a range twenty or thirty miles across the valley.  Mr. Scrope’s theory is, I believe, that these are all mere flowing coulees of lava, which, in their liquid state, filled hollows, but afterwards became of a harder texture, as they dried and crystallized, than the higher rocks around them; the consequence of which is that the latter has been decomposed and washed away, while the basalt has been left to form the highest elevations.  My opinion is that these steps, or stairs, at one time formed the beds of the ocean, or of great lakes, and that the substance of which they are composed was, for the most part, projected into the water, and there held in suspension till gradually deposited.  There are, however, amidst these steps, and beneath them, masses of more compact and crystalline basalt, that bear evident signs of having been flows of lava.[l3]

Reasoning from analogy at Jubbulpore, where some of the basaltic cappings of the hills had evidently been thrown out of craters long after this surface had been raised above the waters, and become the habitation both of vegetable and animal life, I made the first discovery of fossil remains in the Nerbudda valley.  I went first to a hill within sight of my house in 1828,[14] and searched exactly between the plateau of basalt that covered it and the stratum immediately below, and there I found several small trees with roots, trunks, and branches, all entire, and beautifully petrified.  They had been only recently uncovered by the washing away of a part of the basaltic plateau.  I soon after found some fossil bones of animals.[15] Going over to Sagar, in the end of 1830, and reasoning there upon the same analogy, I searched for fossil remains along the line of contact between the basalt and the surface upon which it had been deposited, and I found a grove of silicified palm-trees within a mile of the cantonments.  These palm-trees had grown upon a calcareous deposit formed from springs rising out of the basaltic range of hills to the south.  The commissariat officer had cut a road through this grove, and all the European officers of a large military station had been every day riding through it without observing the geological treasure; and it was some time before I could convince them that the stones which they had every day seen were really petrified palm-trees.  The roots and trunks were beautifully perfect.[l6]

Notes: 

1.  November, 1835.

2.  In the Damoh District, twenty-four miles west of Damoh.  The name appears to be derived from the ’great quantity of hewn stone (Hind. patthar or pathar) lying about in all directions’.  The C.  P. Gazetteer (1870) calls the place ‘a considerable village’.