140 Aji Ancient Lake-deposit in Queens Park. [Sess. 



the east, speaking generally, by the northern portion of 

 Salisbury Crags, but in all likelihood extended some distance 

 westwards, for in 1884, when the foundation for the gasometers 

 was being excavated, shell-marl was there met with. As to 

 its age, if we regard it geologically it is of course recent ; 

 but reckoned by human chronology, it may well be termed 

 " ancient." It would, no doubt, be contemporaneous with 

 those other neighbouring sheets of water which have most of 

 them, like itself, now disappeared ; and it may be interesting, 

 therefore, in this connection, to quote what is said in ' Edin- 

 burgh and its Neighbourhood ' of the Borough Loch. Hugh 

 Miller writes of it thus : " The bittern has boomed amid its 

 reeds, and the stately swan skimmed over its surface, when 

 yonder Castle rock was a naked cliff, rising amid an uninhabited 

 country, and the gigantic elk and the bear found shelter in 

 the shaggy forest which waved on their ridges, now covered by 

 their ten thousand human habitations, and musical with the 

 murmurous hum of a busy population. It is not improbable 

 that some of the shells in the lower portion of that marl bed 

 were browsing, according to their nature, on aquatic plants, or 

 alternately rising to the surface to respire and descending to 

 feed, full four thousand years ago." ^ How this lake came to 

 be gradually filled up may be easily understood, for the process 

 of silting can be seen going on in many of our lochs at the 

 present day, as witness Lochend or Duddingston. In the 

 ' Lithology of Edinburgh,' Professor Fleming says, speaking 

 of Duddingston Loch as it was between thirty and forty years 

 ago, that it was " only interesting to the observer as an 

 example of the process of upfiltering by aquatic vegetation." 

 " The lake on the west side especially," he adds, " would 

 soon pass into a bog or morass if the reeds which now grow 

 luxuriantly were not annually cut down and removed for 

 thatching purposes." What Professor Fleming here predicted 

 has actually come to pass, for the lake on the west side is 

 now, and has been for years, represented by a wet spongy bog, 

 and will in the course of time become, no doubt, a verdant 

 meadow. Duddingston Loch itself has only been preserved as 

 a sheet of water by frequent removals of the rank vegetation. 



' Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood ' (8th edition), p. 145. 



