January iSqo.] 



PSYCHE. 



291 



taste for polemics, at least until the 

 fauna of Commentry, which will cer- 

 tainly double the field of observation, 

 gives us a fairer basis for judgment. 

 Meanwhile it may be said that Brongni- 

 art in his sketch hints by many of his 

 terms that he has found the same diffi- 

 culties as those which faced me, and has 

 been forced to admit a synthesis of 

 structure in at least some of the older 

 types, which indeed the very laws of 

 evolution would render probable. 



At the beginning of this decade our 

 knowledge of mesozoic insects was very 

 limited ; it was almost entirely confined 

 to the researches of Germar, Giebel, 

 Hagen and Weyenbergh on the Jura of 

 Eichstatt and Solenhofen ; to Heer's 

 account of the Liassic insects of Aargau ; 

 and to Brodie's and Westwood's publi- 

 cations on the secondary insects of Eng- 

 land. The horizon has been somewhat 

 extended of late years by the thorough 

 discussion of the Bavarian insects by 

 Deichmiiller and by Oppenheim ; by 

 the careful exploitation of a new locality 

 for Liassic insects at Dobbertin, Ger- 

 man}^, by F. E. Geinitz ; by the con- 

 siderable number of newr generic and 

 specific types of cockroaches from the 

 secondary rocks of England described 

 by myself; by the repeated, though not 

 extensive, discoveries of Fritsch in Bo- 

 hemia, adding interesting material for 

 our very meagre knowledge of creta- 

 ceous insects ; and by the discovery at 

 Fairplay, Col., of a collection of triassic 

 cockroaches of special interest and im- 

 portance. 



Among noteworthv contributions to 



our knowledge of the insects of this 

 epoch may be mentioned Oppenheim's 

 study of the group he called rhipido- 

 rhabdis which he regarded as a distinct 

 order and an ancestral type of lepi- 

 doptera. The discussionof the structure 

 of these insects, especially by Oppen- 

 heim and Deichmiiller, has made clear 

 many points regarding the Solenhofen 

 insects which have always been obscure, 

 and brought about the agreement that 

 the rhipidorhabdi must be regarded as 

 hymenoptera and in no sense prede- 

 cessors of lepidoptera. Geinitz in his 

 study of the Liassic fauna of Dobbertin 

 has been able to extend considerably our 

 knowledge of the structure of that pre- 

 vailing mesozoic type, Orthophlebia., 

 known entirely by its wings, and which 

 he regards as phryganideous. In our 

 own country, the triassic cockroach- 

 fauna of Fairplay, just referred to. 

 sliows an interesting transition from the 

 older to the newer forms, which goes 

 far to substantiate the differences I have 

 pointed out between paleozoic and later 

 cockroaches ; while the study of a large 

 number of specimens of Morniolucoides ^ 

 long but imperfectly known from the 

 red sandstone of Connecticut, has en- 

 abled me to render it in a high degree 

 probable that this oldest known insect- 

 larva was a sialid. 



In the monographic treatment of me- 

 sozoic insects we have only to record 

 the discussion of the rhipidorhabdi al- 

 ready mentioned, and a systematic re- 

 vision of the mesozoic cockroaches, 

 based on a considerable collection of 

 English forms new and old, lent me bv 



