THE CAEBONIFEKOUS AGE. 135 



science and theology. Surely it is more rational to 

 hold that the mind which can utilize the coal and 

 understand the manner of its formation, is itself made 

 in the image and likeness of the Supreme Creative 

 Spirit, in whom we live and move and have our being, 

 who knows the end from the beginning, whose power 

 is the origin of natural forces, whose wisdom is the 

 source of laws and correlations of laws, and whose 

 great plan is apparent alike in the order of nature 

 of the Palaeozoic world and of the modern world, as 

 well as in the relation of these to each other. 



In the Carboniferous, as in the Devonian age, 

 insects existed, and in greater numbers. The winged 

 insects of the period, so far as known, belong to three 

 of the nine or ten orders into which modern insects 

 are usually divided. Conspicuous among them are 

 representatives of our well-known domestic pests the 

 cockroaches, which thus belong geologically to a very 

 old family. The Carboniferous roaches had not the 

 advantage of haunting our larders, but they had 

 abundance of vegetable food in the rank forests of 

 their time, and no doubt lived much as the numerous 

 wild out-of-door species of this family now do. It is, 

 however, a curious fact that a group of insects created 

 so long ago, should prove themselves capable of the 

 kind of domestication to which these creatures attain 

 in our modern days ; and that, had we lived even so far 

 back as the coal period, we might have been liable to 

 the attacks of this particular kind of pest. Another 

 group, represented by many species in the coal 



