The great rivers which flow eastward to the sea have fissured and moulded the surface into deep ravines alternating with high plateaus, ridges and isolated hills.
So long as the epidermis of animals remains sound, disease germs may come in contact with it almost with impunity, but immediately on its being fissured, or a larger wound made through it, the underlying parts, the blood and soft tissues, are attacked by them.
The Egri-dagh possesses a sharply defined crest, ranges at a general elevation of 8000 ft., is bare of timber, scantily supplied with water, and rugged and deeply fissured.
In this system the soft ground or fissured water-bearing rock is rendered temporarily solid by freezing the contained water within a surface a few feet larger in diameter than the size of the finished shaft, so that the ground may be broken either by hand tools or blasting in the same manner as hard rock.
Among the sedimentary rocks we have, for example, in the clay slates of the Silurian formations, rocks no less cracked and fissured than others, but generally quite impermeable by reason of the joints being packed with the very fine clay resulting from the rubbing of slate upon slate in the earth movements to which the cracks are due.
