Mac Culloch on Animals preserved in Amber. 45 



trouble to make the necessary inquiries and experiments, it will 

 probably not bs found very difficult to ascertain whether these 

 specimens are limited to the produce of many trees, or to that of 

 one only, and to what plant they actually belong. 



The immediate object of this paper is included in the foregoing 

 remarks ; but the fact itself, as far as it relates to the existence of 

 insects in amber, opens a different field of interesting inquiry, 

 respecting which, unfortunately, no accurate information will 

 probably ever be obtained. 



Geological observations, recently multiplied to a most interest- 

 ing degree, have proved, that besides the animals imbedded in 

 deep-seated strata of solid rock, and consisting of marine species, 

 numerous remains exist in alluvial soils, of quadrupeds and 

 birds which have once inhabited the dry land and the air, and of 

 amphibious creatures that have been bred and have died where 

 they have had alternate and easy access to the shores and to the 

 waters of lakes. 



It ought to be a sufficient proof of the corresponding, probably 

 simultaneous, existence of insects, that they are found imbedded 

 in amber ; the only mode nearly in which they could have been 

 preserved for the examination of the naturalists of future and 

 distant ages, though some of the aquatic, or rather subaquatic, 

 winged ones, have been found in the shales of the fresh- water 

 formations. To render the proof of distance of time, or of a cor- 

 responding era complete, it is only here necessary to advert to 

 that which is already well known ; namely, that amber is found in 

 alluvial soils of an antiquity at least as remote as that which marks 

 the other alluvial soils or strata in which such remains of a forme r 

 living inhabited world are imbedded. That this should have been 

 the fact, is too probable to doubt, even if such proofs did not 

 exist. Whether specimens sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently 

 distinct, may ever be found to enable some future Cuvier in ento- 

 mology to assign the genera and species of such remains, is uncer- 

 tain ; perhaps it is not probable. 



Hitherto, it is certain that no sufficient attention has been paid 

 to this branch of suhteirene zoology, to the entomology of a former 



