I.—Relics of the Great Ice Age in the Plains of Northern India

Extract

It may seem strange to dwellers in this country under its present conditions to speak of relics of a Glacial Period being visible in the plains of the Ganges Valley, where the mean annual average temperature is about 77˚ F. and we all know what the maximum may rise to; and at the outset I must guard against misapprehension by saying that I do not mean to imply, by the title of my discourse, that the plains of India were ever, within geologically recent times, covered with snow and ice. We have evidence, it is true, that in long distant ages, at the beginning of the period that saw the filling up of the valleys of the old Gondwana continent, part of which still exists as the Peninsula of India, that is to say, when the deposits of clay and sandstone, supporting a luxuriant vegetation, now transformed into the coal of Raniganj and other localities, were beginning to be laid down, the higher ground of the Peninsula was under snow and ice, and that glaciers descended into the low ground and probably sent off icebergs into the surrounding seas. Traces of these events, which took place in what is known to geologists as the Talchir Period, even the old rock-floors grooved and striated by the passage over them of fragments of rock embedded in moving ice, have been found at the base of the Coal-measures in the Central Provinces and in Rajputana, while a bed containing striated and polished boulders, exhibiting unmistakable evidence of ice action, is known in the Salt Range of the Punjab. But with these, and with traces of what may prove to have been a still older ice age, of which Sir T. Holland brought some evidence before this Society in August, 1908, discovered by him near Simla, I do not propose to deal on the present occasion.