CHAPTER III 



THE ORIGIN OF INSECTS 



That the race of insects is inconceivably ancient cannot 

 be doubted. " We often take the mountains as emblems 

 of age" (I quote Professor Carpenter) "and speak of the 

 'everlasting hills.' The most advanced orders of insects 

 are older than the chalk of the southern English downs, 

 while the early winged insects flitted by the shores of the 

 lakes wherein the grits and sandstones of the Kerry 

 Reeks gathered fragment by fragment. For the primitive 

 wingless insects we must look at least to the time when 

 by accumulation of coral, and the ash and lava of old 

 volcanoes, the rocks of Snowdon were being slowly formed 

 on the bed of the Primary sea. . . . We walk over the 

 hills rousing the bee from the flower, or the dragon-fly 

 from the rushes. The life of each individual insect lasts 

 but for a few days, or months, or years. Yet these 

 creatures are the latest links in a long chain of life which 

 reaches back to a time before the mountain whereon 

 they dwell was brought forth. To unobservant eyes the 

 landscape seems enduring, but study of its features shows 

 that it changes from age to age, changes even more 

 rapidly than the insect-types which adorn it." 



There must have been a time, however, when insects, 

 as such, first came into being. How did these primitive 

 insects originate, and what were they like ? The diffi- 

 culties which beset such an inquiry are too obvious to 

 call for emphasis, yet they are not so great as to preclude 

 all possibility of conjecture. The conception that living 



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