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.
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