IN SOUTHERN INDIA. 



283 



deserving of much more attention than it afterwards received. 

 Many of Newbold' s most important deductions were the 

 result of his personal observations over extensive areas which 

 he traversed during his frequent official journeys. 



The work of other original observers will be referred to in 

 the sequel when dealing with the geological formations they 

 described. 



Shortly 6 after the commencement of the geological survey 

 in Madras, Mr. H. F. Blanford had to proceed to the Nil- 

 giris on account of his health, and while there occupied himself 

 in surveying the plateau of that interesting mountain mass. 

 The immediate result of this was to show the fallacy of a 

 view held by Captain Newbold as well as many others at 

 that time and still later, namely that each of the mountain 

 plateaus and ridges contained a great irrupted nucleus of 

 granitic rocks. Subsequent researches have shown that such 

 granitic nuclei have no existence anywhere in Southern India, 

 and that the metamorphic rocks (the hypogene rocks of 

 Newbold) have not been greatly broken up and dislocated by 

 intrusions of granite, to which the present outlines of the 

 country were supposed to be largely due. The existing 

 outlines are almost entirely due to atmospheric erosion acting 

 over vast periods of time, the gneissic highlands of the south 

 of the peninsula being one of the oldest known portions of 

 terra fi'rma. 



Th§ cretaceous rocks, with the examination of which the 

 survey of South India began, were discovered in 1840 by 

 Mr. Kaye, of the Madras Civil Service. A large collection of 

 fossils was made by him and Mr. Brooke Cunliffe, M.C.S., 

 and submitted to the eminent palaeontologist, Prof. Edward 

 Forbes, who described and figured many new forms in a very 



6 Mr. H. F. Blanford' s Memoir on the Nilgiris appeared in 1859 in 

 vol. i. of the Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India. 



