226 
Records of the Geological Surveg of India. 
[vOL. XIII. 
either fail or refuse to recognise the agency of water in their arrangement as 
I hold it to he in any opponents who fail to recognise the proofs of glacial 
agency concurrently present in the same area. 
I do not point to well-rounded boulders embedded in a stratified deposit, 
with their long axes arranged with reference to the direction of the river, as 
proof of glacial agency; but I do point to streams of blocks not so rounded, 
but sub-angular and piled on one another, with little or no intervening matter, 
in a fashion suggestive of moraine rather than river transport. It is true the 
rock of which the largest blocks consist rounds off by surface exfoUation under 
atmospheric action; but the streams of sub-angular blocks, to which I allude, 
have no nearer resemblance to the water-worn boulders deseribed by my colleague 
than accrues from their consisting of the same identical rock. As an 
instance in point I may mention, on the right bank of the Jhelum the stream of 
blocks which is seen to descend the Kathai stream just below the Fort of 
Kathai, and is buried in the surface of the high level plateau before reaching 
the Jhelum. These blocks are scattered about, sometimes isolated on the surface 
of the alluvial plateau ivhereon they rest, in other places ranged in clusters or piled 
against each other ivith little or no intervening matter; and they are all more or less 
suh-angular, and have none of the appearance of having heen washed down the valley 
or hy the stream. Granting, for argument’s sake, that a great debacle might have 
washed them down, it would not have arranged them in a long thin line, heading 
up the valley; in a word, their arrangement is decidedly suggestive of moraine 
aetion as distinguished from fiuviatile. 
Mr. Lydekker adds (l.e., p. 31) :—“ It will be gathered from the above observ¬ 
ations, that the whole of the gneiss blocks in the Jhelum valley have followed 
the course of tributary mountain streams, have not been carried across inter¬ 
vening ridges, and are embedded in an aqueous formation.” To this passage I 
can give my cordial assent, if I may interpolate after the word ‘ in’, the words 
‘ and on, ’ which in my opinion furnish the clue to the discrepancy of opinion 
between my colleague and myself. The rounded blocks to which my colleague 
points as conclusive of fiuviatile agency may be, and no doubt are, embedded in 
river deposits; the sub-angular ones on which I no less confidently rely as proving 
moraine agency are, I believe, always found resting, not m, but on, the above 
river deposits. 
There is one paragraph with which I cannot agree :—“ It will be gathered 
from the above observations that the Jhelum is now a denuding, and not a 
depositing, river, as it was when these alluvial formations were laid down; from 
which we may probably infer that great changes of level have taken place 
since the period of these deposits, which may have afforded greater facilities at 
certain times for the movements of the blochsf’ This is far from clear. The 
‘ change in level, ’ which converted the Jhelum from an excavating stream 
employed in deepening its bed into a depositing one, which it must have been 
when it refilled its valley with alluvial deposits 200 or 300 feet thick, was one of 
subsidence, w'hereby the gradient of the Jhelum valley, both the main channel 
and all its tributaries, was low'ered,—the proximate cause, of course, of the 
deposition of the above bods: ccoteris paribus, therefore, this change could neither 
