452 



Proceedings of the Had. Lit. Society [No. 38, 



teresting geological phenomena on historic record namely the Deluge of Scrip- 

 ture- 



The circumstance of some of the oldest cities of the world being built either 

 on them, and the pebbles themselves having been employed in their construc- 

 tion, as at Babylon. Nineveh, Accad, &c. proves their antiquity. 



2- The position of the beds and their extent fully demonstrate that they are 

 no fiuviatile deposits- 



3. Their nearly N- and S- longitudinal axis and the nature of the pebbles 

 show that the course of the flood which deposited them rolled from the north- 

 ward from the direction of Mount Ararat towards the Mount Zead of the Per- 

 sian Gulph washing down fragments from the rocks of the Laurus and Kurdis- 

 tan and grinding their softer materials into the vast, flat mud deposits which now 

 cover the sea-line plains of Assyria, Babylonia and Chaldea- In this light brown 

 and greenish mud are blended the component parts of all the rocks whether cal- 

 careous, argillaceous, siliceous, or ferruginous, with a small portion of vegetable 

 and saline matter, into one undistinguished mass : but we can easily learn from 

 the mineral and fossil character of the pebbles in the gravel, the sources from 

 which they were originally transported and from their small size, roundness of 

 colour and their being exclusively composed of the hardest portions of the 

 parent rocks, we are enabled to estimate with some approach to truth the dis- 

 tance they have travelled, and the amount of friction they have undergone. In 

 the nummulitic pebble and other limestone quartz and serpentine pebbles I dis- 

 tinctly recognize the rocks of the Laurus and the Kurdistan. 



The bed of gravel near Misrak-chi-khan we found to rest on stratified whitish 

 semi-crystalline gypsum. 



The absence of pebbles of lava and basalt in the gravel we examined is re- 

 markable but before any speculations are hazarded on this head further search 

 is necessary. "With regard to any theory making the date of the Deluge de- 

 rivable from an examination of these deposits, I have only to observe that this 

 must be reserved for a future and a better opportunity than is afforded by this 

 list of rocks already too long and tedious- 



19. Nummulitic limestone from the vicinity ofShiraz (Persia.) It resembles 

 exactly the nummulitic limestone of Arabia, near Muscat. Mr- Carter, the learn- 

 ed and indefatigable Secretary of the Bombay Asiatic Society has found num- 

 mulitic limestone in the cliffs fringing the shore of Southern Arabia between 

 Aden and Muscat- I have traced it from the Lybian desert over Egypt to the 

 opposite or Arabian shore of the Red sea by Muscat and the mountains of Shiraz 

 in Persia to the banks of the Indus- It has been traced still farther to the east- 

 ward by Captain Vicary and into Cutch by Captain Grant- 



It occurs near Mardin in upper Mesopotamia and some of the sculptures at 

 Nimrud I observed were chisilled in it- It is there of a light yellowish colour 

 and compact in texture- I am quite of opinion that it must be referred to the 

 supracretacious group, and not to the cretaceous as has been done by some geo- 

 logists- 



(Signed) T. J- Newbold. 



