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PROCEEDINGS OF NATURAL-HISTORY SOCIETIES. 
BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 
The local Committee met in January to receive the report of the auditors. 
The total receipts were £4, 563. Is. lOd.; the disbursements £4,375. 17s. 4d.; 
leaving a balance of £187- 4s. 6d. A general report of the proceedings was 
ordered to be printed. A discussion then arose as to how the money was to be 
applied, and we believe it was settled that £100 should be given towards the 
purchase of a collection of shells, and the remainder to be divided between the 
Literary and Philosophical Society, Natural-History Society, Mechanics’ Institu¬ 
tion, Medical School, and the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, in 
Newcastle. 
DEVON AND CORNWALL NATURAL-HISTORY SOCIETY. 
This Society, recently established at Plymouth, is, we are glad to hear, in a 
very flourishing condition. At every meeting new members are enrolled, and a 
number of valuable donations have from time to time been received. 
EXTRACTS FROM FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS. 
ZOOLOGY. 
1. Shower of Fish near Calcutta. —We have received the following state¬ 
ment of an extraordinary fall of fish from a correspondent of undoubted veracity’ 
who witnessed the occurrence himself, at a place not more than twenty miles 
South of Calcutta, in the Sunderbunds, by way of the salt-water lakes :—About 
two o’clock, p.m., on the 20th inst., we had a small shower of rain, and with it 
descended a quantity of live fish, about three inches in length, and all of one kind 
only. They fell in a strait line on the road from my house to the tank, which 
is about forty or fifty yards distant. Those which fell on the hard ground were 
of course killed from the fall ; but those which fell where there was Grass 
growing, sustained no injury; I picked up a large quantity of them “ alive and 
kicking,” and let them go into my tank. Some people suppose that phenomena 
of this kind take place through the agency of the water-spouts, which draw up 
the fish, &c., from the rivers and tanks, and afterwards return them to the earth 
again in showers of rain; and there appears to me no other way of accounting 
