Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/231

 of the Royal Asiatic Society,' has published a memoir on those of the Yangtse. Much information, however, still remains to be gleaned.

Wherever the opportunity offered, I have made careful search for relics of glacial action in the south of China, but hitherto without success. In fact, the general appearance of the country forbids the hope of any such discovery, one of the most prominent features in the landscape, as mentioned above, being the needle-like and fantastic forms of those portions of the limestone rocks in the northern provinces which have escaped the solvent power of water. Of the appearance of the limestones in the central and eastern provinces the same may be said ; they are everywhere pierced by holes produced by water action ; the surface is cut up by fantastic projections ; and where chert nodules occur, these uniformly jut out far beyond their former matrix. The Chinese are much skilled in making rockeries of fantastic shapes ; but in these eroded limestone rocks they find not only the materials but the pattern ready to hand. Almost equally characteristic of the action of water is the denudation of the earlier grits. The mountain-sides are scored by deep ravines with sharp intervening crests, and present none of the rounded forms peculiar to glacial action. Except close to the flanks of the mountains, as near Kiukiang, I have never met with boulders ; while the parallel striae which are so conspicuous in the ice-worn rocks of Europe seem to be entirely absent. Whether in the higher mountain-ranges of the south and west remains of ancient glaciers are to be found, I am not in a position to state ; in none visited by myself did I notice traces of their former existence.

Reverting, then, to the topics discussed in the foregoing pages, the following general conclusions may be arrived at.

First and most important seems to be the enormous development, both laterally and vertically, of the representatives in China of the sub-Carboniferous rocks of Europe.

Secondly, the enormous extent to which they had been altered, contorted, and upheaved, with the accompanying intrusion of repeated outbursts of igneous rocks, after the close of this period, and antecedent to the deposition of the newer coal-beds, classed, at the latest, as Triassic, and which upheaval must have left the main framework of the country almost in its present state.

And, thirdly, the comparatively small importance, south of the Yangtse, of the deposits of Secondary or Tertiary age. With the exception of a partial submergence during the deposition of the Pliocene clays, the face of southern China has probably retained, in great measure, a similar aspect since the upheaval of the later coal-beds — a time sufficiently long to have allowed the action of water on the limestones of the Tung-ting series to have slowly and gradually dissolved and carried away a series of rocks probably 6000 feet in thickness, and extending laterally over a considerable portion of the province of Kwang-tung, the gentle character of the erosion being sufficiently shown by the fantastic shapes of those portions which, probably owing to a difference in their chemical composition, induced