birds or fish, but that they conformed in type to the families in which
they are classed to-day. Though they become fewer and fewer as they are
tracked back up the river of time, there are not found in the earliest
fossil-bearing rocks any connecting links or earlier and simpler forms of
insect life, or a clue to the common ancestor of insects, spiders, and
shrimps, which naturalists would dearly like to discover. There is a
baffling completeness about these creatures. When in the lias period, for
instance, the vertebrates were huge saurian reptiles and flying lizards,
and scarcely any of our existing classes of fish had come into existence,
the beetles, cockroaches, crickets, and white ants were there, with all
the distinguishing characteristics of the existing families as they were
settled by Linnaeus.

The first insect known to have existed, a creature of such vast antiquity
that it deserves all the respect which the parvenu man can summon and
offer to it, was--a cockroach. This, the father of all black-beetles,
probably walked the earth in solitary magnificence when not only kitchens,
but even kitchen-middens were undreamt of, possibly millions of years
before Neolithic man had even a back cave to offer with the remains of
last night's supper for the cockroach of the period to enjoy. His
discovery established the fact that in the Silurian period there were
insects, though, as the only piece of his remains found was a wing, there
has been room for dispute as to the exact species. Mr. Goss in his preface
to the second edition of his book notes that what is probably a still
older insect has been found in the lower Silurian in Sweden. This was not
a cockroach, but apparently something worse. If the Latin name,
_Protocimex Silurius_, be literally translated, it means the original
Silurian bug. It was a fair conjecture that insects appeared about the
same time as land plants first grew on the earth. As almost all the
species either feed on some vegetable substances in growth or decay, or