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Notes of a trip from Simla to the Spiti Valley. [No. 4, 
Notes of a trip from Simla to the Spiti Valley and Chomoriri 
(Tshomoriri) Lake during the months of July , August and Septem¬ 
ber , 1801.— By W. Tiieobald, Esq., Jnr., 
The object for which the present trip was undertaken, was to 
acquire some definite information regarding the interesting fossili- 
ferous deposits, both of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic age, known to exist 
in the Spiti valley and the higher Himalayas, to ascertain as far as a 
cursory examination would permit, their extent, and relations to the 
older groups in contact with them, and to collect such a series of 
fossils from them, as should facilitate the determination of their age 
in the geological scale, and thereby afford a key for the approximate 
determination of the age of those older groups, in which fossils are 
either rare or altogether wanting. These objects have, I trust, been 
to some extent accomplished, though I shall not now touch on geo¬ 
logical questions, which, with the result of the examination of the fossil 
collections, will appear elsewhere at some future period. In the mean¬ 
while I have put together a few notes of a general character, in hopes 
that they may prove of some interest or service to any one about to 
travel over the same ground. 
I may, in the present place, perhaps he expected to allude to two 
papers by Capt. Thomas Hutton, entitled “ Journal of a Trip through 
Kunawar, Hungrung and Spiti, in Yols. VIII, and IX, of the Asiatic 
Society’s Journal for 1839 and 1840,” and a “ Geological Report on the 
valley of the Spiti and of the route from Kotghur, in Yol. X, of 184 J.” 
Of the first of these, I have little to remark; but, as regards the 
second, I must deny the applicability of the term geological to such 
speculations as it presents. Capt. Hutton has, in fact, fallen into 
the not uncommon error of confounding cosmogony with geology, 
although they have no more in common than the alchemy of the 
Middle Ages possesses with the science of modern chemistry. To 
attempt the serious refutation of some of the views of Capt. Hutton, 
on subjects connected with geology, would he almost as hopeless, 
not to say absurd, as for a surgeon to discuss the treatment of 
Aneurism with a man who denied the circulation of the blood; 
and I must, therefore, excuse n^self from entering at any length 
on the merits of the views of cosmogony and creation set forth 
in the above paper: but they are, I fully believe, as ingenious as 
