e, let us anticipate
here, for the sake of the illustration which it affords, one of the
sections of the other great division of our subject,--that which treats
of the fossil animals. Let us run briefly over the geologic history of
insects, in order that we may mark the peculiar light which it casts on
the character of the ancient floras. No insects have yet been detected
in the Silurian or Old Red Sandstone Systems. They first appear amid the
hard, dry, flowerless vegetation of the Coal Measures, and in genera
suited to its character. Among these the scorpions take a prominent
place,--carnivorous arachnidae of ill repute, that live under stones and
fallen trunks, and seize fast with their nippers upon the creatures on
which they prey, crustaceans usually, such as the wood-louse, or
insects, such as the earth-beetles and their grubs. With the scorpions
there occur cockroaches of types not at all unlike the existing ones,
and that, judging from their appearance, must have been foul feeders, to
which scarce anything could have come amiss as food. Books, manuscripts,
leather, ink, oil, meat, even the bodies of the dead, are devoured
indiscriminately by the recent _Blatta gigantea_ of the warmer parts of
the globe,--one of the most disagreeable pests of the European settler,
or of war vessels on foreign stations. I have among my books an
age-embrowned copy of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany," that had been
carried into foreign parts by a musical relation, after it had seen hard
service at home, and had become smoke dried and black; and yet even it,
though but little tempting, as might be thought, was not safe from the
cockroaches; for, finding it left open one day, they ate out in half an
hour half its table of contents, consisting of several leaves.
Assuredly, if the ancient _Blattae_ were as little nice in their eating
as the devourers of the "Tea Table Miscellany," they would not have
lacked food amid even the unproductive flora and meagre fauna of the
Coal Measures. With these ancient cockroaches a few locusts and beetles
have been found associated, together with a small _Tinea_,--a creature
allied to the common clothes-moth, and a _Phasmia_,--a creature related
to the spectre insects. But the group is an inconsiderable one; for
insects seem to have occupied no very conspicuous place in the
carboniferous fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and
seed devouring kinds, and would probably have found their food am