154 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
have of its date and of the vegetable remains which have 
escaped the metamorphosis of eremacausis, clearly prove 
that from Elie westward for several miles, perhaps as far as 
Leven, a lake existed, which is considered, by all who have 
studied it, to have been a fresh-water lake, bordered, or 
perhaps preceded, by a forest. 
In the first notice of this lake, published by Professor 
Fleming (Brande’s Journ. of Science, 2nd series, vi. p. 21), he 
describes trunks of trees standing rooted in the soil beneath, 
but the only animal remains he found were those of 
certain sea creatures, that had taken up their abode in it 
after submergence in the sea. Dr Brown, in his paper 
“On the Shell Clay of Elie” (Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin. xxiv., 
p. 617), records its occurrence in the section exposed in the 
railway cutting near Elie station, and on the shore, east of 
Elie pier, and next describes its appearance as a great peaty 
mass in Largo Bay, 4 feet in thickness, in which hazel and 
willow, and especially hazel nuts, were found, also other 
seeds, mosses, and especially abundant remains of Arwndo 
phragmitis, adds that it sweeps for miles round Largo 
Bay, passing out at low water-mark, and considers it to have 
represented a land surface when Britain stood so high above 
the water as to be connected with the Continent. Mr Robert 
Howie, in Ballingal’s “Shores of Fife,’ p. 147, gives the 
names of fifteen species of mosses which he had “collected 
from the vegetable drift of Largo Bay, the drowned valley of 
the traditional wood of the Forth;” and adds, “many of the 
specimens which grew under widely different conditions, 
were found drifted together in broken fragments.” 
Mr Wood (“ East Neuk of Fife,” 2nd ed., p. 488) records 
that on sinking a well on the south side of High Street, Ele, 
opposite the churchyard, a bed was found beneath 12 feet 
of blown sand, and resting on blue clay with “branches of 
hazel and oak, and some hazel nuts.’ And further, ‘in 
digging the foundation of the wall which bounds the road 
to the harbour on the west side, vegetable remains of the 
same kind were found, but the branches were larger, with a 
greater proportion of oak.” é 
In the paper by Mr Wood on the railway cutting already 
