gneiss and granite which formed the bed-rock when, in the earliest beginnings of which geological science can take account, the Peninsula extended from the Aravallis to the present east coast. There is no evidence of any great change in the outline of the east coast of India since Palaeozoic times. No fossils are found in the marine deposits of Secondary and Tertiary age in the interior of the continent. No life, no slow movement of creeping things, disturbed the awful silence of that weird landscape of primaeval days, when India was represented by the central plateau and its northern fringe of Arāvalli mountains. This, then, was the first stage of evolution. Never since the Palaeozoic era has this part of the continent been depressed beneath the sea. Over the extra-peninsular area, north of it and west, where now exist the regions of Baluchistān, Afghānistān, the valley of the Indus, and Rājputāna, with the great extension of the North-western Himālayas, the tides of a wide and shallow sea ebbed and flowed. Then, in Tertiary times, followed the slow formation of the Gondwāna beds, the gradual spreading out of sandy deposits, and the outlining of the leading features of Indian topography as we see them now. After the Palaeozoic era, and during the secondary stage of evolution, when India was probably connected with Africa by dry land and ocean currents swept from the Persian Gulf to the Arāvallis, the rock area extended over Assam and the Eastern Himālayas, while Burma, the North-western Himālayas, and the uplands beyond the Indus were still submarine, or undergoing alternations of elevation and depression.
At the close of the Cretaceous period, the infinitely gentle process of sedimentary deposit and the dead repose of the geological world were rudely shaken. Then ensued a series of volcanic cataclysms, such as the eastern world has probably never seen since. Two hundred thousand square miles of India’s surface were covered with lava and volcanic deposits to a depth of thousands of feet, and the Deccan landscape was shaped to its present outlines. As the period of volcanic activity ceased, there commenced in the far north the throes of an upheaval, which has gradually (acting through inconceivable ages) raised marine limestone of Num- mulitic age to a height of 20,000 feet above the sea, and resulted in the most stupendous mountain system of the world. The North-western Himālayas, Tibet, and Burma were gradually upraised and fashioned during this epoch; but there is evidence that Burma is a much more recent
