On a Fossil Fish from the Table-land of the Deccan, in the Peninsula of India

Abstract

General Fraser, the British Minister at the Court of the Nizam at Hyderabad, in a letter to me dated the 31st July 1850, mentioned his having transmitted some specimens of fossil fish, with impressions of leaves, in a matrix which Dr. Walker, whom General Fraser had employed in Statistical and Natural History researches in the Nizam's territories, considered as appertaining to a coal-formation. General Fraser had previously caused specimens to be sent to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta; but the reports upon them not satisfying Dr. Walker, a second series of the specimens were sent to me by General Fraser, with a request that I would ascertain their possible relations with true coal-strata. Considering the enormous development of trap, covering some 200,000 square miles in the Deccan,—the granitic basis of the whole Peninsula of India,—the area occupied by laterite,—the want of sedimentary rocks,—and the hitherto total absence of organic marine fossils in the Deccan (for a few shells brought to notice by the late Dr. Malcolmson were either fluviatile or lacustrine),—the discovery of fossil fish on the margin of the trap region was a novelty necessarily of great interest, as indicative of the former submerged state of the Peninsula of India. The fossils arrived in October last, and a glance showed that the remains were imbedded in bituminous schist. The specimens were met with, General Fraser mentioned, near to the confluence of the Wurda and Godavery Rivers, north of Hyderabad and south of Nagpoor. But as the Wurda runs into