436 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



ourselves or Mr Geikie the question, was coal so commonly 

 consumed at the period of the Roman invasion, so as to yield 

 so large a percentage of the bed ? For myself I answer in 

 the negative. With regard to the horizontality of the oysters 

 and stones, I leave those who feel interested in the controversv 

 to convince themselves ; but I cannot help expressing my own 

 opinion that the number of oyster-shells in the upper part of 

 bed (5) are not greater than can be found in any humus bed 

 supplied by the manure of the city of Edinburgh ; nor are they 

 evidence of marine deposition more than can be afforded by 

 any well-cultivated field of Mid-Lothian. I shall now advert 

 to the character of the pottery found in bed (5), where Mr 

 Geikie found his Eoman pottery. Above I have stated that 

 we found upwards of thirty specimens of the fictile art; these 

 were submitted to the inspection of Mr Birch of the British 

 Museum, the first authority we have in the kingdom as re- 

 gards pottery. His answer was, " Not one piece is of Roman 

 origin." 



Another gentleman, second only to Mr Birch in his know- 

 ledge of pottery, pronounced them to be of local and modern 

 origin ; in this opinion he was both right and wrong. In re- 

 gard to the pottery being of local origin, I found that the red 

 pottery owed its formation to a manufactory at Portobello, 

 where elegant jugs after the Etruscan mould were made to 

 hold butter-milk, and the others were remains of neat glazed 

 flower-pots from Holland, which forty years ago the skippers 

 brought over to adorn the parlours of their wives. 



During our diggings in this bed No. 5, we frequently met 

 with the stems of tobacco pipes, which, of course, did not by 

 any means prove its Roman deposition ; pursuing our researches 

 further, we found five heads or bowls of pipes bearing the 

 initials T. W. Knowing only one tobacco-pipe manufacturer 

 in Edinburgh, we submitted them to him, and asked when 

 they were manufactured. His reply was, " these are the 

 initials of my father-in-law, to whose business I succeeded, 

 and could not have been made before the year 1814, when he 

 founded our establishment." 



But another proof of this bed No. 5 being a humus bed, 

 exists in the testimony of an old man, Thomas Anderson, who 



