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C. J. Cornish - The Naturalist on the Thames
sometimes joined by cross branches at right angles. Some of the modern kinds are very beautiful
four-winged flies, with bright colours on their wings like butterflies. Others are ant-lions or caddis-flies.
The curve of the fragment of wing also suggested its probable size when unbroken. It was perhaps two
inches long. As there are little horny rings round the wing base like those which crickets have, on which
they rub their legs and so "chirp," it is also quite likely that this insect of hoary antiquity did the same,
and enlivened the silence of Devonian fern groves with a prehistoric hum. It is quite in keeping with
modern ideas that in that age of fishes one of the most remarkable insects should have been a kind of
May-fly, "a large species of Ephemerina, which must have measured five inches in expanse of
wings." Thus our Thames May-flies had gigantic prehistoric ancestors, which appeared on earth, possibly
with their present associates the caddis flies, at an enormously remote age.
So far no butterfly had yet appeared on earth, though the Ephemerinae might dance over the still
lagoons and swamps. In the coal-forest period, and the age of trees and rank vegetation, insects of many
kinds seem to have multiplied, even though the most beautiful of all were not yet launched in air. In
England the first beetle wandered on to the stage of life - the oldest British insect fossil known. It was
discovered in the ironstone of Coalbrookdale, and was a kind of weevil. Another creature found in the
same ironstone was a cricket. It is quite in keeping with the forest and tree surroundings of the time that
white ants should have abounded to eat up the decayed and dead wood. Strictly speaking, black-beetles
are not beetles at all. But they are a very good imitation. As some hundreds of families of
Paltaeoblattidae, which may be translated as "old original cockroaches," and Blattidae, or
cockroaches pur sang, pervaded these forests, and the doyen of all Swiss fossil animals is one of
these, the "state of the streets" in a coal forest may be imagined when there were no bird police to keep
the insects in order. Thus the end of the Palaeozoic world - a very poor world at best - was fairly well
stocked with insects, though the moths, bees, and butterflies had yet to come. Then came the sunrise of a
new time - mammals, any number of reptiles, possibly some birds, and an insect life more teeming than
any we now know. The "insect limestone" attests these multitudes. Beetles, of which the scarabs were a
numerous family, increased vastly, and the oldest known dragon-fly and supposed ancestor of those
which hawk over the Oxford river, left his skeleton, or what represents a dragon-fly's skeleton, among
some two thousand other specimens of fossil insects, in the Swiss Alps. It was then that the first bird and
the first butterfly appeared. The bird was the famous Archaeopteryx, found in the Solenhofen slate, and
the first butterfly, to use an Irishism, was a moth, a sphinx moth, apparently about the size of the
Convolvulus sphinx moth. This stone-embedded relic of the moth that sucked the juices of the plants of
the Mesozoic world, incalculable ages before the time even of the gigantic mammals, is preserved in the
Teyler Museum at Haarlem. When the new era of the Eocene period developed modern forms of plants,
their rapid growth was accompanied by a great increase in the number of insects. Those which, like the
moths, had only made their first venture on earth, now appeared in greater numbers. Near Aix, in
Provence, five butterflies and two moths were found in some beds of marl and gypsum long celebrated
for their fossils, and with the fossil butterflies were, in every case but one, fossil remains of the plants
which had served its larvae as food. Thus the May-flies and beetles are perhaps older than the Thames
shells, and older than the prehistoric plants on which the river molluscs feed.
[1] Secretary of the Entomological Society, and an accomplished botanist. The work is entitled "The
Geological Antiquity of Insects," and published by Gurney and Jackson, London.
BUTTERFLY SLEEP
Fond as the butterflies are of the light and sun, they dearly love their beds. Like most fashionable people
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