180 LA TOUCHE: GEOLOGY OF NORTHERN SHAN STATES. 



of tho beds in the same relative order, with low dips corre- 

 sponding to those of the Plateau Limestone above, on either side 

 of the shallow Zebingyi syncline, is alone sufficient to disprove 

 this theory, as well as the continuous passage upwards from the 

 one formation into the other, which may be followed without any 

 gap through the Zebingyi railway cuttings, and is also seen iu 

 the long line of outcrop reaching from Pvintha to Mvenigon. 

 In any case the connection with the Urals does not appear to 

 have been very direct, for only one of the 

 pean^ro°vin"er ith Ur0 peculiar forms of the Zebingyi beds, and that 

 a doubtful genus and species, Vlasta sp., is 

 allied to any of those described by Tschernyschew. If the Her- 

 cynian fauna had appeared in South-Eastern Asia before the end 

 of the Silurian period, it is difficult to understand why more traces 

 of it are not to be found in the Namhsim group. The only fossils 

 belonging to that facies that occur in that group rre Mimulus 

 aunglohensis and Phacops shane isis, tho latter of which has been 

 found not only in the arei where the graptolite shales are present, 

 but also far to the south-east in Mong Kiing. It appears to 

 me more likely that there had been, throughout the Naungkangyi 

 and Namhsim period, some connection between the sea? of Burma 

 and those of Southern Europe, but not so direct as that with the 

 seas of Northern and Western Europe ; so that the fauna of the 

 latter province frustrated any attempt of the southern fauna to 

 travel eastwards : but that with the changes in the distribution of 

 sea and land that began to take place at the close of Silurian 

 times a more direct connection with Southern Europe was opened 

 up. The movements that effected this change may have only partly 

 closed the old connection with Northern Europe, allowing the 

 Hercynian fauna to travel on the one hand towards the Urals and 

 on the other to the South-East without interference. 1 



By what route the migration took place is quite uncertain. 



It was certainly not by way of the Himala- 

 Himalayan equivalents. . P . .1. ■ , 



yan region, for no traces of this fauna nave 



been found there ; but in Spiti and the Central Himalaya the 



homotaxial equivalent of this horizon is probably the ' Muth 



quartzite,' which succeeds strata of undoubted Silurian age, and 



comes beneath a limestone which, there is some reason to believe, 



1 I'". R. Cowper Reed, Pre-Carboniferous Lifi'-Provin-es, Records, d<ol Sur., Ind., 

 Vol. XL, Pt. 1, p. 20. 



