136 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



1 foot or so of boulder clay, then 18 inches of fine laminated 

 silt, then about 10 feet of sand and gravel with large waterworn 

 boulders of trap rock. Upon this gravel lay 20 to 30 feet of 

 boulder clay, with the farmhouse of Kingsknowe crowning it. 

 At the west end of this section the sand and gravel abutted 

 abruptly against the boulder clay, which then extended from 

 the rock head up to the farm buildings as a steep cliff' more 

 than 30 feet in height. The eastern side of this bed of sand 

 and gravel was not seen, as it was covered by a mass of run 

 debris which had slipped down from above. Beyond this 

 slipped stuff, the sand and gravel was again seen resting on 

 the rock with a much larger proportion of waterworn blocks. 

 It was clear from this fact that the gravel was the cUhris of 

 a river which once occupied the hollow it now fills, and that 

 the quarry had cut it obliquely, exposing its western end, 

 while the eastern was hid by the debris. In 1886 this gravel 

 was free from vegetable remains, but in 1884 occurred several 

 small lumps of peat that had evidently been torn from a 

 peat bed, and carried away and deposited in the gravel 

 forming by the torrential action of the river. These stray 

 pieces of peat, when washed, were found to be merely masses 

 of granular vegetable debris, quite identical with peaty 

 matter washed from sand got in 1887 in situ in the south- 

 east corner of Hailes Quarry, which consisted only of 

 vegetable debris and spores of Isoetes, which latter were 

 innumerable. Above this peaty sand were 6 or 7 feet of 

 boulder clay, brown and rusty from being near the surface, 

 and in it were some trap boulders 2 feet in diameter. 

 Between these gravel and peat beds on the south side of the 

 quarry, and the peat beds in the sandy clay in the north-east 

 corner, there is the great gap of the quarry, and all physical 

 connection is now wanting between them, but there can be 

 little reasonable doubt that both are parts of the same series 

 of deposits which took place at the same time under similar 

 circumstances, and, taken together, they suggest a river, 

 rapid and torrential in parts, and in others, slow, and with 

 lake-like expansions, in the quieter water of which the shells 

 and Ostracoda lived, and the plants grew, Avliose remains we 

 now find buried in its peats and silts. 



