LATERITE. Cabook, &Non. A clay iron ore peculiar to India. It covers the western coast almost continuously, and for the most part up to the very foot of the ghats, from near Bombay to Ceylon. It is found in detached beds along the Coromandel coast, near Madras and Nellore, Raja mundry, and Samulcottah, extending into Cuttack. It caps the loftiest summits of the Eastern and Western Ghats, and some of the isolated peaks in the table-land in the interior. A small patch of it is to be seen in Berar on the left bank of a river, eleven miles N. of Amraoti, on the road to Ellich pur, and it covers all the country around Beder. It occurs in the Southern Mahratta country, Mysore, Salem, Coimbatore, South Arcot, the Carnatic, and Tanjore. It is found in Malwa, and in many parts of Bengal and Ceylon. It fringes the shores of Burma, Malacca, and Siam, and appears on the coast of Singapore and Sumatra. It is found in boulders and rolled masses all along the Malabar coast from Bombay north to Gogo in the Gulf of Cambay. Beyond the region of the formation itself, pieces of it have been met with three hundred feet under the surface, in the blue clay beds at Calcutta, as also in similar beds of lesser thickness in Bombay, and close by Cambay and Kurachee ; so that the formation at one time was probably much more extensive than at pre sent. Its colour is of a red irony or brick-dust hue, sometimes deepened into dark-red. It is
marked with whitish stains, and is occasionally cellular or perforated with tubiform holes. It rarely if ever contains either crystals or organic remains, is never stratified or columnar, and generally spreads out in vast sheets over the surface of the plutonic or volcanic rocks. When the upper surface is cleared away, the rock below is found soft and easily cut into blocks of any form. It quickly hardens and darkens in hue by exposure to the air, and is then not at all liable to decomposition or injury from the weather. The Arcade Inquisition at Goa is built of it, also St. Mary's Church, Madras, and the old fortress of Malacca. It is called by the natives, from its worm-eaten appearance, Kire-ka-patthar, or Sili ka-patthar. The Tamilar call it Chori kullu and Vettic kullu, and on the Malabar coast it is termed Stika kullu. There are two strong objections to supposing laterites to be the decomposed rock over which they lie ; first, because were such the case, we ought to observe at the foot of a laterite hill a gradual blending of the laterite into the secondary greenstone, but such has never pre sented itself. — Carter's Geological Papers on Western p. 77 ; Cole on Laterite, in Madras Journal Lit. and Soc. ; Newbold in Asiatic Society's Transactions.