THE FLY IN THE AMBER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18197, 16 September 1922, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE FLY IN THE AMBER.

CAPTIVES OF ANCIENT DAYS. WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG. The British Museum- has received ai. interesting addition to fEs treasures. It is only a little collection of insects fixed in the juices of trees, but each one has a history that can never be written, begun as it was before human history dawned. The collection is millions of years old, for it is a series of amber fragments, each fragment containing an insect that came tragically to its end in the twilight days of creation. The amber comes from the mines of Burma by way of Colorado -University, where Mr. T. D. A. Cockerell has added over a score of little creatures to the list already known to be the denizens of amber prisons. Mr. Cockerell's resarches are said to prove that the age of some forms of amber is much greater than had hitherto been believed. Whatever the age of amber the story is always the same. Amber was once ute sap of a resinous cone-bearing tree. Some injury to the tree caused sap to flow out of the wound and heal it. But the supply exceeded the need. The resin fell in streaming plenty to the ground, or hung in great beads and congealing rivukas on the tree, and survived tho tree which created it.

- I It fell with the tree and was not destroyed. It fell in such enormous quantities from age to age, as forest rose on . the wreck of forest, that it formed depos- ; sits, was covered by accumulating earth, j and is now mined. So long ago was all this that land and sea slowly changed places where some of the amber formed, and to-day the finest 1 amber in tho world is dredged up from j the floor of the Baltic Sea. Some cornea ! to land along the English coasts from ; ; long-dead forests that have been sub- j ' j morged for ten of thousands of years; j ! some is in the clay of old London. ! ; But when the sa.p. poured forth to j staunch a nine-tree's wounds, its journey j was not always uneventful. Very many times the sudden flow meant to iiioccts , a fate as tragic as that of tho people of ' Herculaneum and Pompelii. As lava and ashes embedded and mummified those people, so tho Bticky gum imprisoned and preserved these insects , pursuing their calling on th© old tree trunk. The insects perished miserably where they stood, to be preserved for . millions of years in their indestructible , prison. Spiders, flies, ants, wasps, bees and a host of other little creatures were thus imprisoned. To-day they come to light from the sea or the unlit gloom of the mine. Science is grateful to amber, for it was the first substance to reveal the fact that friction excites electricity.