A growing spirit
of inquiry in reference to Indian mineral deposits has led me to
prepare a series of Papers descriptive of the mode of occurrence and
distribution of several of the more important among them.
Three
of these Papers on the Diamonds, Coal, and Gold, which were first
published in the journals of learned societies,* are now offered to the
public in a more compact and accessible form.
The
design of this work is that it may be used as a handbook to the
detailed accounts published by the Geological Survey of India, and by
other authorities, in numerous scattered publications, to which full
references are given.
That a plain and, at the same time, comprehensive
statement of the Geology of the more useful mineral
.deposits of India was urgently wanted is amply
testified by the scanty and too often erroneous manner
* Report of the British Association for 1879, "Journal of
the/ Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society,"
jum " Journal of the Royal Geological Society of Ireland " for
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