ssumption that glacial conditions in the
Salt Range and those at the base of the Gondwanas were contemporaneous,
and partly due to analogy with the coal measures of Australia and South
Africa. In Kashmir the characteristic plant remains of the Lower
Gondwanas are found associated with marine fossils in great abundance,
and these permit of a correlation of the strata with the upper part of
the Carboniferous system of the European standard stratigraphical scale.

Kashmir seems to have been near the estuary of one of the great rivers
that formerly flowed over the ancient continent of _Gondwanaland_ (when
India and South Africa formed parts of one continental mass) into the
great Eurasian Ocean known as _Tethys_. As the deposits formed in this
great ocean give us the principal part of our data for forming a
standard stratigraphical scale, the plants which were carried out to sea
become witnesses of the kind of flora that flourished during the main
Indian coal period; they thus enable us with great precision to fix the
position of the fresh-water Gondwanas in comparison with the marine
succession.

~Spiti.~--With a brief reference to one more interesting patch among the
geological records of this remarkable region, space will force us to
pass on to consideration of minerals of economic value. The line of
snow-covered peaks, composed mainly of crystalline rocks and forming a
core to the Himalaya in a way analogous to the granitic core of the
Alps, occupies what was once apparently the northern shore of
Gondwanaland, and to the north of it there stretched the great ocean of
Tethys, covering the central parts of Asia and Europe, one of its
shrunken relics being the present Mediterranean Sea. The bed of this
ocean throughout many geological ages underwent gradual depression and
received the sediments brought down by the rivers from the continent
which stretched away to the south. The sedimentary deposits thus formed
near the shore-line or further out in deep water attained a thickness of
well over 20,000 feet, and have been studied in the _tahsil_ of Spiti,
on the northern border of Kumaon, and again on the eastern Tibetan
plateau to the north of Darjeeling. A reference to the formations
preserved in Spiti may be regarded as typical of the geological history
and the conditions under which these formations were produced.

~Succession of Fossiliferous Beds.~--In age the fossiliferous beds range
from Cambrian right through to the