524 Memoranda on the Geology of Silikim, 



Rumam^ where the rock rises very high, and bears the appear- 

 ance of some fort of the giants, with bastions of enormous 

 proportions, and other phenomena in keeping. 



In the quartz of the gneiss I have met lime, as on 

 the Pucheem road ; and near the top of Goongla following 

 the old road up the Bellassun valley to the Rungeet valley, 

 there is a piece of gneiss rock through which small amethysts, 

 or seed amethysts are profusely scattered, of the size of half 

 a barley-corn. 



It may be worth while to mention, that the gneiss rock 

 about Darjeeling contains, nodules of a flinty appearance, 

 or more probably they are fused quartz, which some have 

 supposed to be fossil remains. There is a specimen to be 

 seen on Mr. Turton^s grounds, which has an appearance re- 

 sembling the back of a huge lizard, with divisions answering 

 to the scales ; but the divisions seemed to me to pass down 

 through the mass of the specimen, and not to have taken 

 their shapes from the covering of any animaFs body, or from 

 having been filtered into a mould shaped from any animal 

 which had originated the form for its reception. The cir- 

 cumstance of no fossil remains having been heretofore found 

 on primitive rocks, maj' be thought to cause an unwilling- 

 ness to admit these appearances to be what some have thought 

 them to be ; but for my own part I have no theory to main- 

 tain in geological matters, and would readily agree to their 

 being fossil relics, if I saw reason for their being so considered. 

 In the menilites of Menihnoutant, we have something of the 

 kind now spoken of (and they by the bye are allowed to be of 

 animal origin) only on a smaller scale, for the quartzy nodules 

 here alluded to, are of a much greater size than any menilites 

 I ever saw, and may weigh some of them many pounds. 



Lower on the hills as above remarked than the gneiss, slate 

 occurs in the forms both of mica slate and of clay slate, 

 and in the former chiefly graphite is met with, as at Punka- 

 baree on the new road ; also in the land slip to the east of 



