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 Phasmide 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 carboniferous ones, the disgusting cockroaches. And for the first time amid the remains of a flora that seems to have had its few flowers, though flowers could have formed no conspicuous feature in even an Oolitic landscape, — we detect in a few broken fragments of the wings of butterflies, decided trace of the flower-sucking insects. Not, however, until we enter into the great Tertiary division do these become numerous. The first bee makes its appearance in the amber of the Eocene, locked up hermetically in its gemlike tomb,—an embalmed corpse in a crystal coffin, ——— along with fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees. The first of the Bombycida too, - insects that may be seen suspended over flowers by the scarce visible vibrations of their wings, sucking the honied juices by means of their long, slender trunks, - also appear in the amber, associated with moths, butterflies, and a few caterpillars. Bees and butterflies are present in increased proportions in the latter Tertiary deposits; but not until that terminal creation to which we ourselves belong was ushered on the scene did they receive their fullest development. There is exquisite poetry in Wordsworth's reference to "the soft murmur of the vagrant bee," "A slender sound, yet hoary Time Doth to the soul exalt it with the chime Of all his years; a company Of ages coming, ages gone, Nations from before them sweeping." And yet, mayhap, the naked scientific facts of the history of this busy insect are scarcely less poetic than the pleasing imagination of the poet regarding it. They tell that man's world, with all its griefs and troubles, is more emphatically a world of flowers than any of the creations that preceded it; and that as one great family- the grasses — were called into existence, in order, apparently, that he might enter in favoring circumstances upon his two earliest avocations, and be in good hope a keeper of herds and a tiller of the ground; and as another family of plants—the Rosacea —was created in order that the gardens which it would be also one of his vocations to keep and to dress should have their trees "good for food and pleasant to the taste;" so flowers in general were profusely produced just ere he appeared, to minister to that sense of beauty which distinguishes him from all the lower creatures, and to which he owes not a few of his most exquisite enjoyments. The poet accepted the bee as a sign of high significance: the geologist also accepts her as a sign. Her entombed remains testify to the gradual fitting up of our earth as a place of habitation for a creature destined to seek delight for the mind and the eye as certainly as for the grosser senses, and in especial marks the introduction of the stately forest trees, and the arrival of the delicious flowers. And, "Thus in their stations lifting toward the sky The foliaged head in cloud-like majesty, The shadow-casting race of trees survive: Thus in the train of spring arrive Sweet flowers: what living eye hath viewed Wherever sportive zephyrs bend Their course, or genial showers descend." 8 LECTURE SECOND. THE PALEONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS. AMID the unceasing change and endless variety of nature. there occur certain great radical ideas, that, while they form, if I may so express myself, the groundwork of the change, -the basis of the variety, - admit in themselves of no change or variety whatever. They constitute the aye-enduring tissue on which the ever-changing patterns of creation are inscribed: the patterns are ever varying; the tissue which exhibits them for ever remains the same. In the animal kingdom, for instance, the prominent ideas have always been uniform. However much the faunas of the various geologic periods may have differed from each other, or from the fauna which now exists, in their general aspect and character, they were all, if I may so speak, equally underlaid by the great leading ideas which still constitute the master types of animal life. And these leading ideas are four in number. First, there is the star-like type of life, life embodied in a form that, as in the corals, the sea-anemones, the sea-urchins, and the star-fishes, radiates outwards from a centre; second, there is the articulated type of life, life embodied in a form composed, as in the worms, crustaceans, and insects, of a series of rings united by their edges, but more or less moveable on each other; third, there is the bilateral or molluscan type of life, life embodied in a form in which there is a duality of corresponding parts, ranged, as in the cuttle-fishes, the clams, and |