LET 
clusion that this was the natural function, or at all events one of the functions, of 
those organs, and doubted whether the wings could be expanded without the use of 
the appendages. 
Prof. Westwood was inclined to think that the appendages were more ornamental 
than useful, and that their use, if any, was rather for the purpose of defence. 
Mr. S. H. Scudder, Sec. Nat. Hist. Soc. of Boston, U.S. A. (who was present as 
a visitor), exhibited two fossil specimens (one the reverse of the other) of a gigantic 
Ephemera, which must have measured five inches in expanse of wings. This with 
some other fossil insects had been found by Mr. Hartt in the Devonian series of North 
America, in a ledge of rocks which ran out to sea, so that they could be examined 
only at low tide; and respecting them Mr. Scudder read the following note:— 
** On the Devonian Insects of New Brunswick.—There are in all ten specimens in 
Mr. Harit’s most interesting collection of the fossil remains of insect-wings from 
Lancaster, eight of which are reverses of one another, thus reducing the number to six 
individuals; of these, one, a mere fragment, belongs, I think, to the same species as 
another of which the more important parts of the wing are preserved, so that we have 
five species represented among these Devonian insects, and these remains are all, I 
suspect, composed of portions of the anterior wing alone. The data being thus frag- 
mentary, the conclusions cannot be quite so satisfactorily determined as we could 
wish, but we can still discover enough to prove that they are of unwonted interest. 
Besides the peculiar interest which attaches to them as the earliest known traces of 
insect life on the globe, there is very much in themselves to attract and merit 
our closest attention. One of them is a gigantic representative of the family of 
Ephemerina amovg Neuroptera, some three or four times the size of the largest 
species now living, with which Iam acquainted. Another borrows some striking 
points of the peculiar wing-structure of the Neuropterous family Odonata, and com- 
bines with them those of families remote from that, and even belonging to a distinct 
section of the Neuroptera, exhibiting to our view a synthetic type which combines in 
one the Pseudo-neuroptera and the Neuroptera, and represents a family distinct from 
any bitherto known. Other fossil insects, found in carboniferous concretions in 
Illinois, and described in ‘Silliman’s Journal’ (N.S. xxxvii. 34), which Prof. Dana 
has‘kindly allowed me to examine, also belong to hitherto unrecognized families, 
exhibiting similar relations to these in-our-day-disconnected sections of Neuropterous 
insects; and a third species of Mr. Hartt’s is a member of still another family of 
Neuroptera, which finds its natural relations between the two described by Prof. Dana. 
A fourth, of which only an unimportant fragment was found, would seem to belong to 
the Neuroptera; but by some peculiarities of the minuter cross-veins, thrown off in 
the middle of the outer edge of the wing, in a most irregular and unusual manner, 
suggests no intimate relations with any known family, but must have belonged toa 
group of large and weak-winged insects. The fifth and last to be mentioned is of very 
striking interest, because, while it exhibits the peculiar venation which forms the well- 
known tympanum or stridulating apparatus of the male, in the Orthopterous family 
Locustarie (though differing somewhat from that), it also most resembles the Neu- 
roptera in all or nearly all the other peculiarities of its structure, and suggests the 
presence in the insect-faune of those ancient times of a synthetic type, which united 
the characteristics of the Orthoptera and Neuroptera, in themselves closely allied: 
this point, however, requires patient and severe investigation, and only my earliest 
