The Ancient Lakes of Edinburgh. les 
ANCIENT LAKE aT NEW REDHALL QuarrRY. 
In 1874, when this quarry was first opened, a lake peat- 
bed was disclosed beneath the boulder clay, and resting 
partly on sand lying upon the rock and partly on a lower 
boulder clay. A description and sketch of the section as 
then exposed is given by Mr J. Henderson in the Trans. of 
the Geol. Soc. of Edinburgh, vol. ii, p. 391. An attempt was 
made to get the plant remains found in the peat-bed named, 
but it was unsuccessful. At various tirrings since 1874, the 
same lake peat-bed was exposed, and, though further attempts 
were made to get the plants and other things named, nothing 
effective was done till 1887, when Mr Clement Reid, of the 
Geological Survey of England, succeeded in naming about 
46 species of plants, whose names and characters will be 
found in his paper on the “Early History of the British 
Flora,” published in the Annals of Botany for August 1888. 
At the same time, through the kindness of Mr Reid, the 
beetles found along with the seeds were submitted to Mr 
C. O. Waterhouse of the British Museum, who was able to 
“name about 30 species. The samples of peat from the 
tirring of 1887 were got from the coup, the bed in situ 
having been rendered inaccessible by a landslip. In 1889, 
during another tirring, access was got to the peat-bed in situ, 
and many samples taken from different parts of the bed 
were subjected to improved methods of research, with results 
far exceeding those obtained previously. The seeds and 
beetles obtained, greatly surpassed in number those got 
before, and the record will be considerably extended. One 
interesting addition was a number of Ostracod shells, which 
come as an agreeable surprise, for it has been generally held 
by experienced students that these shells, which consist, 
partly at least, of limy matter, would be dissolved by the 
carbonic acid of the decaying peat, and nothing left to tell of 
their existence in the lakes in which the peat was formed. 
The section in which the lake peat occurred in 1889 
consisted of—(1.) sandy stony clay, presumably rotten boulder 
clay, resting on the rock; (2.) brown compressed vegetable 
matter 4 inches in thickness, with only a few seeds of the 
