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The following communication has been delayed in being brought before the Geological Society in the expectation of receiving further facts from Dr. Oldham, or that he would publish a substantive account of his own results after his examination of the earthquake-region. The latest communications received, however,by the writer from Dr. Oldham render it doubtful whether he will be able, consistently with the pressure of his official duties, to pursue the subject further; and as the facts which he has collected and well explained, of the production of enormous earth-fissures as effects of this earthquake, are of great importance, the writer has deemed it best to place them on record now, and to add to Dr. Oldham's account some remarks of his own as to the very striking secondary effects of this earthquake. Cachar, the site of the earthquake of the 10th January, 1869, is a British Province of Eastern India, about 110 miles in length from north to south, by 60 or 70 miles in width. Its boundaries on the north and south are Assam and Tipperah (an independent state), and on the east and west Munnepoor and Silhet respectively. It is hill-surrounded, except on the south and west, and consists chiefly of extensive plains, through which many large and small rivers wind and wander through ever changing courses in deep muddy beds, in which they rise from 25 to 35 feet in the rains. The chief river is the Barak, which is navigable for great distances, the Juroo and

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The fact that water expands in becoming ice, and that the latter thus floats upon the water, can scarcely have escaped the observation or inference of the acute intellects of a remote antiquity. Its conditions, when more carefully examined in modem times, pointed out the strange and, as it has been called, anomalous fact that water can be cooled 7° or 8° below its freezing-point without becoming solid, and that between its maximum density at about 39° Fahr. and its freezing-point at 32° Fahr., or within the narrow range of 7° Fahr., it expands in the large ratio of 915:1000.

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