1875.] 113 [Scudder. 



The President exhibited two specimens of porpbyritic 

 rock, evidently of a conglomerate character. He had been 

 the first, as long ago as 1862, 1 to refer to evidences of meta- 

 morphic action in conglomerate rocks, which he had ob- 

 served near Hingham, Mass., but was then unable to procure 

 hand specimens. He believed the subject worthy of farther 

 study. 



Prof. Niles remarked that he had noticed similar cases in 

 Wakefield and elsewhere in Massachusetts, and believed the 

 phenomena to be general, and not local in character. 



"Wednesday, June 16, 1875. 



President in chair. Eleven persons present. 



Mr. S. H. Scudder exhibited to the Society some remains 

 of insects occurring in carboniferous shale at Cape Breton. 



They were all found upon a single small fragment of stone, and 

 consist of wings of cockroaches (not very uncommon in carbon- 

 iferous strata) and the well preserved remains of the abdomen of a 

 larval dragon-fly. 



Heretofore the earliest indubitable remains of dragon-flies have 

 come from the Lias, several fragments of wings, as well as perfect 

 wings, a head and part of an abdomen having been figured by Rev. 

 Mr. Brodie in his work on the fossil insects of the secondary rocks 

 of England. Goldenberg, however, figures 2 an obscure insect (of 

 which he only says it is possibly a Termes, but to which, in a subse- 

 quent work he gives the name Termes Hagenii) , which also is per- 

 haps the larva of a dragon-fly ; this was found in the carboniferous 

 beds of the neighborhood of Saarbriicken in the valley of the Rhine. 

 Further I exhibited to this Society some years ago, from the Carbon- 

 iferous of Cape Breton, a photograph of a curious insect's wino- 

 which I called Haplopldebium Barnesii, and which had the general 

 aspect of a dragon-fly's wing, but differed from it in several essential 

 features ; it is not impossible that the body now exhibited may prove 



1 These Proceedings, IX, p. 57. 



2 Dunker and Meyer's Falaeontogr., IV, pi. vi, fig. 8. 



PROCEEDINGS B. S. N. H. — VOL. XVIII. 8 OCTOBER, 1875. 



