Mountain Ranges

Abstract

IT is to be regretted that Mr. Trelewney W. Saunders should make confusion worse confounded by noticing imaginary discrepancies based upon a mistaken assumption of a natural agreement. In his paper “On the Mountains of the Northern and Western Frontier of India”, published in NATURE, vol. xxi. p. 96, he takes geologists to task for not making their descriptions to fit in with his delineation of purely superficial features. He reproaches the authors of the “Manual of the Geology of India” with adopting an “antiquated theory” which had been disposed of by his demonstration of a second line of peaks in the Himalayan range. The omission to account for such apparent neglect of recent discovery was solely due to the perceptions of its almost irrelevancy to the matter in hand. The old familiar feature for which Mr. Saunders claims such geographical importance (which the writers were not concerned to dispute) happens to be of quite incidental significance in the mountain-structure, and much more in accordance with “the antiquated theory” than with the independent position Mr. Saunders would assign to it. Also, the fact that the great gneissic axis of the Himalayan range divides into several minor axes west of the Sutlej, and that these disappear under fossiliferous formations before reaching the Indus, will probably be held by geologists as sufficient reason for considering this ground as the natural termination of the range. On the other hand, the fact that there should be a continuous watershed between these terminal ridges and the contiguous ridges of a confluent system of disturbance, will be admitted by geologists as sufficient for a combined hydrographical delineation of the two systems, as proposed by Mr. Saunders. The points of view of the pure geographer and of the geologist are at present so wide apart that it is irrational to represent them as conflicting.