302 Carboniferous Glaciation , Etc .— White. 
den succeeded in removing numerous scratched and grooved 
blocks from the Talchir terrane in the valley of the Godaveri, 
and found the underlying hard Vindhyan limestone scored 
with innumerable deep parallel scratches and furrows. It 
must be remembered that the Talchir terrane is the basal 
member of the great sequence of fresh water or lacustrine forma¬ 
tions forming the great plateau of central India, and extending 
into Bengal on the east and reaching over into the Trans-Indus 
region on the west. It is a typical system, based on biological 
and stratigraphical relations and sequence. The lower Gond- 
wanas consist of the Talchir, Karharbari, Damuda and Pan- 
chet; the upper division of the system includes the Rajmahal, 
Kota-Maleri, Cutch and Jabalpur, respectively, passing up¬ 
wards. The boulder beds characterize and constitute a large 
part of the Talchir terrane which blends upwards into the 
Karharbari. They underlie the coal-bearing strata in deposits 
of varying depth, often from 500 to 800 feet in thickness, and 
consist of clays, fine silts, boulders, sandy shales, conglomer¬ 
ates, and soft sandstones. The Talchirs are remarkable every¬ 
where, and are to be at once distinguished by the presence of 
semi-angular and somewhat rounded pebbles, boulders and 
rock masses of quartzite, Vindhyan rocks, granite, gneiss and 
other metamorphic rocks. The boulders, which consist of 
rocks usually foreign to the localities in which they are found, 
are generally but slightly rounded, and are smoothed, fur¬ 
rowed, and striated in parallel straight lines. Frequently the 
fine silty matrix contains boulders, facetted and perfectly 
polished as by a lapidary, the surface scored, often in two or 
more directions, in sets of parallel striations precisely similar 
to the scoring, furrowing and polishing which rocks carried 
down by glaciers are so well known to exhibit. 1 These boul¬ 
ders are not at angles of repose incident to current action, but 
often lie at all angles, and, further, they lie imbedded in silt 
too fine to admit of any explanation other than that they 
must have been dropped there in quiet water from floating ice 
above. In the neighborhood of Madras Mr. R. B. Foote found 
at numerous places, quartzite boulders of 800 to 1,000 cubic 
1 Descriptions are given in nearly all the papers referred to and 
illustrations of the boulders may be found in those by Grisebach, Old¬ 
ham, Warth, Wynne, Waagen and W. T. Blanford. 
