Coal'Formation Insects. .9 



be extremely scarce, in the low region of cypress-swamps, 

 near the sea, where we behold conditions more nearly re- 

 sembling those which must have prevailed when the ancient 

 coal-measures were formed. 



Already some light has been thrown on the Articulata of 

 the carboniferous period, some Arachnidae having been pro- 

 cured from strata of this age. Two species of Coleoptera 

 of the Linnsean genus Curculio, a neuropterous insect re- 

 sembling a Corydalis, and another of the same order related 

 to the Phasmidse, have been met with in the iron-stone of 

 one coal-field, that of Coalbrook Dale. As an example of 

 the insectivorous arachnidans, I may mention the Scorpion 

 of the Bohemian coal, figured by Count Sternberg, in which 

 even the eyes,' skin, and minute hairs were preserved.* We 

 need not despair, therefore, of obtaining eventually fossil re- 

 presentatives of all the principal orders of hexapods and 

 arachnidans, although the species found in the coal may 

 never constitute a thousandth part of those which inhabited 

 the earth at the era in question. 



The inference of Professor Heer, that insects were very 

 rare at that period, owing to the scarcity of flowers in those 

 forests in which Ferns, Lycopodia, and Equiseta predomi- 

 nated, does not appear to me legitimate ; nor can I agree with 

 him in thinking it probable that lepidopterous insects were 

 first created in the tertiary period, merely because the only 

 well-determined specimens of that order yet known to 

 palaeontologists have come from tertiary strata.t I have 

 myself found the elytra of beetles both in peat and shell- 

 marl in Scotland, as well as in the pleistocene freshwater 

 beds of the Norfolk cliffs at Mundesley, but I have never 

 seen a single moth or butterfly in any recent deposits ; and 

 if we were to search these for ages, could we expect to gain 

 from them a much clearer knowledge of the 11,000 insects 

 now living in Great Britain, than that which the coal- 

 measures have affbrded of the carboniferous insects ? 



When Agassiz described 152 species of ichthyolites from 



* Buckland, Bridgewater Treat, p. 409. 



t Heer, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. vi., Part 2, p. 



