The succeeding era--the Dravidian Era--opens with Haimanta (Cambrian) times. A shallow sea now extended over Kumaun, Garwal, and Spiti, as well as Kashmir and ultimately over the Salt Range region of the Punjab as is shown by deposits in these areas. This sea was not, however, connected with the Cambrian sea of Europe. The fossil faunas left by the two seas are distinct. After an interval of disturbance during closing Haimanta times, geographical changes attendant on further land movements occurred. The central sea of Asia, the Tethys, extended westwards and now joined with the European Paleozoic sea; and deposits of Ordovician and Silurian age were laid down:--the Muth deposits. The succeeding Devonian Period saw the whole Northern Himalayan area under the waters of the Tethys which, eastward, extended to Burma and China and, westward, covered Kashmir, the Hindu Kush and part of Afghanistan. Deposits continued to be formed in this area till middle Carboniferous times. Near. the close of the Dravidian Era Kashmir became convulsed by volcanic disturbance and the Penjal traps were ejected. It was a time of worldwide disturbance and of redistribution of land and water. Carboniferous times had begun, and the geographical changes in 135 the southern limits of the Tethys are regarded as ushering in a new and last era in Indian geological history the Aryan Bra. India was now part of Gondwanaland; that vanished continent which then reached westward to South Africa and eastward to Australia. A boulder-bed of glacial origin, the Talchir Boulder-bed, occurs in many surviving parts of this great land. It enters largely into the Salt Range deposits. There is evidence that extensive sheets of ice, wearing down the rocks of Rajputana, shoved their moraines northward into the Salt Range Sea; then, probably, a southern extension of the Tethys. Subsequent to this ice age the Indian coalfields of the Gondwana were laid down, with beds rich in the Glossopteris and Gangamopteris flora. This remarkable carboniferous flora extends to Southern Kashmir, so that it is to be inferred that this region was also part of the main Gondwanaland. But its emergence was but for a brief period. Upper Carboniferous marine deposits succeeded; and, in fact, there was no important discontinuity in the deposits in this area from Panjal times till the early Tertiaries. During the whole of which vast period Kashmir was covered with the waters of the Tethys. The closing Dravidian disturbances of the Kashmir region did not, apparently, extend to the eastern Himalayan area. But the Carboniferous Period was, in this 136