Charles Frederick Hartt. 
5 
mained for Mr. Hartt and his collaborateurs to amass the 
materials which, in the hands of the sagacious Principal of 
McGill University, were to show that these plant-hearing 
sandstones contained a Devonian flora. 
The writer had already found in these beds a sufficient 
number and variety of species to enable Sir Mm. Dawson 
to pronounce upon their Devonian age, but the rich harvest 
of fossils — exquisitely preserved ferns, asterophy Hites, and 
psilophyta were not discovered until Mr. Hartt entered 
the fleld. To the collection and observation of these 
plants he gave the whole of his vacations during the years 
1861, ’62 and ’63; and the result of this work has been of 
the most enduring value to science. Every bed of Ihe 
unique section at the “ Fern ledges” in Lancaster, West of 
St. John, was carefully studied, its fossils collected and its 
remains recorded. Such a work had not been done before 
in the Maritime provinces of Canada. The thoroughness 
of the work will be seen from the fact that while Hartt dis- 
covered scores of species in these beds, no new species of 
plants have been added to those which crowned his re- 
searches, and remains of only two insects beside those he 
found. 
The discovery of insects of such great antiquity was per- 
haps the most striking result of these investigations. A 
few insects mostly related to the cockroaches had previous- 
ly been found in the Coal Measures in several countries, 
but Hartt’s discovery of insect wings in these older rocks 
threw a new light upon the history of insect life in the first 
geological ages. These insects were of five species, and 
were placed in the hands of Dr. S. H. Scudder of Boston for 
study. He referred them all to the Heuroptera; in part to 
new, in part, doubtfully, to old families, and suggested that 
some of the forms were synthetic types. But their impor- 
tant bearing on the history of insect-life was not then 
fully reached by that sagacious and experienced student of 
insects, for he has since referred them all to a great Palaeo- 
zoic order, now quite extinct, the Palaeodictyoptera of Gol- 
denberg, from which he conceives that all the modern or- 
ders of insects have arisen. 
