126 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
quence of fossil insects with their companions of vegetation re- 
veals many interesting and cumulative facts. In the Carbonifer- 
ous period, as pictured in the coal, we find vegetation consisting 
entirely of ferns, club-mosses, and “ horse-tail,” in luxuriant growth, 
as well as the most primitive pines—the lowest in organization 
among the true flowering plants. The companion insects were 
of the dragon-fly, locust, and beetle tribes. Inasmuch as these 
are insects that rarely frequent flowers, we find that the com- 
panion plants are all flowerless genera, that require no insect aid 
for perpetuation, or of trees whose existing counterparts—white 
pine and spruce, etc.—even to-day ignore the existence of in- 
sects, and depend wholly upon the wind in the scattering of their 
pollen and consequent perpetuation. 
The Reptilian age, which followed after the annihilation of all 
preceding species, we find ushered in by a luxuriant growth of 
seemingly freshly created types of the previous mentioned tribe 
of plants, followed in the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous pe- 
riods by the successive multiplication of Palms and Cycads— 
wind fertilized plants again—succeeded at last by a countless 
host of blossoming trees and flowery fragrant vegetation: oaks 
and willows, beech, alder, tulip-tree and blossoming herbs and 
shrubs, accompanied by a myrmidon representation of all the 
tribes of insects now known. In the light of modern scientific 
revelation who shall question the analogy or significance of this 
simultaneous creation, or that the prehistoric bee and butterfly 
were called into being obedient to the same design which we see 
them now fulfilling among the fragrant blossoms of our mead- 
ows?—for fragrance had not been wasted on the desert air of 
those earlier mesozoic times. 
“Geologists inform us,” says Hugh Macmillan, “that all the 
eras of the earth’s history previous to the upper miocene were 
destitute of perfumes. It is only when we come to the periods 
immediately antecedent to the human that we meet with an odor- 
iferous flora.” An era of gladness in anticipation of the birth of 
man. 
In further reinforcement bearing upon the functions and an 
