Art. XXIII.—Mineral Resources of Southern India. No. 5. Manganese Mines in the Kupput-gode Range, Southern Mahratta Country

Extract

At the time of my visiting these hills I had not seen Dr. Wilson's remarks on the minerals sent to the museum at Bombay by Trimulrow, from whose oral account of his excursion, and what he had heard among the hills, I was induced to imagine that there might be some truth in the report of the existence of coal. Led by this hope I proceeded from the gold-washings at Doni, and crossed the southern chain of the divergement by a steep and rugged mountain-path leading down on the opposite side by a ravine, in which the Kupput Iswara temple sits enshrined, into a jungly valley. A mile or two easterly down the valley, the village of Chick Wodurti is reached; here I was shown some fragments of a yellowish and brownish ferro-siliceous stone, not unlike some varieties of jasper, or the eisenkiesel of the Germans. The excavations whence these were procured were made by order of Hyder and Tippoo, who used these stones as gun-flints. They lie in the plain at the base of a spur of the Kupput-gode range, about two miles to the S.E. of Wodurti. They are evidently fragments of a large vein, analogous to those of chert or hornstone that so frequently occur near plutonic formations.