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Notes upon the History of Floods in the 
River Darling. 
By H. C. Russert, B.A., F.R.S., &c. 
[Read before the Royal Society of N.S. W., 3 November, 1886.] 
For some time past I have been collecting notes about floods in 
the Darling, and although there are many persons who remember 
them for twenty, or even thirty, years, ] have found great diffi- 
culty, in fact insuperable difficulty, in getting such an account of 
them as to height and continuance as we require. Nevertheless, 
the facts collected appeared to me to be of sufficient interest to 
submit them for your consideration. It is only another instance 
of the difficulty of arriving at historical facts twenty years after 
their occurrence. No record of the state of the river at Bourke 
seems to have been kept prior to 1871, when the Engineer-in- 
Chief for Harbours and Rivers established a gauge there: and for 
the few facts I have about floods in that river between 1835 and 
1871 I am indebted to gentlemen whose names will appear later 
on, Mr. M‘Intosh’s history from 1861 to 1879 is a valuable con- 
tribution, and without it we should have no record for many of 
the years. But valuable as the records really are, I found it difti- 
cult to translate them into river measures so that I could put 
them into the diagram of the Darling floods. The heights of those 
of 1864, 1870, and 9 are given with reference to known floods, 
but only these, and I trust my readers bn remember this when 
consulting the diagram and subsequent pag 
or convenient “reference it appeared Pant to put the substance 
of this history into a diagram which should show all the recorded 
oods. Those actually — measured are shown in Black: those 
recorded without measures by a shaded surface 
serious difficulty affects all the records, and that is the 
question of “summer level,” which is simply a point chosen for 
i convenience ; gene rally it means that the zero used is four 
feet below that height of the water at which steamers can travel, 
that is four feet of water on the bars or Barres places. ‘But 
these points have not been, so far as Iam aware, connected with 
the sea level until the gauges were put up vat Bourke, Alb 
pang places by Mr. McKinney, engineer for the Water Conserva- 
Jommission. From him I learn that the zero of the new” 
na at Albury, 481-63 feet above the sea, and the zero of the 
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