18 
Records of the Geological Survey of Lidia. 
[vol. IX. 
The Sevalik beds in Sind consist of clays, sandstones, and conglomerates. The clays are 
usually buff or rod in colour, the sandstones reddish-brown or grey. One very characteristic 
bed is a rather fine greenish-grey sandstone composed of fragments of quartz, felspar, and 
bornblcnd. This sandstone is often quarried for platters used to bake bread upon. In the 
reddish-brown sandstone the bornbleud is absent. 
The conglomerates vary much in character. As a general rule, and especially towards 
the base of the group, they contain rolled fragments of argillaceous sandstone and clay, 
closely resembling the associated beds in the same group. As a rule, too, except in the upper 
conglomerate at the top of the group, pebbles of the older tertiary formations are wanting ; 
but in a few instances they have been found. This is the case in one bed on the Khenji Nai, 
and conglomeratic bands containing Nummulitic limestone and Gaj (Miocene) limestones are 
seen on the road between Shah Hassan on the Manehhar Lake and Pir Gaji. 
On the top of the Manehhar or Sevalik and on the edge of the alluvium there is found, 
in most parts of the Khirthar range, a very thick bed of coarse conglomerate composed 
of large pebbles of nummulitic limestone and other rocks, amongst which fragments of a 
quartzite are abundant. This conglomerate bed in places, as at the outlet of the Gaj, cannot 
be less than two or three hundred feet thick. It is disturbed and inclined like the Manehhar 
beds beneath it, and it appeal’s conformable to them. It has, however, an appearance of 
passing upwards into the gravels of the slope outside the range, but such appearances are 
sometimes fallacious. At the same time it is far from improbable that the conformity of 
this conglomerate to the Manehhar beds may be only apparent. 
The thickness of the Manehhar group in Sind has not been ascertained with any 
certainty, but it can scarcely be less in places than five thousand feet. 
Except near Karachi, where some oysters were found by Mr. Pedden in beds apparently 
belonging to this group,* no marine fossils have hitherto been obtained in it, and the principal 
recognizable remains of vertebrata hitherto collected by the Survey are some bones and 
teeth of Rhinoceros and Crocodile. Captain Vicary and some other explorers appear, how¬ 
ever, to have found bones in larger numbers. 
From the circumstance that the Manehhar group rests unconformably on the Gaj 
beds, which are at the oldest Upper Miocene, it is manifest that the Manehhar group itself 
cannot be older thau Pliocene. This result is extremely important, if, as appears almost 
certain, the Manehhar beds of Sind are the equivalents, in part or wholly, of the Sevalik 
and Bakun beds of the Punjab, since the latter have generally been referred by all writers 
to a Miocene epoch.f The Makran group, the possible equivalent of the Manehhar in 
Baluchistan, is newer Pliocene or Pleistocene. 
It appears to me that the Sind beds cannot be of marine origin. With one or two local 
exceptions, they are entirely destitute of mollusca or other forms of marine animal life, 
whilst similar beds in the Giij group just below are full of fossils. The coarse conglomerate 
at the top of the group is chiefly composed of pebbles which appear to have been rolled 
in streams, their form being too oblate for them to have been formed on a sea beach. I am 
strongly disposed to suspect that the Manehhar group, despite its enormous thickness, is 
* Within the last few days, some more oysters have been found, also by Mr. Fedden, at Vero, west of Kotri. 
They are accompanied by two kinds of Balanus. 
f I have, for a long time past, doubted whether the Sevalik rocks were correctly referred to so early a date 
as the Miocene, and I expressed my doubts, mainly founded on the great proportion of remains of ruminants to 
those of other orders, to Dr. Falconer himself as long ago as 1862. 
