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 controversy 
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 
