DISTRIBUTE INSECT VARIETY. 263 



chronic convulsions, vomiting- pillars of smoke and scoriae by 

 day, and red lava reflecting- against the midnight sky. 



The first evidence of this carboniferous forest and its insects 

 on northern areas is found in Devonian beds. Its plants are 

 stated to present the essential structure of their living represen- 

 tatives. The ferns are of existing type with some now extinct. 

 The Equisetacese were arborescent and lai-ge-leaved, with fruit 

 cones protected by scales containing small spores similar to those 

 of living horse-tails, and alike furnished with hygrometric 

 elators. With these vascular cryptogams of the swamps co- 

 existed some true conifers yet little known. Its insect tenants, 

 for the most part recovered as the merest wing fragments, whose 

 identification is precarious, are earliest detected by Dr. Scudder 

 in a dark shaly bed of Devonian age near St. John^s, New 

 Brunswick, presenting us the pristine marsh or esturine slime 

 where marine shell and trilobite crawled among decaying reeds 

 and fern. These oldest imprints are thought to belong to the 

 Neuroptera, a tribe mostly aquatic in its earlier wingless state, 

 and which, represented by the May Fly, Caddis Fly, and Dragon 

 Fly, still lights up with its glitter the umbrageous nooks of river 

 and ditch. The best determined, however, of Palseozoic insects are 

 certainly the terrestrial cockroaches, of which the coal measures 

 of Arkansas in America, and those of Saarbriicken and West- 

 phalia in Europe, have. yielded species in tolerable preservation. 

 These by habit are well suited to increase and multiply on the 

 damp leaf -fall and succulent stems of such plants as ferns and 

 sigillarise. On the whole, it may be said we are presented with a 

 flora and fauna most akin to that of the moist and warm islands 

 of Australasia, which then threw out its lines in the Northern 

 Hemisphere to the snows of Melville Island and the Arctic circle ; 

 and they who, like the writer, have basked an hour beneath the 

 whispering tree-ferns on some southern volcanic eminence washed 

 by a bright coral foam, among whose newer complex life lie 

 enshrined the last lingering relics of this past, have there 

 doubtless mentally reconstructed much that a museum is powerless 

 to reveal. 



If we examine the subsequent Permian rocks in England and 

 Germany, we find them everywhere deposited on the upturned 

 edges of the Carboniferous, while in the ancient kingdom of 



