APPEARANCE OF BIRDS AND MAMMALS 223
ranges, but the greater part of Kashmir had sunk once more beneath the waters, in which new sediments of enormous thickness were being accumulated, till in the late Cretaceous period, or about four million years ago, the great crustal compression began which finally upheaved these deposits from the ocean bottom, and formed the Kashmir of the present day. ‘This upheaval was, however, neither sudden nor continuous. It was very gradual, it had three distinct phases, and was not complete till a million years ago when the dividing ocean entirely disappeared, and the Himalaya reached its maximum height.
And now at this period of upheaval — the Tertiary period of geologists—a great change had come in the animal and vegetable worlds. Man had not arisen even yet, but birds and mammals and flowers, and all kinds of trees were now developed ; and this marked the threshold of the modern type of life. The ages when the great ferns and palms and yew-like conifers were the leading forms of vegetation had passed away, and the period of the hard-wood trees and ever- greens had commenced. The great reptiles, too, which in such wonderful variety of type were the
