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the season has advanced, the fetid smell has materially diminished. This is indeed to have been expected: the soil has been washed comparatively clean, and there is less of such matter to wash away.

The only possible way in which my results as to the small quantity of organic matter in the water of the hot season (supposing there is no great error in the analysis) can be reconciled with the results of those analyses that give it as equal to 8 or 10 grains per gallon, would be to suppose that the water at that season contains a large quantity of organic matter having no very offensive smell, but capable of very rapid decomposition, so that about th to 9th of it would be lost during the first two weeks. Without denying the possibility of this, I can only say that I know of nothing that makes it probable that such is the case, while I have already given reasons for believing that no such state of matters exists. Further observation and experiment can alone decide the question beyond doubt; while I may remark that if such be the case, it will be a fact well worth noticing and establishing.

It may also be observed, that as in the case of supplying towns the water must always be stored for a time in tanks or reservoirs, it is a point of some importance to note the changes which it undergoes by keeping in these circumstances. I have made some observations in the course of these enquiries suggestive of further investigations on this subject, and which may also have a bearing on the purification and preservation of such waters, a subject which has lately been occupying much attention in England. It is obviously a possible thing that one water may be putrefying but its putrescibility nearly exhausted, while another may be highly putrescible, and yet its actual putrefaction may be only about to commence. As regards the preservation of waters too, it is one thing to keep them in stoppered bottles, and another thing to keep them in tanks. It seems to me questionable if they improve in tanks as they do in glass bottles. It is by following out such inquiries that advance in knowledge of such subjects is attained, and in the present case the activity of chemical changes produced by the high temperature and the regularity of the seasons are in no small degree favourable for carrying them to a successful result.

Kashmir, the Western Himalaya and the Afghan Mountains, a geological paper by ALBERT M. VERCHE'RE, Esq., M. D Bengal Medical Service, with a note on the fossils by M. EDOUARD DE VERNUEIL, Membre de l'Acadèmie des Sciences, Paris.

(Continued from page 203, of No. III. 1866.)

CHAPTER III.-Cursory Survey of the several chains of the Western Himalaya, the Afghan mountains and their dependencies. Preliminary geological mapping of the Western Himalayan and Afghan Ranges.

59. It is intended, in this chapter, to give, in as few words as possible, an idea of the general geology of the several portions of the Western Himalaya, the Afghan mountains and their respective dependencies. In doing so, I have availed myself of all sources of information which have been opened to me; I have, however, been sadly in want of the help of a more extended library, and I have never seen some excellent works which would have much improved this chapter, if they could have been consulted. I need therefore hardly say that it is a most superficial of surveys; but I hope nevertheless that it may be found to contain a few interesting observations and some new matter yet unpublished. Such as it is, it will enable us to sketch at least the first preliminaries of a geological mapping of the Himalayan and Afghan Ranges; and also to attempt, in the last chapter, to draw the history of the mightiest mountainous mass of our globe.

By reference to the map and and to the long Section (Sect. G) it becomes evident that the Himalayas are a succession of more or less regularly parallel chains, having a general N. W. to S. E. direction. Between the chains are situated valleys which are elevated above the sea in proportion as one nears the centre of the mountainous mass: thus the Rawul Pindie plateau, between the Salt Range and the SubHimalayan hills, is about 1700 feet high; Poonch valley, between the Sub-Himalaya and the Pir Punjal chain, is under 4000 feet; Kashmir between the Pir Punjal and the next chain (called in the map Ser and Merchain), is above 5000; Ladak between the Ser and Mer chain and the Kailas chain is 10,000 to 11,000; Nubra and the valley of the Shayok,

between the Kailas and Korakoram chains is a plateau nearly 15,000 feet high. It is probable that on the other side of the Korakoram chain the elevation diminishes and that the Aksai chain and the valley of the Yarkandkash river, between the Korakoram and Kuen-Luen chains, are about 10,000 feet high; beyond the Kuen-Luen is the province of Kotan which has been satisfactorily determined by its vegetation to be no more than 5000 feet high.

We have therefore a series of steps rising from the plains of the Punjab to the high plateau of Little Thibet, and descending from Little Thibet towards Turkish China. These steps are supported by parallel chains or walls which tower by some thousands of feet above the plateaux which they support. These chains offer a considerable impediment to the flow of rivers towards the plains, and most rivers have a considerable course parallel to the direction of the chains, before they can find a gap to pass through.

The Afghan mountains present the same arrangement as the Himalayas; the direction is from the N. E. to S. W. the direction of parallel chains is less well marked than in the Himalaya, but this is probably due to the little which is correctly known of the topography of these mountains. The plateaux are similarly graduating: Bunnoo being about 1200 feet above the see, Kabul 7000 feet, Kaffiristan higher, whilst the plateau of Koonduz, on the other side of the Hindoo Koosh, slopes gradually towards the west. This arrangement by plateaux is the same as is seen in the Andes with their high central chain and their plateau between that chain and the Cordilleras.

