286 
HALF HOURS WITH INSECTS. [Packard. 
mistaken for each other, and the wingless Atropos, or death 
tick, reminds us of the louse. The ants have among the 
Neuroptera their well known analogues, the Termites or 
white ants. Like the true ants they live in large colonies, 
and have wingless workers of two sorts. Not^ these and 
certain peculiarities in structure, which place the white ants 
at the head of the Neuroptera, are just those which make 
them so much like the true ants, which are among the most 
highly developed insects, ranking near the honey bee. 
From the facts here and elsewhere given it may be re¬ 
garded as quite well proved, that some, if not the majority 
of mimics among insects belong to groups, lower in the or¬ 
ganic scale than the insects they mimic. Moreover, the 
paleontological record shows that the Neuroptera were the 
Fig. 224 . 
Fig. 225 . 
Panorpa. 
Hepialus. 
first to appear. The fossil forms discovered were also syn¬ 
thetic types, combining the characters of other neuropterous 
and some orthopterous families.v These fossil insects, it 
should be observed, were remarkable “mimics,” but we have 
no proof that the living insects they resemble were then in 
existence. We can only explain the matter by regarding 
them as prophetic types, anticipating in nature the coming 
of whole families and even orders of insects. They repre¬ 
sent ancestral or stem forms, from which arose lines of de¬ 
scent resulting in the present insect creation. The original 
Devonian May fly-like insect, and the Xenoneura and Ilomo- 
thetus, as well as the Carboniferous Miamia and Hemeristia 
and Eugereon, possessed features which they have, perhaps, 
30 
