(i)   Geological anteriority of South India to the Himalayan
     region

     “Towards the close of the period of the Gondwana there was another earth movement in the history of South India, but the peninsula remained a solid block little affected by this movement. Subsequent to the formation of the Kurnool series, there is a wide blank which perhaps extended over millions of years in the geological history of South India. At the end of this period the Purƒ-a sea got linked up with the sea of Tethys which overspread North India, Tibet and China. South India formed a great part of the continental area known as the Gondwana land which extended through Madagascar and South Africa to South America on the one side and through Malaya Archipelago to Australia on the other. The lowermost beds of the Gondwana system are fixed by indirect evidence as upper carboniferous or permocarboniferous in age.

      “Rocks similar to the Gondwana system occur in Australia, South Africa, South America and Antarctica. It is believed that land connections existed between these regions across the Indian ocean, which linked with South America through India and the Malaya Archipelago to Australia. Zoology furnishes further proof that the fauna of India have marked affinities with those of Central Africa and Madagascar. Geology accepts the Indo-African land connection as a settled fact though there is a difference of opinion about the mode of continuity and of its geography. According to one school of thought the whole of the region that is now the Indian ocean and the area to the north of it was at the close of the Palaeozoic in Permo - carboniferous times occupied by two separate masses of land, the great continent of ‘Angara’ with its Gigantopteris type of flora and secondly the continent of Gondwana characterised by Glossopteris flora extending from Australia through peninsular India to South Africa on to South America. Between these two continents ran a comparatively narrow sea, which perhaps united the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. This seems to have persisted till the commencement of the Cainozoic era, when large segments of it are supposed to have subsided to