From the hypothesis, advanced in the next chapter, of the manner the Himalayan and Afghan mountains were upheaved, we will deduct which of the lower hills belong to the Afghan and which to the Himalayan mass, and I will therefore not discuss this subject here, as it would but lead to useless repetitions. I shall begin with the hills which one first meets crossing out of the alluvial plain of the Punjab, as he travels north from Mooltan; and I shall take the parallel regions of the Himalaya one after the other, noticing as I go on whatever little I know of the geology of the Afghan mountains in the same latitude.

60. In latitude 32° 10′, longitude 70° 50′ to 71° 20′ rises the double chain of the Kafir Kote range or Rotta Roh and the Sheikh

Bodeen range.

A small valley, the Paniala valley, separates the Rotta Roh range from the Sheikh Bodeen range, and the direction of both small chains is from the N. E. to the S. W. as far as the highest summit of Sheikh Bodeen, whence westwardly the Rotta Roh altogether disappears, and the Sheikh Bodeen range is continued by a small and low ridge of hillocks directed towards the W. N. W. and supporting the plateau of Bunnoo. (See map.)

The Rotta Roh is mostly composed of carboniferous limestone. The Zeawan bed is well developed, but extraordinarily disturbed; it is a yellowish rock, often very sandy. It forms the base of the hills on the E. and S. E.

Dr. A. Fleming sent home some fossils from Kafir Kote, which were ascertained by M. de Verneuil to belong to the following species:Productus cora (D'Orb.); Productus costatus (Sow.). Productus Humboldtii, (D'Orb.) Spirifer?

Dentalium ingens, (DeKönig).

All the species of which I have given drawings in Pl. I, III, and V, were found in the Rotta Roh limestone, with the exception of the Spirifer like S. trigonalis. Several species of corals, either not found at all or very rare in Kashmir, were found abundantly in the lower beds of the Rotta Roh; but altogether the fauna of the Zea wan bed in Kashmir and in the Rotta Roh is so very similar, that it can be called identical.

The limestone rests on a quartzite rather peculiar in some localities. It is composed of opaque white quartz in which are imbedded plates of pearly white mica half an inch wide; these plates of mica are arranged in tufts; there are also some irregular nodules or granules of black augite (?) quite lustreless (see fig. 74, pl. IX). There can be

* A distinct species of Sp., according to Mr. de Verneuil.

I failed to find the bed of quartzite in situ; my examination was much more superficial than I could wish. But it is hardly to be wondered at that the quartzite beds are not found in situ, if we consider the wonderful state of confusion the beds are in. The limestone is in an extremely shivered condition, having been thrown into stray arch-like anticlinals separated by numerous faults. The shivering of the beds often goes so far that it is difficult to ascertain the dip and strike of the beds. In such convulsions as those which must have taken place in these hills, the brittle and fragile beds of quartzite must have been entirely broken, and are therefore not to be seen in situ at their outcrops, but are only indicated by the fragments into which they were reduced. In several localities the ground is covered with angular pieces of quartzite, either with mica as described in the text, or plain and opaque.

no doubt that this micaceous quartzite represents the bed of quartzite which we have seen invariably underlying the Zeeawan bed in Kashmir. The beds of volcanic ash which it probably covers are not exposed in the Kafir Kote Range.

The Zeeawan bed of limestone is capped by very extensive and thick beds of Weean limestone rich in goniatites, in mussel-like anthracosiæ, in Aviculo-pectens and other characteristic fossils. I found some blocks of the sandy limestone in which the anthracosia, solenopsis and A. pectens are generally found, containing one specimen of Productus semireticulatus, several Athyris subtilita (Hall) and A. Royssii (L. W.), and also the P. Bolivicutis (D'Orb.) mixed up with the anthracosia and A. pectens, a mixture of Zeeawan and Weean fossils which I never saw in Kashmir. Some very large bivalves of which debris had been found in Kashmir and resembling an aviculoid inequilateral pecten were also found; the transverse diameter is 71 inches. Fine nautilides and spines of cidaris six inches long were also found. In the Rottah Roh the difference between the Zeeawan and Weean beds is not everywhere so well marked as it is in Kashmir, as I have just exemplified; generally, however, the assemblage of fossils given in the plates as characteristic of the beds is the same as it is in Kashmir.

In the northernmost end of the Rottah Roh, the Zeeawan bed does not appear, and is only represented near Kumdul by a few small mounds of debris rising through the sandy plain close to the foot of the hill. As we travel south and approach the Kafir Kote river, the Zeeawan bed appears under the Weean, and can be traced without interruption as far as the southern end of the hill a few miles from Paniala. It is impossible to give the dip and strike of the Zeeawan bed, as not a hundred yards of it keeps the same direction; the broken fragments of the bed are more like packed ice in the polar seas than like courses of rock in a hill. The Weean bed above is much less disturbed, except the deepest beds which rest immediately on the Zeeawan; it dips generally N. W. with a very trifling angle varying from 20° to 8° or 9° with the horizon; occasionally the dip becomes W. and even S. W.

I have not seen any beds in the Rottah Roh similar to the Kothair bed of Kashmir.

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