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
else live upon other insects, some such provision of food was necessary
for them. Remains of such plants were discovered in the Silurian rocks. In
the Devonian formations, which contain the next oldest set of fossil
insects, numbers of conifers and ferns are found. Yet even then the only
vertebrate animals seem to have been fish. The insects still had the land
all to themselves. Of one of these Devonian insects the base of a wing was
the only part preserved in the rock.
Pages:
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57