Records of the Geological Survey of India. 
[vol. vn. 
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largely developed west of the town. 1 am inclined to regard this series of chloritic rocks 
as occupying the same horizon as the Kappatgode series; but this cannot he determined 
till the geology of the intermediate country shall have been worked out. 
Gold is said to occur at Sogul, four miles south-east of Moorgod, but I could not ascertain 
which of the two nullahs near the village contains the auriferous sand. The existence of 
gold there is denied by the talook officials, so it cannot be found in any great quantity. 
The last place reported to yield gold is Gooludegud, in the Badami Talook of Kuladgee 
District. I am inclined to doubt it altogether, as I did not hear of it, though I visited the 
place three times. It could hardly have been unknown to the German missionaries of the 
Basle Society who are located there, and I should have certainly heard of it from them. 
Remarks on certain considerations adduced by Falconer in support of the 
antiquity of the human eace in India, by W. Theobald, Geological Survey 
of India. 
Few of the writings of the illustrious Falconer possess greater interest to the geologist 
or anthropologist than the paper entitled “ Primeval man and his cotemporaries,” written in 
1863 ( vide Falc. Memoirs, Vol. II, page 570), or display bolder or more forcible speculation 
on a question foremost for interest among those to which the attention of the great 
paleontologist had been devoted. The question, moreover, is an eminently living one, and 
great as have been the discoveries already achieved, we may confidently expect still greater 
accessions to our knowledge of it in the future, especially that particular branch of it 
relating to India, and the existence of man there, during the latest tertiary times. Whilst, 
however, every advance in knowledge has tended in the direction of Falconer’s arguments, 
and rendered increasingly probable the main conclusions he advocated, there are certain facts 
of which he was ignorant, which materially diminish the force of one of the arguments he 
employed in support of his general proposition. 
The first argument in favor of the co-existence of man and the extinct animals of the 
Sivalik Fauna, was the probability that the idea of a gigantic tortoise met with in the 
Pythagorean and Hindu Mythology had originated in a traditional acquaintance with the 
huge Colossochelys atlas, which in size was physically comparable with and capable of con¬ 
tending on equal terms with the largest elephant. The tortoise on which the elephant stood 
which sustained the world, the second Avatar of Vishnu in the form of a tortoise, and the 
elephant and tortoise which during their combat were borne off and devoured by the bird 
Garuda, are adduced as instances of this idea. “In these three instances, taken from 
Pythagoras and the Hindu Mythology, we have reference to a gigantic form of tortoise, 
comparable in size with the elephant. Hence the question arises, are we to consider the 
idea as a mere figment of the imagination, like the minotaur and the chimaera, the griffin, 
the dragon, and the cartazonon, &c, or as founded on some justifying reality P The Greek 
and Persian monsters are composed of fanciful and wild combinations of different portions 
of known animals into impossible forms, and, as Cuvier fitly remarks, they are merely the 
progeny of uncurbed imagination; but in the Indian cosmogonic forms, we may trace an 
image of congruity through the cloud of exaggeration with which they are invested. We 
have the elephant then, as at present, the largest of land animals, a fit supporter of the 
infant world; in the serpent Asokee, used at the churning of the ocean, we may trace a 
representative of the gigantic Indian Python; and in the bird-god Garuda, with all his 
attributes, we may detect the gigantic crane of India ( Ciconia gigantea ) as supplying the 
origin. In like manner, the Colossochelys would supply a consistent representative of the 
tortoise that sustained the elephant and the world together. But if we are to suppose that 
