OF THE PAST. 207 



same scurrying movements. Indeed, some accurate observers 

 so, I suppose, we must call them. have failed to take note of 

 some important and very general distinctions between the 

 living and the dead. Thus Gerstaecker, in a work begun 

 twenty years a^o. and not vet finished, said, near its beginning,* 



*; *. O ' V 



"Not a single species of Insect has yet been found in the Car- 

 boniferous rocks which does not fall, on closer examination 

 (mit roller Evident), not only in an existing order, but even 

 almost completely in the same family as some living form, and 

 only presents striking distinctions when compared with the 

 species themselves." He further specifies the Cockroaches 

 described from the Coal Measures, by Germar and Goldenberg, 

 as agreeing in every distinguishing family characteristic with 

 those of the present day. 



In one sense, indeed, this is true. We separate the living 

 Cockroaches from other kinds of Orthoptera as a " family ' 

 group, and " Cockroaches ' have existed since the Coal 

 Measures at least ; yet the structure of every one of the older 

 types is really so peculiar that none of them can be brought 

 within the limits of the family as it now exists. We recognise 

 ours, indeed, as the direct descendants of the ancient forms, but 

 so changed in structure as to form a distinct group. A parallel 

 case is found in the Walking-sticks, and is even more obvious. 

 The recent researches of M. Charles Brongniart have brought 

 to view a whole series of forms in Carboniferous times, which 

 are manifestly the progenitors of living Walking-sticks, with 

 their remarkably long and slender stick-like body, attenuated 

 legs, and peculiar appendages at the tip of the abdomen. Exist- 

 ing forms are either wingless or else have opaque elytron-like 

 front wings, and very ample, gauzy, fan-like hind wings ; while 

 the Carboniferous species are furnished with four membranous 

 wings, almost precisely alike, and so utterly different from those 

 of existing types that, before the discovery of the bodies, these 

 wings were universally classed as the wings of Neuropterous 

 Insects (sensu Linneano). Thus Gerstaecker, in the very place 

 already quoted, says of these same wings, known under the 

 generic name Dictyoneura, that they show at least a very close 

 relationship to the Ephemeridce of to-day. 



* Die Klassen und Ordnungen der Arthropoden. Leipzig, Svo, p. 292. 



