127 
Geological Society of London. 
above tlie sea. This the author regarded as very improbable. He 
assumed that the President, rejecting the evidence adduced by 
various writers in favour of the glacial origin of the Talchir aml 
Karoo Boulder-beds, was inclined to fall back upon the notion of 
their being of volcanic origin, and quoted a letter from Mr. King, 
who had described the Talchir rocks of Kamaram as trappean, in 
which that gentleman stated that the rocks so interpreted by kirn 
prove to be dark green and brownish mudstone. He cited further 
evidence of like nature, and concluded that the ascription of a 
volcanic origin to these boulder-beds was probably in all cases due 
to similar misinterpretations. 
The President, having quitted the chair, stated that in the remarks 
he had made he had no wish to dogmatize, as the author seemed to 
think ; and further, that those remarks were not made by him as 
President, but as a simple Fellow of the Society, in a paper written 
before he had the honour of filling the office of President. In 
connexion with the assumed improbability of a change of level to 
the extent of 14,000 or 15,000 feet, required, according to the 
author, by the liypothesis that the beds referred to were formed by 
local glaciers, he noticed that there was in the immediate neigh- 
bourhood of some of these deposits a fault with a downthrow of 
12,000 feet, so that such changes were at all events not impossible. 
He remarked that as Professor at Cooper’s Hill he had prepared an 
abstract of all that had been written on the geology of India, and 
in so doing had made a selection of the different views that had 
been expressed by Indian geological surveyors as to the nature of 
the beds in question, but found their opinions so strjkingly divergent 
that he was forced to go back to the facts. He described the ränge 
of the great Talchir formation from the Sone river in the north to 
Hyderabad in the south-east and the Nerbudda in the north, and 
stated that throughout the whole region the plant-bearing series is 
underlain by crystalline rocks, except in one instance by Vindhyan 
rocks. The Coal-bearing series is found in basins or broken Seg- 
ments between great faults, the whole country, in fact, being much 
broken. The succession of the beds he described as follows : — At 
the top the Panchet beds, then the Barakar, and at the bottom the 
Talchir deposits about 500-800 feet thick, having as their lowest 
member a bed consisting of boulders United by a sandy silt. To- 
wards the Nerbudda it was possible to trace within a few miles the 
source from which the blocks had been derived. The boulder-bed 
presented a close resemblance to an old shore-deposit, but to this 
might be objected the large size and angularity of the blocks, many 
of which must have travelled far, and some of which are scratched. 
The underlying rocks are sometimes grooved. The deposit occurs 
over an immense area, and its formation must have occupied much 
time, and some forces raust have been at work to bring the blocks 
down and scratch them. Some Indian surveyors have referred their 
presence to the action of shore-ice. He maintained that scratching 
and angularity do not necessarily imply ice-action. With regard to 
the grooviug of the underlying rock, he remarked that on rocky 
