22-1. 
[vOL. XIII. 
liecords of Ike Geological Survey of India. 
I have myself crossed the Chitapahar range twice, and have both times care¬ 
fully sought for evidence of the Indus having formerly flowed over it, hut without 
success, and I believe that river has never deviated from the deep gorge whereby 
it now crosses this barrier. The highest alluvial deposit which can be I’eferred 
to the river Indus in this quarter, is a homogeneous clay, which is seen in places 
on the flanks of the range south of Choi,' rising to a height (roughly guessed) 
of between 300 to 400 feet above the present bed of the river. 
This clay may possibly be of lacustrine origin if the Chuch Hazara plain 
and neighbourhood weie ever occupied by a lake prior to the lowering of the 
Indus bod to its present depth. Anyhow I should say 400 feet was the highest 
level on the Chitapahar range above the present Indus bed, at which any dis¬ 
tinct Indus alluvium can be made out. So much for positive indications. 
But there is one very powerful negative argument against the idea of the Indus 
ever having hereabouts flowed at the height indicated by Mr. Wynne. 
Above the limits at which the clay in question occurs, the hills are formed of 
vertical beds of limestone, cut up or fun'owed by deep, almost cavernous, fissures, 
forming a deeply serrated surface, which would have acted ns the most efficient 
pebble trap that could be imagined, and into which any pebbles must have been 
washed, without the possibility of their being subsequently cleared out again. Yet 
not a single pebble or boulder of any sort can be seen in any of these rifts, the 
conclusion being therefore irresistible that no wash of gravel has ever taken place 
over them. 
The next papers to notice are two by myself in Records, Vol. X, pages 140 
and 223. In the former I describe an alluvial deposit in the Potwar with 
numerous .species of living shells, and a peculiar silt near Jand, possibly in¬ 
dicative of glacial conditions at the time it was being dej)Osited. Perhaps the 
most important fact, however, was the occuiTence of a large ‘ erratic ’ “ over 
20 feet in girth, resting on alluvkmi at a high level, eight and a half miles from 
Pindigheb and eleven miles from Taman” (1. c., p. 142). This is a valuable in¬ 
dication of the relative age of the glacial conditions presumed to have obtained 
in the district, and the older alluvium ; the instance here quoted not admitting 
of any doubt as to the fact of the ' erratic ’ reposing on a thick bed of alluvium. 
My other paper refers to certain distinctions that should be drawn between 
‘ erratics ’ of the pleistocene period and the ‘ erratics,’ which in the Salt-range 
are embedded in strata of mesozoic and pateozoic age, and which are as distinct 
in their lithological aspect, as they are from the Indus erratics by their geological 
age. In his Memoir on the Salt-range (Vol. XIV) in a note to page 117, 
Mr. Wynne thus correctly, as I believe, alludes to the ‘erratics’ of the Indus 
valley:—“ In other parts of the country, too, along the left bank of the Indus 
south of Attook, the foreign erratic blocks are too numerous and too large to be 
accounted for satisfactorily in any other way that I know Of.” That is, than by 
ice agency. T wo of those are described in Records X, p. 124, as having a girth 
’ Choi is not oil the Atlas map. It is, however, a little nndcr 3 miles from the mouth 
of tlie Haro on the south hank of that river, ami is a halting stage (with a ‘sarai ’) on the road 
from Attock to Khuslialgurb. 
