Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/585

Rh of cities require pure water, and the people of Lynn have wisely determined to protect and preserve the abundant supply which still flows from the springs that watered the cattle of the Puritans, and these woods now perform their noblest duty, in furnishing the great city with water, oxygen, and sylvan beauty for the repose of its inhabitants.

Fossil Insects.—The publications of the last ten years on fossil insects comprise, according to Mr. S. H. Scudder's review, about one third of a complete catalogue of papers on the subject. This literature records some of the most important discoveries that have been made in this field. Passing the discovery of Silurian scorpions in several parts of the world, we have, first, Brongniart's discovery of the hexapod, Palæoblattina, in the Silurian of France, as yet the only known true insect in that system. Next is the remarkable Devonian insect fauna in New Brunswick, first announced before 1880, but only fully published, with figures of the species, then. With these must be classed the Devonian myriapods, the earliest known members of that group, elaborated by Peach. In the Carboniferous period we have the abundant forms of Mazon Creek and other deposits in the United States, which include so extraordinary a number of blattarians that Mr. Scudder calls it, so far as its insect fauna is concerned, "the age of cockroaches." These discoveries are even more than paralleled by the similar discoveries of M. Brongniart in France, equally characterized by multitudes of cockroaches. There the principal discoveries in the Palæozoic series have been accompanied by the publication of many striking forms which indicate the ancestral types of living insects, or by the better elucidation of types already known but whose significance had not been understood. A new era has been begun in the study of the earlier types, in that the subjects have been treated in more than a scattered way, by fuller discussions, and by attempts to systematize. Our knowledge of Mesozoic insects has been likewise much enlarged. Of Tertiary insects, the earliest are to all general intents and purposes identical with those of to-day, although they differ no doubt specifically, and to a considerable degree generically. Most of those so far recovered from temperate regions indicate a warmer climate in their time; but, taken as a whole, the grand features of insect life appear to have been essentially the same since the beginning of Tertiary times. Of the insects of this period, the Florissant deposit alone of the Western United States is as productive, if we exclude the insects found in amber, as all the Tertiary fields of Europe taken together. Last year the author found that the strata of a considerable tract of country in western Colorado and eastern Utah were packed with fossil insects as closely as at Florissant. "Whether these new localities will excel or even equal that place in the variety of their fossil treasures is yet to be determined; but there can hardly be any doubt that we shall soon be able in our Western Territories to rehabilitate successive faunas as successfully as has been done with many of our vertebrate types, and as has not yet been done for insects in any country in the world." Insects have now been found, too, in a score of places in our Carboniferous series.

Ancient Superstitions in Italy.—In a paper at the International Folk-lore Congress on Modern Tuscan Tradition, Mr. Charles G. Leiand spoke of a mountainous district, the Romagna Tuscana, between Forli and Ravenna, in which the peasantry have preserved old customs and traditionary [sic] lore to a degree for which there was no parallel elsewhere in Europe. There are certain families in which witchcraft is especially cultivated, among whom the old traditions and names of the gods still live. There is ten times as much belief in the superstitions as in the Catholic religion; and when people are in trouble, though they first tried the saints, they always found sorcery and spirits best in the end. The basis of the cult was a peculiar polytheism, or a worship of the spirits called folletti. These spirits generally bear the names of old Etruscan gods, mostly very little changed? or of the old Roman minor rural deities First among them is Tinia, the folletto of thunder, lightning, and storms. There is also an herb called tigna, identified with this spirit and much used in magic to repel Tinia when he injures crops. The spirit of