Reptiles and Batrachians of the Edinburgh District. 495 
and Amphibians (Batrachians) included in the annexed list 
would be much more abundant in the district than now; 
but direct evidence on the point is singularly meagre. The 
old statistical account of the parishes does not help us,—its 
silence, indeed, may be taken as strong evidence that neither 
the Adder, nor any other Ophidian, at any rate, has been 
common for considerably over a century, and probably for a 
much longer period. Geologists tells us, that during pre- 
historic times, there existed in the very heart of what is now 
the city of Edinburgh, and in the immediate neighbourhood, 
numerous post-glacial lochs and tarns, most of which have 
long since vanished. These “ancient lakes,” at all events 
the later ones, were, we may be sure, inhabited by innumer- 
able frogs, toads, and newts; yet Mr James Bennie, who, as 
is well known, has given much attention to the organic 
remains embedded in their marls, silts, and other deposits, 
tells me nothing has, up to the present time, been detected 
that can be positively referred to any of the creatures we 
have here to deal with. 
To be complete, papers such as this should, of course, 
include full information regarding the fossil as well as the 
recent species. Nevertheless I have deemed it advisable to 
confine myself to the latter, leaving the former to be dealt 
with by some one fully conversant with all the facts relating 
to the paleontological side of the subject. In the present 
instance the omission does not amount to much, no fossil 
teptiles,and only two Amphibians, having Edinburgh localities 
assigned to them in Woodward & Sherborn’s “ Catalogue of 
3ritish Fossil Vertebrata,” published in 1890. The expla- 
nation is, no doubt, to be found in the absence of strata 
representing the epochs between the Carboniferous and the 
Glacial eras—an immense gap in the geological record of the 
district, which all who listened to or read the reports of Sir 
Archibald Geikie’s address to the British Association, on the 
occasion of its meeting in Edinburgh in 1892, must have 
keenly regretted. As we recall his mental pictures of the 
landscape during Carboniferous times, and see in place of 
the familiar hills and valleys of the Lothians, “ dense jungles 
of a strange vegetation—tall reeds, club-mosses, and tree 
