PART 4.] II'iioffen : (kmjrajjklcal dlsh'ibniion of fossil ofganisnis in- India, ill 
sandstones, and shales which must, on the whole, correspond with the upper 
palasozoio beds in the western part of the range. It is very difficult to follow 
up the several beds through the several phases of their transition from west to 
east, but I endeavoured to do this at least for the lowest beds of the so-called 
carboniferous limestone, and found that they pass, in progressing from west to 
east, first into coarse-grained white sandstones (which contain a very few 
fossils, chiefly rolled fragments of corals), then into a very coarse conglomerate, 
with boulders as large and larger than a man’s head, and finally into a homo¬ 
geneous gray-green sandstone without any fossils, which appears to stand in 
close relation to Wynne’s magnesian sandstone. 
We have now entered into the domain of the second facies of the palaeozoic 
beds of India, and may turn at once to the typical development of the same in 
the Vindhyan mountains. Several papers have already been written on the 
Vindhyan mountains, and their structure and composition are pretty accurately 
known. According to Mallet^ there rests upon the gneiss a thick formation of 
crystalline and argillaceous schists with quartzites and limestones,** and on these 
the Vindhyan formation lies quite uneonformably. The latter formation begins 
with sandstones, which are soon overlaid by thin-bedded silicious limestones, 
mostly light brown and grey in color, with intermediate earthy beds of variable, 
but considerable thickness. The total thickness of this lower half of the forma¬ 
tion ranges from 1,000 to 1,500 feet; above it comes with apparently but slight 
uncorformity a red sandstone formation of very great thickness which includes 
intercalated beds of shales and conglomerate of greater or lesser thickness, and 
in the upper beds only, a rather considerable bed of compact blue limestone. 
Over the limestone sandstones occur again, and attain locally a thickness of 3,000 
feet. This closes the Vindhyan formation. In the whole of this series of many 
thousand feet in thickness not one single fossil has been discovered, although 
special attention was directed to that point by the Greological Survey. The only 
point of support one has on which to fix the age of these foi’mations is that rolled 
debris of Vindhyan rocks is found already in the Talchir conglomerate, which is 
certainly either very young patoozoic, or very old mesozoic, age, shewing that 
the Vindhyan series should probably be reckoned among the old paleeozoic 
formations. 
Another palaeozoic area of similar type has been described by Kino^ from 
the Madras region. As in the Vindhyan mountains an upper and lower division 
of the formation has been recognized, so also has King divided the palcnozoic 
deposits of the Madras region into two different groups, of which he calls the 
lower, the Kadapa, the upper, the Karnul series. Both of these are more highly 
metamorphosed than are the rocks of the Vindhyan mountains. The lower of the 
two series rests on the gneiss, and consists chiefly of clayslates and quartzites, 
' Mallet : Mem. Geol Suit, of India, Vll. 
® These beds have recently been distinguished as the Gwalior and Arvali scries, but are in my 
map still mostly shown as crystalline, as the materials for cartographic distinction were not 
sufficiently advanced. 
^ King t Mem, Geol. Suit, of India, VIII. 
