The Ancient Lake of Elie. 153 
against the sea. I discovered it, however, on the west side of 
the road to the harbour, at the north-east angle of Elie Bay, 
as mentioned by Mr Wood, and took a goodly sample of it 
for examination. On washing it I found almost nothing like 
what I got from other lake peats, and, most emphatically, 
none of the shells or other remains of animal life so rife in 
the later lake of Elie. The peat was hard, compact, almost 
rock-like, consisting of vegetable mud, with much drift- 
wood in the shape of sticks, several inches in length 
and about one inch in diameter, rounded at the ends, 
and generally stripped of the bark. There were a few 
hazel nuts crushed and broken, a few sprays of mosses, 
and a number of bog beans gnawed by some small rodent for 
the sake of the kernels. I need not say that this was a great 
disappointment; but to give the submerged forest a further 
and a better chance,-I got a fisherman, Mr Anderson of 
Liberty Place, Elie, to send me a bagful from Largo Bay 
near low-water mark, where he had often seen it while 
dredging for bait. On examination I found it identical with 
that from the north-east angle of Elie Bay. A hard, compact 
vegetable mud, with less driftwood in it, but a few more 
gnawed bog beans and better preserved sprigs of mosses. So 
ended, for the time being, my hope of getting something good 
from the submerged forest peat to match the lake peats of 
the Lothians. This failure is apparently due to the pureness 
of the peat, there being in it neither clay, nor silt, nor sand to 
modify or arrest that process of decay called eremacausis, by 
which all susceptible vegetable substances subjected to it 
turns eventually into amorphous dust or mud, or what Mr 
Smith of Kilwinning calls “ parrot-coal” peat, because the 
vegetable matter in either is now only grains of black dust. 
Mr Thomas Scott has suggested that this amorphous lake 
peat is probably confined to the centre of the lake, where the 
water was deepest and free from clayey muds; and that 
peat from shallower water, by the shores of the lake, would 
probably have preserved in it the tenderer seeds of plants, 
or the shells of Mollusca and Ostracoda. 
But, though we have failed to elucidate, as I had hoped, the 
character of the lake of the submerged forest, the records we 
