

 highly developed. The name of Zebingyi beds, given to it in the re- 

 ports drawn up by Mr. Datta and myself in 1900, is taken from 

 a well known station on the railway between Mandalay and 

 Maymyo, where the traveller fir&t begins to realise that he has 

 left the torrid plains of the Irrawaddy valley for the cool breezes 

 of the uplands. It was in a cutting on the railway then under 

 . construction, about a mile west of the sta- 



1 " tion, that I made my first assault upon the 



rocks of this region, on the 13th December 1899, and I can well 

 recall the thrill of delight and astonishment with which I recog- 

 nised, in the first fossiliferous piece of rock that I broke off, a 

 fragment of a graptolite, the first of that class of organism that 

 had been discovered in Southern Asia. It was this discovery that 

 led me to suspect, at the veiy beginning of my investigations, that 

 the geology and the fossil fauna of the Shan States would be found 

 to differ, in a remarkable degree, fiom anything that was hitherto 

 known in India ; and though it perhaps gave at the outset a 

 certain bias to my opinions, it can hardly be doubted, I think, 

 that subsequent researches, those of the geologists who have been 

 associated with me in this work as well as my own, have tended 

 to confirm this view. 1 propose to return to this subject when 

 the nature of the beds, their distribution, and the fauna contained 

 in them have been described. 



M 2 



