Miocene Plants and Insects related to recent Species.
Geologists were acquainted with about three hundred species of marine shells from the 'Falunian' strata on the banks of the Loire, before they knew anything of the contemporary insects and plants. At length, as if to warn us against inferring from negative evidence the poverty of any ancient set of strata in organic remains proper to the land, a rich flora and entomological fauna was suddenly revealed to us characteristic of Central Europe during the Upper Miocene period. This result followed the determination of the true position of the Oeninghen beds in Switzerland, and of certain formations of 'Brown Coal' in Germany.
Professor Heer, who has described nearly five hundred species of fossil plants from Oeninghen, besides many more from other Miocene localities in Switzerland,[1] estimates the phenogamous species, which must have flourished in Central Europe at that time, at 3,000, and the insects as having been more numerous in the same proportion as they now exceed the plants in all latitudes. This European Miocene flora was remarkable for the preponderance of arborescent and shrubby evergreens, and comprised many generic types no longer associated together in any existing flora or geographical province. Some genera, for example, which are at present restricted to America, coexisted in Switzerland with forms now peculiar to Asia, and with others at present confined to Australia.
Professor Heer has not ventured to identify any of this vast assemblage of Miocene plants and insects with living species, so far at least as to assign to them the same specific names, but he presents us with a list of what he terms
