Geology of the Gondwana systems with special reference to India and Australia and with a view to test if the known facts make a reasonable palaeogeographic synthesis when applied to Carey's reconstruction of Gondwanaland

About a hundred years ago two brothers, W.T. and H.F. Blanford, working in the sub-tropical parts of India declared that the conglomerate they had examined in Talcher was of glacial origin and consequently there was land Ice in the tropical part of India in the late Palaeozoic times. Their observation and reasoning becomes more remarkable when it is realised that they did not find any striated or facetted boulders to back their argument. Ridiculed by their colleagues, and laughed at by geologists, physicists, astronomers, meteorologists, and other naturalists abroad, they had to wait for about two decades before the discovery of a striated pavement decided the issue in their favour. Medlicott in a manuscript report in 1872 suggested the name Gondwana after the ancient Kingdom of the Gondso an aboriginal tribe which still populates the area, for the formation, and Feistmantel brought it into print in 1876. Discoveries of similar formations in Australia, S. America, and S. Africa followed in quick succession, and land connections were envisaged to explain the occurrence of identical flora. It was Suess, who in 1885, introduced the term Gondwanaland for the hypothetical continent which comprised all these continents and the \land-bridges\" that connected them."