The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-03-12
OLDEST OF INSECTS.

His Kind-His Noble Line Traced
 Back Through Millions of Years by
 the Fossils in Rocks of the Silurian
 Periodic Was Always Rover and
 a Scavenger.
 There is doubtless many a good housewife in this world who wonders as she chases about the kitchen. and the pantry poking into dark hooks and crannies with her pail of hot water or box of poison, whatever the little pests called cockroaches are here for any way and what good they do. These questions would be rather difficult to answer, for, like most of natures scavengers-and they or most of their varieties at least have certainly been such in the past-they have obtruded in these times of advanced sanitary arrangements and modern improve ments," where their service might well be dispensed with. But there is no doubt, however much we may be- grudge the little insects d few tiny, warm crevices in our homes or an occa- sional burial place in our buildings and cuisine at the summer hotel that by all recognized laws of priority they have at least as much right here as we have, for their very. very great-grand- sires were settlers upon this earth many ages before our progenitors were even thought of.
 In Bible times their presence was far more disagreeably felt than in our own both on account of the different and more sovenly mode of living that pre- vailed among those people and of the warm climate of the countries of which the Bible tells. And it is pro- bable, although no distinct mention is | made of the cockroach in the Script | ures as among the animals of Noah, that it was nevertheless in the very | vanguard of the procession that so placidly wended it's way into the ark Even the first of her kind, the wife of Adam. was unquestionably acquainted with the little six footed creatures. But Eve was a very happy go lucky sort of dame and was as little troubled with household cares and victpals as she was with fashion, and it is likely that the fact of their existence did not weigh heavily upon her mind.
 The antiquity of the cockroach, how ever, is not reckoned by the thousands of years with which we commonly compute our vast stretches of historic time, but by the millions and millions upon millions. Its .beginning takes us back through misty and unfabled ages, past the epochs of the gigantic masto- don and the tremendous glaciers that swept over the northern part of this land, to disappear beneath warmer southern sun; past the epoch of the huge and horrible reptiles that wand cred over the universal and bogs and fitted through the air with their strange, Tapping wings, like the fiends in Dante's Inferno" past the long period of the luxuriant solitudes of the carboniferous forests. when the great forces of nature were at work storing away the rich beds of coal into which we delve to-day: past the times when l WHdleS dlu BtdHt SfldThS dHu SSd monsters dashed the waters into foam the monarchs of the oceans. Their orgin carries us back to the very com mencemert of things They were ont of the earliest of the forms of life and the pioneers of insect life. As some one has said. 'They are the true aristocrats of insects" the kings o1 their kind.
 Learned savants and, researchers tell us that the most primitive ot cockroaches are found deep oown 1T what are known as the silurian rocks which were formed such. countless ages ago that they don't attempt tc count them at all. They were not very unlike their lineal descendants of toda. the principal difference being as tc their wings, and it is probable tha
 should one of these ancient creature!
 be in some way resurrected and g scurrying across the kitchen floor i
 would be stepped on with as littl'
 thought and compunction as are it
 modern kindred. As these wings con
 stitute the chief and often the onl.
 means of studying their species, tn
 bodies having in most cases beel
 wholly dissolved by putrefaction, 1t i
 perhaps worthy of note that their de
 velopment was more perfect than il the present varieties-excepting tn
 hind or under wings, which are almos identical-and that they are preserve,