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