556 Meeting of the British Association. [ Oct., 
fruits are produced in great quantities, and Mr. Johnson considered 
the country far superior to India. Khotan is watered by numerous 
affluents of the Tarim river, which discharges itself into the great 
lake Lob Nur; canals have been dug from stream to stream for the 
irrigation of the country. The return journey was made in No- 
vember, 1865. The elevated plateau between the Kiun Lun and 
Karakorum ranges was then in its winter garb, and the cold was 
so intense that the beards of the party were covered with icicles 
whilst travellmg in the sun. He crossed the Karakorum pass 
(18,317 feet), and reached Srinagar, the capital of Kashmere, on 
the 19th December. 
The discussion which followed the reading of this remarkable 
paper was rendered interesting by the part taken in it by Dr. T. 
Thomson, the well-known Himalayan traveller and botanist, who 
was the first Englishman who ascended to the summit of the 
Karakorum pass. Sir Andrew Waugh, late Surveyor-General of 
‘India, who read the paper, stated that it was accompanied by an 
excellent map of the new region surveyed by its author, photo- 
zincographed from his plane table. 
A paper relating to the Pangong lake in the elevated region 
of Ladakh, lying in the route of Mr. Johnson, from the pen of 
Captain Godwin-Austen, was also read to the Section, and gaye a 
detailed account of the physical geography and glacial phenomena 
of the neighbourhood. 
The Section was rich in papers on physical geography, for 
besides the cummunication of Captain Godwin-Austen just alluded 
to, there was a remarkable paper by Colonel Tremenheere, on 
the Lower Indus, which gave in a summary form the results of 
the author’s engineering surveys of the lower course of the river 
for 540 miles from its mouth. He showed that the Indus flowed 
along the summit of a ridge, the plain of Sind sloping away from 
each side of the river as well as downwards towards the sea. ‘The 
slope of the plain in a direct line to the sea is 9°3 inches per mile, 
and in many places the transverse slope on each side of the river is 
quite as much. The soil consists of a very fine silicious deposit, 
without a single grain of sand as large as a pin-head. The amount 
of silt carried down annually is sufficient to cover 70 square miles 
of the sea-bottom with deposit one yard in thickness. It is curious 
that there exists, in the plain, dry channels far below the actual bed 
of the Indus; these exist only on the eastern side, and the con- 
clusion must be that the river has gradually worked to the 
westward. Colonel Tremenheere observed that it might be 
generally stated of rivers flowing through such plains, that the 
larger the body of water and the less the surface slope of the plain 
the more direct will be the course of the river; and, on the con- 
