•28 
DIENER : TRIAS OR THE HIMALAYAS. 
the Dras valley, and originally determined by him as Megalodon 
columhella} 
According to Bittner, they are imbedded in an impure calcareo- 
arenaceous rock, and he suggests that the specimens may belong to the 
same horizon — or one nearly related to it — as those bivalves which had 
been described in 1865 by C. W. Guembel from the collections of the 
brothers Schlagintweit.- Those bivalves proved in part identical with 
species from the Alpine Werfen beds, and were imbedded in a shaly, 
micaceous, very dense, yellow-grey, calcareous sandstone, resembling 
" Grauwacke," which, according to Guembel, is scarcely distinguishable 
from certain layers of the Alpine Werfen beds. 
A. V. Krafft lays special stress on the fact that in the Himalayas, 
as far as they have been surveyed, the Lower Trias has always been found 
to consist of limestones with Cephalopoda and bivalves, intercalated 
with shales, but that sandstones have been observed nowhere. This is 
also the case at Lilang, only a few miles from Dankhar, the locality 
at which the Schlagintweit fossils are reported to have been found. 
A. v. Krafft therefore peremptorily emphasizes the fact that sand- 
stones are entirely absent from the Lower Trias of Spiti. 
When visiting Spiti in 1899, he endeavoured, but in vain, to clear 
up the evident discrepancy existing between the actual facts and 
Guembel's record. 
On inquiry of several natives of Dankhar and the neighbourhood 
as to the existence of a village of the name Balamsali, he invariably 
received the answer that no village of that name was known. 
Nor could he find in the sections near Dankhar any support for 
Guembel's statement. 
The Lower Trias is — with the Muschelkalk — cut out near Dankhar 
by a big fault running parallel to the Spiti valley. He searched in 
the few rivulets, in which sections are exposed, but observed in one 
locality only a thin wedge of black limestone with Cephalopoda, 
belonging to the Lower Trias and compressed between the Permian 
Productus shales and a limestone mass of ladinic or carnic age, which 
had been pushed by a fault over this wedge. 
1 F. Stoliczka : Memoirs, Geol. Surv. of India, V, p. 349. 
2 Sitzungsber. kgl. Akad. d. Wissensch. Muenchen, 1865, II, p. 348. 
( 229 ) 
