S. H. Scudder — English Carhoniferous Insecls. 265 



IV. — Two MORE English Carboniferous Insects. 

 By Samuel H. Scudder, Esq., 

 of Cambridge, U.S.A. 



BY the kind intervention of Sir William Dawson, the Kev. H. H, 

 Higgins has sent me two new Carboniferous Insects of suffi- 

 cient interest to bring to the attention of English palaeontologists. 

 They are both preserved in the Liverpool Museum, one having been 

 presented to it by Major Chambers as long ago as January, 1858 ; 

 while the other was mentioned by Mr. Higgins in his presidential 

 address to the Liverpool Naturalists' Field Club in 1871, and figured 

 on the plate of the Kavenhead fossils in the Liverpool Museum 

 (fig. 15) which accompanies it. Both the wings are gigantic. 



The recent discoveries of M. Charles Brongniart in the Carbon- 

 iferous rocks at Commentry in France have occasioned something 

 of a revolution in our ideas concerning early insects, having shown 

 among other things the presence in Carboniferous deposits of a 

 group of walking sticks of an ancestral, generalized type (see Geol. 

 Mag. 1879, Vol. VI. pp. 97-102, PL IV). Their wings, for instance, 

 so closely resembled in their neuration the general structure of 

 neuropterous wings, that up to his discovery detached wings, now 

 known to belong to this group (Dictyoneura, etc.), were always and 

 unhesitatingly classed as neuropterous. M. Brongniart has also 

 discovered fragments of a gigantic wing which is either the same as, 

 or closely allied to, one from Derbyshire, which, from a basal frag- 

 ment, I described as Arclmoptilus ingens (Geol. Mag. 1881, Vol. 

 VIII. p. 295), showing that this also is to be referred to the same 

 group. Most probably the fragment, also of the base of a wing, 

 which Mr. Higgins figures from the Lancashire deposits, belongs to 

 the same category ; but it is rather too incomplete to speak of it 

 with confidence. Not unlikely, when more complete examples are 

 found, it may prove to be a second and smaller species oi ArchcBoptilus. 



Of the other specimen, we may speak with more confidence, as it 

 is much better preserved, showing indeed the greater part of the 

 wing. It belongs unquestionabl}'^ to this same group of Protophas- 

 mtda, as Brongniart calls it, and bears a considerable general resem- 

 blance to the still larger form which he has named Dictyoneura 

 Monyi, belonging indeed in the same division of the family, where 

 the scapular nervure is simple. It may be known under the name 

 of jEdceophasma ^ anglica. 



In its generic features it is characterized by the great breadth of 

 the wing, which is broadest in the middle, its unbranched scapular 

 vein (which brings it in the immediate vicinity of Goldenhergia, 

 and especially of the group to which Dictyoneura Monyi and D. Gol- 

 denbergi of Brongniart belong), and the abundant offshoots of the 

 lower veins, which in the distal halves are closely crowded and 

 repeatedly forked, while in the basal half of the wing, the veins are 

 comparatively distant. The costal margin is regularly and gently 

 convex. Notwithstanding the great extent of the wing, the externo- 



^ AlSoios, Phasma, 



