RECORDS 
OF THE 
GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA. 
Part 4.] 1879. [November. 
Note on the “ Attock slates ” and their probable geological position, hy 
Dr. W. Waagen. 
In the Records of the Geological Survey of India, Vol. XII, pt. 2, there 
is a paper hy Mr. Wynne, entitled “ Further notes on the geology of the 
tipper Punjab,” which bears a special interest on aceount of the general 
views on the geology of that country. As many of the points treated of in 
the paper are yet to be considered as open questions, it seems not advisable to 
pronounce any opinion on them until further materials have been collected, but 
it may not be useless to notice some points which might be of value towards 
the elucidation of the questions discussed by Mr. Wynne. 
There is before all the age of the “ Attock slates.” Mr. Wynne is quite 
right when he considers the evidence upon which the opinion of their being of 
Silurian age is founded very scanty indeed ; and only the absence of any other 
clue towards the determination of the age of those slates could at the time jus¬ 
tify the opinion expressed in our joint memoir on Mount Sirban, that the oc¬ 
currence of lower Silurian fossils in gravels in the Kabul river, which lay approxi¬ 
mately in the strike of the “ Attock slates,” would make a silurian age probable 
also for the latter. 
It is very much to be regretted that to the careful search of Mr. Wynne the 
slates have proved absolutely unfossiliferous up to the present. Yet this sterility 
in fossils seems not to prevail at all localities. Among the materials which have 
been most liberally sent to me by the Geological Society of London, there are 
about a dozen speeimens of a Spirifer, which bear, however, only the label 
“ Punjab.” These specimens are preserved in a black slate, which, if the speci¬ 
mens came really from the Punjab,—and there is no reason why this should be 
doubted,—must have belonged to the Attock slates, as there is no other rock 
known to mo in that part of India which would bear similar petrographical 
characters, and from which the specimens could have come. 
