THE FIRST AIR-BREATHERS. 141 



of modern crickets (Fig. 123, d). Two others are represented 

 by mere fragments of wings, i-nsufficient to determine their 

 affinities with certainty. No other insects so old as these have 

 been discovered elsewhere; but it is to be borne in mind that 

 no other locality rich in Devonian plants has probably been 

 so thoroughly explored. The hard slaty ridges containing 

 these fossils are well exposed on the coast near the city of St. 

 John, and Messrs. Hartt and Matthew of that city, acting, I 

 believe, in concert with and aided by the Natural History 

 Society of the place, not only searched superficially, but removed 

 by blasting large portions of the richest beds, and examined 

 every fragment with the greatest care. Their primary object 

 was fossil plants, of which they obtained magnificent collec- 

 tions ; and it is scarcely possible that the insects could have 

 been found but for the exhaustive methods of exploration 

 employed. 



It is interesting to observe, respecting these oldest insects, 

 that they all belong to those families which have jaws, and not 

 suctorial apparatus, that they are not of those which undergo a 

 complete metamorphosis, and that their modern congeners pass 

 their larval stage in the water. Thus the waters gave birth to 

 the first insects, and their earliest families were not of those 

 which suck honied juices or the blood of animals, or which 

 pass through a worm-like infancy. These groups belong 

 apparently to much later times. 



On one of the specimens collected by Messrs. Hartt and 

 Matthew, and placed by them in my hands, is a spiral form 

 which m every particular of external marking resembles a 

 genus of modern West Indian Land-snails.i I have hesitated 

 to describe it, as the structure is lost and the form imperfect ; 

 but I cannot help regarding it as an indication that this group 

 of land animals also will be traced back to the Devonian age. 



Ascending from the Devonian to the Carboniferous, we at 



c/ ?/""^ Strephia, I have provisionally named the St. John species 

 Strephttes erianus. ^ ^ 



