anist has not yet succeeded in finding any trace in even the Tertiary deposits, and which appears to have been specially created for the gratification of human sense. Unlike the Rosacea, it exhibits no rich blow of color, or tempting show of luscious fruit;-it does not appeal very directly to either the sense of taste or of sight: but it is richly odoriferous; and, though deemed somewhat out of place in the garden for the last century and more, it enters largely into the composition of some of our most fashionable perfumes. I refer to the Labiate family, a family to which the lavenders, the mints, the thymes, and the hyssops belong, with basil, rosemary, and marjorum, -all plants of “gray renown," as Shenstone happily remarks in his description of the herbal of his "Schoolmistress."

"Herbs too she knew, and well of each could speak,

That in her garden sipped the silvery dew,

Where no vain flower disclosed a gaudy streak,

But herbs for use and physic not a few,

Of gray renown within those borders grew.

The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme,

And fragrant balm, and sage of sober hue.

"And marjorum sweet in shepherd's posie found,

And lavender, whose spikes of azure bloom

Shall be erewhile in arid bundles bound,

To lurk amid her labors of the loom,

And crown her kerchiefs clean with meikle rare perfume.

"And here trim rosemary, that whilom crowned

The daintiest garden of the proudest peer,

Ere, driven from its envied site, it found

A sacred shelter for its branches here,

Where, edged with gold, its glittering skirts appear,
With horehound gray, and mint of softer green."

All the plants here enumerated belong to the labiate family; which, though unfashionable even in Shenstone's days, have still their products favorably received in the very best society.

The rosemary, whose banishment from the gardens of the great he specially records, enters largely in the composition of eau de Cologne. Of the lavenders, one species (Laven dula vera) yields the well known lavender oil, and another (L. latifolio) the spike oil. The peppermint (Meantha viridus) furnishes the essence so popular under that name among our confectioners; and one of the most valued perfumes of the East (next to the famous Attar, a product of the Rosaceae) is the oil of the Patchouly plant, another of the labiates. Let me indulge, ere quitting this part of the subject, in a single remark. There have been classes of religionists, not wholly absent from our own country, and well known on the Continent, who have deemed it a merit to deny themselves every pleasure of sense, however innocent and delicate. The excellent but mistaken Pascal refused to look upon a lovely landscape; and the Port Royalist nuns remarked, somewhat simply for their side of the argument, that they seemed as if warring with Providence, seeing that the favors which he was abundantly showering upon them, they, in obedience to the stern law of their lives, were continually rejecting. But it is better, surely, to be on the side of Providence against Pascal and the nuns, than on the side of Pascal and the nuns against Providence. The great Creator, who has provided so wisely and abundantly for all his creatures, knows what is best for us, infinitely better than we do ourselves; and there is neither sense nor merit, surely, in churlishly refusing to partake of that ample entertainment, sprinkled with delicate perfumes, garnished with roses, and crowned with the most delicious fruit, which we now know was not only specially prepared for us, but also got ready, as nearly as we can judge, for the appointed hour of our appearance at the feast. This we also know, that when the Divine Man came into the world, — unlike the Port Royalists, he did not refuse the temperate use of

any of these luxuries, not even of that "ointment of spikenard, very precious" (a product of the labiate family), with which Mary anointed his feet.

Though it may at first seem a little out of place, let us anticipate here, for the sake of the illustration which it affords, one of the sections of the other great division of our subject, -that which treats of the fossil animals. Let us run briefly over the geologic history of insects, in order that we may

CYCLOPHTHALMUS BUCKLANDI.

(A Fossil Scorpion of the Coal Measures of Bohemia.)

mark the peculiar light which it casts on the character of the ancient floras. No insects have yet been detected in the Silurian or Old Red Sandstone Systems. They first appear amid the hard, dry, flowerless vegetation of the Coal Measures, and in genera suited to its character. Among these the scorpions take a prominent place, carnivorous arach

nidæ of ill repute, that live under stones and fallen trunks, and seize fast with their nippers upon the creatures on which they prey, crustaceans usually, such as the wood-louse, or insects, such as the earth-beetles and their grubs. With the scorpions there occur cockroaches of types not at all unlike the existing ones, and that, judging from their appearance, must have been foul feeders, to which scarce anything could have come amiss as food. Books, manuscripts, leather, ink, oil, meat, even the bodies of the dead, are devoured indiscriminately by the recent Blatta gigantea of the warmer parts of the globe,—one of the most disagreeable pests of the European settler, or of war vessels on foreign stations. I have among my books an age-embrowned copy of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany," that had been carried into foreign parts by a musical relation, after it had seen hard service at home, and had become smoke dried and black; and yet even it, though but little tempting, as might be thought, was not safe from the cockroaches; for, finding it left open one day, they ate out in half an hour half its table of contents, consisting of several leaves. Assuredly, if the ancient Blatta were as little nice in their eating as the devourers of the "Tea Table Miscellany," they would not have lacked food amid even the unproductive flora and meagre fauna of the Coal Measures. With these ancient cockroaches a few locusts and beetles have been found associated, together with a small Tinea,a creature allied to the common clothes-moth, and a Phasmia, —a creature related to the spectre insects. But the group is an inconsiderable one; for insects seem to have occupied no very conspicuous place in the carboniferous fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and seed devouring kinds, and would probably have found their food among the conifers; the Phasmida and grasshoppers would have lived on the tender shoots of the less rigid

plants their contemporaries; the Tinea, probably on ligneous or cottony fibre. Not a single insect has the system yet produced of the now numerous kinds that seek their food among flowers. In the Oolitic ages, however, insects become greatly more numerous, so numerous that they seemed to have formed almost exclusively the food of the earliest mammals, and apparently also of some of the flying reptiles of the time. The magnificent dragon-flies, the car

Fig. 45.

nivorous tyrants of their race, were abundant; and we now know, that while they were, as their name indicates, dragons to the weaker insects, they themselves were devoured by dragons as truly such as were ever yet feigned by romancer of the middle ages. Ants were also common, with crickets, grasshoppers, bugs both of the land and water, beetles, twowinged flies, and, in species distinct from the preceding