‘agot-1902.| Geological History of the Coast of Fife. 71 
yet another group of old sediments, coutaining also trunks and 
stems of trees like those before-mentioned. 
If we review what was taking place inland at this period, 
which the record of the rocks enables us to do with tolerable 
certainty, we find that the volcanic rocks which emanated 
from the Binn did not extend as far to the north as the Howe 
of Fife; nor, in the direction of the East Neuk of Fife, did 
they extend as far as St Monance. There is some reason to 
think that the lava flows did now and then go as far as 
where Inchkeith is now—though one cannot be quite sure 
that these may not have travelled from some other vent now 
concealed beneath the waters of the Forth. 
It is quite clear, however, as any one can see by studying 
the rocks seen on the the shore north of the Abden shipyard 
at Kinghorn, that the volcano continued in activity some time 
later, and, indeed, all through the period while the vast pile of 
strata, some three thousand feet in thickness, which now form 
the Lothian Oil Shales, were being laid down. The normal 
conditions existing were evidently those of a great estuarine 
or delta area, near to the sea in one direction, for marine fish 
made their way up quite frequently, and not very far from a 
land surface in another, because the remains of land plants 
occur in tolerable abundance. The animals native to the spot 
were clearly of the same general nature as those which occur 
in the water of deltas now. Furthermore, while these con- 
ditions obtained, sheets of lava, again and again, rolled down- 
ward from the adjoining volcano into the sea, covering up 
the older sediments as they did so, and in turn being covered 
by newer sediments as time went on and the subsidences 
made room on the sea-bottom for their accumulation. 
One interesting episode is that represented by the rocks on 
the shore a few hundred yards to the north of the Abden ship- 
yard. Overlying one of the lavas is a thin bed of shale, one 
band in which yields Péeronites persulcatus, Streptorhynchus 
erenistria, and other fossils, in abundance. This I have called 
the Pteronites bed. At the bottom of this shale, and lying 
directly upon the scoriaceous surface of an older basalt lava, is 
a very thin band containing the remains of a considerable 
number of species of fish. These are all in the form of frag- 
ments of bone, scales, and teeth, none of them being connected 
