Abstract: This paper deals especially with the propagation of a 2mm thick saw-cut inclined 45? to the axis of the rock specimen of 5?5?12.5cm and filled with epoxy so as to simulate the development of an earthquake of continental interior. The specimen was loaded in uniaxial compression and attached with a measuring system consisting of strain gages, acoustic emission and wave travelling.Characteristics of failure modes observed in this experimental studies were as follows:1. Creep along the fault face occurred at a very low compressive load without any foreshocks, of course, it would generate precursors such as groundsurface displacements and groundwater level variations.2. As the load increased, a tearing-off crack started to develop at the existing fault tip nearly perpendicular to the fault plane, and appeared to arise initially from the creep process. The propagation of this primary crack was stable and its path was curvilinear. After a considerable primary crack propagation, a second tension crack developed again at the same tip and extended downward to the edge of the specimen, but without any stress drop before overall rupture. During cracking, both the number of acoustic emissions and the wave travelling time increased as time going on. The former phenomenon is equivalent to and the latter is caused by the foreshocks.3. As the compressive load reached a critical level, shear rupture, behaving like mainshock, took place suddenly at the fault end" zone under intensively compressive stress concentration and directed relatively to the tension cracks with angles of varing about from >30? to<90?. Obviously, this was due to the distribution of both the unadmis-sible shear stress from the sliding plane and the tensile stress from the cracked zone to the neighbouring region capable of sustaining an increase of stress.Finally, our results in applying to the prediction of continental earthquakes suggest that large shock should be preceeded first by a fault creep and then by a number of small shocks in tensile cracked regions trending in different directions from the main shear failure plane. In other words, the processes of deformation and fracture of a rock mass would vary in time and in space, which may be used as a guide how to estimate as well as possible the relative locations of precursors and foreshocks to the mainshocks.