204 



Notes on Geological Specimens from 



[July 



washing in small shelving hollows dug in the clay. It is then melted, 

 and its quality said to be improved by using teak branches : the iron 

 is soft, but part is used in the mixture from which wootz steel is form- 

 ed. The strata of the schists have been broken and elevated, but the 

 dip and direction are in no two places the same. Here also, the granite 

 was seen, in the bed of a torrent, in thin concentric scales, not unlike 

 the extremities of petrified trees, caused by the unequal waste of the 

 component parts, the quartz projecting unaltered. 



On approaching the hills, the soil gradually became black, with scat- 

 tered fragments of calcedony; and at the first part of the ascent, 

 which is for some distance very gradual, a singular fragment of 

 semi-vitrified matter was met with, containing small white crystals 

 of felspar. It could not be distinguished from a piece of granite fused 

 in a steel furnace, with which it was compared by Dr. Voysey. At the 

 same place there were fragments so much like iron slag, that till I 

 found them in a large mass resembling a dyke, I supposed that they 

 were the product of a furnace. The granite continues the sur- 

 face rock a little further, passing into a black hard basalt, inter- 

 mixed with many white spots, apparently of felspar ; but I saw none of 

 them rounded or distinctly crystallized, forming amygdaloid or green- 

 stone porphyry, such as occur at the lower part of the pass leading 

 to Eidlabad. On ascending the last part of the base of the hills, 

 the surface was strewed with calcedonies, quartz, and other mine- 

 rals of the same family, and amongst them, a few fragments of a 

 softish white clayey and silicious stone, containing small shells of fresh 

 water families. The trap then became softer, more vesicular with 

 calcedonies, zeolites, &c. imbedded, and the surface covered with tabular 

 crystals of the same kind as those remarkable in the Poonah trap rocks; 

 and latterly concentric, the external layers decomposing, and the nucleus 

 lying in a soft greenish wacke. I spent several hours in ascending the 

 highest points of the range, but was unable to discover any beds of fossil 

 shells ; large blocks of quartz were, however, observed, with a singu- 

 larly angular surface, and sometimes with fine capillary crystals, much 

 of which was found with the fossil fragments ; and afterwards, in the 

 same position and partaking of the characters of the fossiliferous 

 masses found in situ. These blocks were seen extending along the 

 steep face of the hill at the same level as if they had been forced out of 

 the mountain, or rather, as if the basalt, when erupted, had covered, 

 and partially melted the bed on which it lay, and thus caused the sin- 

 gular appearance of those blocks. The highest summit east of the 

 pass is caped by some horizontal strata, having some resemblance to 

 sandstone that had been altered and blackened by heatj what its real 

 nature was, I could not determine. 



