40 
President's Address. 
[Feb. 
palaeontologists. I think, however, the facts of the ease must ultimately 
lead to conviction. It is of course impossible to describe the whole evi¬ 
dence here ; a fuller account will be found in the ‘ Records of the Geologi¬ 
cal Survey’ for 1878, in a paper on “ The Palajontological Relations of the 
Gondwana System.” But precisely the same important conclusion, the 
want of uniformity in the succession of terrestrial forms of life in distant 
countries, is enforced by the Sivalik fauna, the third subject to which a 
fasciculus of the 1 Palseontologia Indica’ and a paper in the “ Records of 
the Geological Survey,” both by Mr. Lydekker, have been devoted. The 
value of the part of the 1 Palseontologia’ is, I regret to say, much diminished 
by the inferiority of several of the lithographs, but the artistic difficulties 
to be encountered in this country are well known. 
The importance of Mr. Lydekker’s work on the Siwalik and other 
tertiary mammalian fossils may be easily ajjpreciated by the circumstance 
that very large additions, many of them from new localities, have been made 
to the original collections described by Dr. Falconer, that Dr. Falconer’s 
descriptions were extremely incomplete, a very large proportion of them, 
including nearly all.the details, having only been printed after his death, 
and having been kept back by him for years with a view of rendering them 
more perfect, and that the Siwalik mammalian fauna appears to be far 
richer than any existing, and perhaps than any other assemblage of fossil 
mammalian remains hitherto examined. Although very few bones of animals 
inferior in size to a pig or a sheep are found, although no bats or insectivora 
and but 8 species of rodents have been discovered, no less than 84 species 
belonging to 45 genera have been detected and described up to 1878, inclu¬ 
ding 11 elephants and mastodons, 7 rhinoceroses, and 6 giraffes or then- 
allies, such as the huge Sivatherium. Two or three additional species of 
mammals have since been added. 
The whole of this fauna is still assigned to the miocene period by 
many European paleontologists, and in the anniversary address of the Pre¬ 
sident, Prof. Martin Duncan, to the Geological Society of London for 1878, 
the miocene age of the Siwalik fauna was advocated in very strong terms. 
The views held by those members of the Indian Survey who have written 
on the subject and have advocated a pliocene age for the Siwalik fauna 
were I think, rather underrated, and this is the more to be regretted, 
as several of the data quoted as adverse to those views are incorrect. Had 
the case really been as Professor Martin Duncan puts it, the Indian Surveyors 
would deserve to be ridiculed for bad reasoning, but I think it will be easy 
to shew that the arguments in favour of a pliocene age for the Siwalik 
fauna are much stronger than they are represented. I must refer all who 
wish to examine the argument more fully to Chapter XXIV of the ‘ Ma¬ 
nual of the Geology of India,’ but the principal facts are simple enough, 
