1^2 
Records of the Geological Suneg of India. 
[vOL. XII. 
2. Tanol group : (Azoic ).—Lying between the Attock slate region and the 
metamorphic area is a great group of rocks, the existence of which was unknown 
until the past season, and the analogues of which I am unable to discover 
among the recorded sections of Kashmir and tlie Pir Panjal. I have called these 
rocks for sake of distinction the “ Tanol” group, from the ancient name of the 
country they occupy. 
These beds are always associated with the schists of the northern series, 
and they appear to pass both into and underneath a considerable section of these 
schistose rocks. They comprise an enormous thickness of gray or drab quartz- 
oso or quartzite rocks, in rapid alternation with dark earthy bands, flaggy, 
shaly or slightly schistose. Many of the daa-k inteiwening bands remote from the 
gneiss are in appearance scarcely altered, and have much the look of Indian 
Jurassic plant beds. Others of the alternating layei’s are exceedingly fine, 
unctuous, slaty argillite, sometimes associated with conglomeratic slates, the 
pebbles of which, ranging up to the size of goose eggs, are usually formed of 
white quartz or quartzite. 
The quarzites or quartz rocks frequently show lines of oblique lamination, 
or other lines of deposition; and they include amongst them beds of almost un¬ 
changed sandstone, the weathered surfaces of which have the small warty pro¬ 
tuberances such as are frequently observed upon certain mesozoic sandstones in 
the peninsular Indian area. 
Some of these Tanol rocks, towards the apparently upper part of the group, 
are of a clear grayish white color, soft enough to mark the fingers ivhen handled, 
and with these the slaty rocks of paler color prevail. The soft white rock is not cal¬ 
careous, nor has it a strongly argillaceous appearance ; reduced to fine powder it is 
but slightly soluble in acids, even when boiled for a considerable time: it fuses on 
thin edges to a white glass, and in powder on charcoal to a somewhat coherent semi- 
fused mass, giving no alumina reaction wdth nitrate of cobalt, nor any distinct 
magnesia color. This powder fuses with effervescence in carbonate of soda, but 
is not quite fusible in borax. The color of the bead given with reagents ivas not 
definite enough to form an ojDinion by. The specific gravity of the pieces examined 
W'as about 2'7B. These soft white beds, though retaining a good deal of their 
detrital aspect, have undergone so much metamorphism that it is uncertain what 
kind of sandstones they originally were; and yet the strata amongst which they 
are intercalated do not seem to have suffered extreme alteration. 
Occupjdng synclinal folds, or else occurring at various horizons, in the 
Tanol group are thick zones of variously colored pseudo-brccciated, silicious, 
cherty or compact gray, black, and buff dolomitic limestone, with which are 
occasionally associated intensely black graphitic and sulphurous shales, or else 
purple and red sandstones and slaty bands. 
The Tanol group extends from near Mangli (and probably further east 
among the Tandiani mountains) by Sherwan towards the Indus, passing north of 
the Gandgarh range. Its relations to the Attock slates on which it seems to rest 
are obscure, the junction being frequently either a line of dislocation or concealed 
by quartzose debris; but still the disposition of the two gi’oups in the neighbour¬ 
hood of the lower Siriin and Dore rivers is one consistent with unconformity. 
