﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lv 



more nearly resembling those which must have prevailed when the 

 ancient coal-measures were formed. 



Already some light has been thrown on the Articulata of the car- 

 boniferous period, some Arachnidse having been procured from strata 

 of this age. Two species of Coleoptera of the Linnsean genus Cur- 

 culio, a neuropterous insect resembling a Corydalis, and another of 

 the same order related to the Phasmidse, have been met with in the 

 iron-stone of one coal-field, that of Coalbrook Dale. As an example 

 of the insectivorous arachnidans, I may mention the Scorpion of the 

 Bohemian coal, figured by Count Sternberg, in which even the eyes, 

 skin, and minute hairs were preserved*. We need not despair there- 

 fore of obtaining eventually fossil representatives of all the principal 

 orders of hexapods and arachnidans, although the species found in 

 the coal may never constitute a thousandth part of those which in- 

 habited the earth at the era in question. 



The inference of Professor Heer, that insects were very rare at that 

 period, owing to the scarcity of flowers in those forests in which 

 Ferns, Lycopodia, and Equiseta predominated, does not appear to me 

 legitimate ; nor can I agree with him in thinking it probable that 

 lepidopterous insects were first created in the tertiary period, merely 

 because the only well-determined specimens of that order yet known 

 to palaeontologists have come from tertiary strata.f I have myself 

 found the elytra of beetles both in peat and shell-marl in Scotland, as 

 well as in the pleistocene freshwater beds of the Norfolk cliffs at 

 Mundesley, but I have never seen a single moth or butterfly in any 

 recent deposits ; and if we were to search these for ages, could we ex- 

 pect to gain from them a much clearer knowledge of the 11,000 in- 

 sects now living in Great Britain, than that which the coal-measures 

 have afforded of the carboniferous insects ? 



When Agassiz described 152 species of ichthyolites from the coal, 

 he found them to consist of 94 placoids belonging to the families of 

 Shark and Bay, and 58 ganoids. One family of the latter he called 

 "sauroid fish," including the Megalichthys, Holoptychius, and others 

 often of great size, and all predaceous. Although true fish, and not 

 intermediate between fish and reptiles, they seem undoubtedly to 

 have been more highly organized than any living fish, reminding us 

 of the skeletons of true saurians by the close sutures of their cranial 



* Buckland, Bridgewater Treat, p. 409. 



t Heer, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. vi. Part 2. p. 68. 



