Age of Insects :i^^'] 



Epoch for the oldest metamorphic insects, and we 

 know that so early as Devonian and even Silurian 

 times winged insects like the Cockroaches and 

 Termites of to-day, inhabited our earth. The 

 Ordovician is the latest of the great periods in which 

 the ancestors of insects can be supposed to have 

 taken to the land ; and in the preceding Cambrian 

 age we are face to face with the oldest known 

 fossils, which prove that the lower Crustacean types 

 were even then already well established. To what 

 an immensely remote period then must the primitive 

 arthropods have belonged ! 



We often take mountains as emblems of age and 

 speak of the " everlasting hills." The most advanced 

 orders of insects are older than the chalk of the 

 southern English downs, while the early winged 

 insects flitted by the shores of the lakes wherein 

 the grits and sandstones of the Kerry Reeks gathered 

 fragment by fragment. For the primitive wingless 

 insects we must look at least to the time when by 

 accumulation of coral, and the ash and lava of old 

 volcanoes, the rocks of Snowdon were being slowly 

 formed on the bed of the Primary Sea. And the 

 oldest rocks of the Western Highlands of Scotland 

 will hardly carry us back to the primeval arthropods. 

 We walk over the hills rousing the bee from the 

 flower, or the dragonfly from the rushes. The life 

 of each individual insect lasts but for a few days, 

 or months, or years. Yet these creatures are the 

 latest links in a long chain of life which reaches back 

 to a time before the mountain whereon they dwell 

 was brought forth. To unobservant eyes the land- 

 scape seems enduring, but study of its features 

 shows that it changes from age to age, changes 

 even more rapidly than the insect - types which 

 adorn it. Yet through the long periods of the 



