Pree The Botanical Gazette. [February, 
prophecy not only of our dragon-flies, and beetles, but also 
of our flies, bees and butterflies.” Scudder sums up what was 
known of American fossil insects about nine years ago in this 
“The species of fossil insects known from North 
America number eighty-one; six of these belong to the Devo- 
nian, nine to the Carboniferous, one to the Triassic and sixty- 
five to the Tertiary epochs; the Hymenoptera, Homeoptera 
and Diptera occur only in the Tertiaries; the same is true of 
the Lepidoptera, if we exclude the Morris specimen, and of 
the Coleoptera with the Triassic exception. The Orthoptera 
and Myriopoda are restricted to the Carboniferous, while the 
Neuroptera occur both in the Devonian and Carboniferous 
formations.” Packard says: ‘‘the lower forms of Hymenop- 
era, so far as the scanty records show, appeared first in the 
Jura formation.” 
From these statements its seems probable that the period 
of the appearance of dicotyledons was also the time of the 
development of our great groups of insects. The two have 
been hand in glove ever since. Insects wandered to and fro 
seeking what they might devour, and if the man is blessed who 
makes two blades of grass grow where only one was, thrice 
happy is the insect which discovers an entirely new source of 
nourishment by which its food supply is many times multi- 
plied. Accidentally lighting on a staminate flower cluster, as 
I have seen bees and flies do on the wind-fertilized inflores- 
cences of Poterium Canadense, it finds itself in the land of 
plenty and thereafter is on the outlook for food-magazines of 
the same kind. The flowers with highly colored bracts (rep- 
resented in the flora of to-day by some species of Euphorbia 
and Amarantus), or those with colored stamens, (such as species. 
of Thalictrum, Corema and Plantago now show as the first 
step toward insect attraction 
: e ovules so fertilized ripen seeds whic 
inherit the peculiarities of thei A 
eir par < 
degree. P cae to a greater or les 
= Sone is then, as far as we know it, the story of the origin 
owers, which were at first merely axes bearing spirally af- 
ian! a ee aA 
