152 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
being found, it may be that it represented a time when the 
lake was silted up; while the lower half, in which sand and 
fresh-water shells occurred together, represent the time when 
the lake existed. Mr Wood gives the thickness of the bed 
with fresh-water shells as not less than 10 or 12 feet, which 
suggests that it was probably more. In the exposures from 
which the shelly peat was got that I have examined, none of 
them exhausted the thickness. At the foundation for the 
new crane at the station, 7 feet was cut into. 
The time when this lake spread its waters over the ground 
on which Elie now stands, was, as Dr Brown says, “of 
considerable antiquity,’ and probably was, as he concludes, 
in the times of the raised: beach of Largo Bay, the deposi- 
tion of the shelly peat going on in the lake, while the great 
accumulation of sand and sea-shells went on in Largo Bay. 
This gives a very considerable antiquity indeed, and justifies 
the term “ancient” we have applied to it. Before the Roman 
invasion—perhaps even before the people whose lands the 
Romans invaded came and possessed these lands,—when the 
only dwellers by the shores of Fife and the Lothians were 
the simple folk whose implements of bone or stone were 
found alongside the Airthrey whale in the Carse of Stirling— 
at that time when the Firth of Forth extended as much 
beyond Alloa as Alloa is west of Elie—we may safely con- 
clude that the lake peat, with the land and fresh-water shells 
we now pick out of its débris, was deposited grain by grain 
and shell by shell from the waters of this ancient lake of 
Elie. 
But ancient as this lake of the shelly loam may be, we 
have had in our investigations glimpses of a much larger and 
more ancient lake at Elie—the lake of the submerged forest. 
My errand to Elie at Christmas 1889 was to obtain specimens: 
of the submerged forest beds to compare-with other lake 
peat I had found in Midlothian, at Redhall and Hailes 
quarries, as detailed in “The Ancient Lakes of Edinburgh.” 
As the submerged forest peat was said by Mr Wood and Dr 
Brown to be exposed on the shore immediately to the east of 
Elie pier, I ‘sought it there first, but found it hidden by 
a palisade of old railway sleepers erected as a bulwark 
