ong the
conifers; the _Phasmidae_ 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 carnivorous 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,
two-winged 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 gem-like tomb,--an embalmed corpse in a
crystal coffin,--along with fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees.
The first of the Bombycidae too,--insects that maybe 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
insec