PART 2.] Wynne: Further notes on the Geology of the Ugjjier Piinjnb. 
121 
associated with them, and evidently belonging to the series, though in some 
places having a pseudo-fossiliferous appearance, seem wholly destitute of any 
01 ‘ganic remains discoverable by the naked eye or the pocket lens. 
But in the southern portion of these rocks, along the margin of the mesozoic 
limestones, there are limestone bands included among the slates in which I 
have in two or three instances found fossils. At one spot near the road from 
Khanpur to Haripur (between Padni and the road) I found highly disturbed 
or vertical limestones containing the well mai'ked sections of Bicerocardia, &c., 
and again in a limestone ridge little more than half a mile due west of Bandi 
Atahi (called by the people of the locality Bandi Tai Khan), and east-south¬ 
east of Huveliyan on the Done, I found imperfect and fragmentary casts of 
crushed Ammonites. 
Although there are in the vicinity of these fossil-hearing limestones others 
of the hard, frilled, and peculiar aspect of those found in the slate series, 
I am by no means prepared to say that these beds with the fossils belong to 
that series ; I regard them as more probably belonging to the adjacent mesozoic 
series, let into their present position by dislocation, and subsequently so wedged 
among the slates as to make it appear that the present is their original situation. 
Aly reasons for this conclusion are shortly, that the Bioeroeardmm limestones of 
Hasan Abdal and Sirban are evidently unconformably superior to the slates, 
and that the rib of limestone with Ammonites is almost continuously traceable 
into the mass of mesozoic and eocene limestone hills crossed by the upper road 
from Murreo to Abbottabad. 
For some time past these Attock slates have been provisionally considered 
of Silurian age, from the recorded discovery by Dr. Falconer of “ lower 
Silurian fossils” in the Kabul river of the PesMwar valley (in slaty rocks ?) 
derived from the Khyber hills on the same general strike. Their silurian ago 
was accepted by Dr. Verohere, and adopted by Dr. Waagen and the Geological 
Survey; but it has never appeared that the correlation was quite correct, nor 
have I been able to trace any thing stronger than indirect allusions to Dr. 
Falconer’s discovery; such as Major Godwin-Austen’s reference in his paper on 
Kashmir (Quar. Jour. Geol. Soc., Bond., Vol. XXII, p. 29), where he says, “ As 
lower silurian fossils from the Khyber hills were found by Dr. Falconer in the 
gravel of the Kabul river, as also by Colonel Strachey on the Niti Pass, the great 
masses of slaty and metamorphie rocks which in this part of the Himalayan 
chain underlie the carboniferous beds may be refeired to a lower pateozoic series.” 
Major Vicary mentions a few of the genera found by Dr. Falconer above 
referred to (Proc. Geol. Soc., Bond., Vol. VII, p. 4.5), but it does not appear 
that the whole or most of these are strictly silurian forms. Still the impression 
conveyed is too definite to have been founded on a mere guess. Nor does it 
after all appear that the identity of the Attock slate group and the Khyber beds 
is at all fixed, though veiy similar slaty beds are said to occur beyond the Khyber 
pass towards Jelalabad. Hence the age of these slates can hardly bo con¬ 
sidered established with sufficient accuracy to warrant their being regarded 
definitely as silurian, while the probability is that they are paleeozoic. (See 
Manual, p. 500.) 
