134 The Rev. F. W. Hope on Succinic Insects. 



of jet, and if not torn from the bed of the sea may have been washed 

 from the Baltic, where there are regular mines of it as well as in 

 Spain*. Amber is also abundant on the shores of Sicily and the 

 Adriatic sea. By eminent geologists it is considered as antedilu- 

 vian, and of its vegetable origin there can be little doubt. The 

 trees which produced the amber and the insects which frequented 

 them are not known to exist. Probably the climate by degrees be- 

 came colder and destroyed the vegetation and drove the latter to 

 seek a more southern and genial region, or inundation may have 

 overflowed the woods and buried all beneath a mass of waters. The 

 celebrated Berendt gives us his opinion that the geographical focus 

 of the amber wood was in the bottom of the Baltic, in the neigh- 

 bourhood of what is now caEed Samland near Pillau. Every gale 

 from the north still throws up, as it did a thousand years ago, its 

 masses of amber on the Baltic shores ; and it is worthy of remark 

 that each point of the coast receives a particular kind of amber, so 

 peculiar that practised cutters of it are able, when looking at a 

 rough piece, to decide whether it came from a quarter to the east 

 of Dantzig, or from the west on the coast of Pomerania, the produce 

 probably of different trees. The places therefore where the amber 

 was originally produced and subsequently immersed appear to be 

 identical. Had it been carried thither by diluvium or alluvium the 

 different kinds must have been commixed, but that is evidently not 

 the case, as is well attested by Mr. Berendt and others. From an 

 examination of the fossil wood (in the British Museum) obtained 

 from the Prussian amber- mines, it appeared to me mostly to resem- 

 ble fir, and as the major part of the insects found in amber are 

 Xylophagous, I did expect to find some species which we meet with 

 at present on the fir. Up to the present moment however I have 

 not succeeded. Berendt informs us that the wood, blossom, fruit 

 and needle leaves of the Conifers have been found in amber, — the 

 latter very rarely, — yet never corresponding with any existing trees ; 

 and although the leaves appeared to differ greatly from all known 

 species, he thinks himself justified in ascribing them to the genus 

 Pinus. And in a letter lately received from Mr. Berendt he informs 

 me that the anatomico-microscopical examination of the wood 



* It is much more likely that amber inclosing insects should be thrown on the 

 shores of England than recent " exotic beetles, which beetles were said to have 

 revived after having been long drenched in salt water." Meeting with this passage 

 in a work of such eminence as Professor Lyell's Principles of Geology, I inquired 

 of the author what these exotics were, and received for answer specimens of Calo- 

 sotna Sycophanta, an insect found in Essex, Norfolk, Cheshire, and other counties 

 in England. .Here the entomologist comes in to aid the geologist. 



