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Title: The Life and Love of the Insect

Author: Jean-Henri Fabre

Translator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

Release date: September 11, 2022 [eBook #68974]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Adam and Charles Black

Credits: Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE AND LOVE OF THE INSECT ***




                                  THE
                             LIFE AND LOVE
                             OF THE INSECT

                                   BY
                             J. HENRI FABRE

                             TRANSLATED BY
                      ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS


                                 LONDON
                         ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
                                  1911








TRANSLATOR’S NOTE


The author of these essays was born at Sérignan, in Provence, in the
year 1823, and was long in coming to his own. His birthday, indeed, is
now celebrated annually (Henri Fabre is still alive) at both Sérignan
and Orange; but, as Maurice Maeterlinck, writing of this “Insect’s
Homer ... whose brow should be girt with a double and radiant crown,”
says:


   “Fame is often forgetful, negligent, behindhand or unjust; and the
    crowd is almost ignorant of the name of J. H. Fabre, who is one of
    the most profound and inventive scholars and also one of the purest
    writers and, I was going to add, one of the finest poets of the
    century that is just past.”


Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques form ten volumes, containing two to
three hundred essays in all. The present book is a translation of the
greater part of a volume of selected essays, comprising, in addition to
those here presented, three that appeared in a volume entitled Insect
Life and published ten years ago by Messrs. Macmillan, in a version
from the able pen of the author of Mademoiselle Mori. This volume
contained also the first of the four articles descriptive of the habits
of the Sacred Beetle; and the publishers desire me to express their
thanks to Messrs. Macmillan for permission to include in The Life and
Love of the Insect a variant of that first chapter from Insect Life.
The omission of three essays included in the French volume of
selections explains the absence of reference to certain insects
represented in some of the photographic plates.

I should like to mention my personal sense of gratitude to a gentleman
belonging to a class of workers whose services are not always
recognized in the manner which they deserve. I speak of Mr. Marmaduke
Langdale, my untiring, eager and accurate “searcher,” whose work at
both branches of the British Museum—to say nothing of his uncommonly
thorough acquaintance with the French language—has greatly assisted me
in my task of translation and saved me, I suspect, from making more
than one blunder.


    ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.

                                                Chelsea, 11 July, 1911.








CONTENTS


                                                                PAGE

    TRANSLATOR’S NOTE                                              v

    CHAPTER
    I.      THE SACRED BEETLE                                      1
    II.     THE SACRED BEETLE: THE PEAR                           18
    III.    THE SACRED BEETLE: THE MODELLING                      32
    IV.     THE SACRED BEETLE: THE GRUB, THE METAMORPHOSIS,
            THE HATCHING CHAMBER                                  42
    V.      THE SPANISH COPRIS                                    63
    VI.     THE ONTHOPHAGI                                        79
    VII.    A BARREN PROMISE                                      88
    VIII.   A DUNG BEETLE OF THE PAMPAS                           99
    IX.     THE GEOTRUPES: THE PUBLIC HEALTH                     113
    X.      THE MINOTAURUS TYPHŒUS                               127
    XI.     THE TWO BANDED SCOLIA                                143
    XII.    THE RINGED CALICURGUS                                157
    XIII.   THE OLD WEEVILS                                      171
    XIV.    LEAF ROLLERS                                         184
    XV.     THE HALICTI                                          199
    XVI.    THE HALICTI: THE PORTRESS                            210
    XVII.   THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION                            223
    XVIII.  THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE FAMILY                243








LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                   PAGE
PLATE I.—1. The Sacred Beetle. 2. The Sacred Beetle rolling
  his pill. 3. Rolling the pill to the eating burrow       Frontispiece
PLATE II.—Burrow and pear-shaped ball of the Sacred Beetle    facing 20
Fig. 1.—Section of the Sacred Beetle’s pill, showing the egg
  and the hatching-chamber                                           24
PLATE III.—1. The Sacred Beetle pushing away and overturning a
  thieving friend who tries to force his assistance upon him.
  2. Crypt in which the Beetle shapes a grub’s provision into
  a pear                                                      facing 36
Fig. 2.—The Sacred Beetle’s pill dug out cupwise to receive
  the egg                                                            39
Fig. 3.—Grub of the Sacred Beetle                                    46
Fig. 4.—Digestive apparatus of the Sacred Beetle                     47
PLATE IV.—1 and 2. The Spanish Copris, male and female. 3. The
  pair jointly kneading the big load, which, divided into egg-
  shaped pills, will furnish provisions for each grub of the
  brood. 4. The mother alone in her burrow: five pills are already
  finished; a sixth is in process of construction             facing 72
Fig. 5.—The Copris’s pill: first state                               72
Fig. 6.—The Spanish Copris’s pill dug out cupwise to receive
  the egg                                                            73
Fig. 7.—The Spanish Copris’s pill: section showing the hatching-
  chamber and the egg                                                73
Fig. 8.—Phanæus Milo                                                102
Fig. 9.—Work of Phanæus Milo. A, the whole piece, actual size.
  B, the same opened, showing the pill of sausage-meat, the clay
  gourd, the chamber containing the egg and the ventilating-shaft   104
Fig. 10.—Work of Phanæus Milo: the largest of the gourds observed
  (natural size)                                                    108
PLATE V.—1. Onthophagus Taurus. 2. Onthophagus Vacca. 3. The
  Stercoraceous Geotrupe. 4. The Wide-necked Scarab. 5. Cleonus
  Ophthalmicus. 6. Cerceris Tuberculata. 7. Buprestis Ærea    facing 80
Fig. 11.—The Stercoraceous Geotrupe’s sausage                       121
Fig. 12.—Section of the Stercoraceous Geotrupe’s sausage at its
  lower end, showing the egg and the hatching-chamber               122
PLATE VI.—Minotaurus Typhœus, male and female. Excavating
  Minotaurus’ burrow                                         facing 132
PLATE VII.—The Minotaurus couple engaged on miller’s and baker’s
  work                                                       facing 137
PLATE VIII.—1. The Common or Garden Scolia. 2. The Two-banded
  Scolia. 3. Grub of Cetonia Aurata progressing on its back.
  4. The Two-banded Scolia paralyzing a Cetonia grub. 5. Cetonia
  grubs progressing on their backs, with their legs in the air;
  two are in a resting position, rolled up                   facing 146
PLATE IX.—1. Lycosa Narbonensis. 2. The Ringed Calicurgus.
  3. Ammophila Hirsuta. 4. Ammophila Sabulosa. 5. Scroll of
  Rhynchites Vitis. 6. Scroll of Rhynchites Populi           facing 162
PLATE X.—The large glass case containing the Scorpions       facing 226
PLATE XI.—1. Nuptial allurements, showing “the straight bend.”
  2. The wedding stroll. 3. The couple enter the nuptial
  dwelling                                                   facing 240
PLATE XII.—1. The Languedocian Scorpion devouring a cricket.
  2. After pairing-time: the female feasting on her Scorpion.
  3. The mother and her family, with emancipation-time at
  hand                                                       facing 252











THE SACRED BEETLE


THE LIFE AND LOVE OF
THE INSECT


CHAPTER I

THE SACRED BEETLE


The building of the nest, the safeguard of the family, furnishes the
loftiest expression of the instinctive faculties. That ingenious
architect, the bird, teaches us as much; and the insect, with its still
more varied talents, repeats the lesson, telling us that maternity is
the supreme inspirer of the instinct. Placed in charge of the duration
of the species, which is of more serious interest than the preservation
of individuals, maternity awakens a marvellous foresight in the
drowsiest intelligence; it is the thrice sacred hearth wherein smoulder
and then suddenly burst forth those incomprehensible psychic gleams
which give us the impression of an infallible reasoning power. The more
maternity asserts itself, the higher does instinct ascend.

The most worthy of our attention in this respect are the Hymenoptera,
upon whom the cares of maternity devolve in their fulness. All these
favourites of instinct prepare board and lodging for their offspring.
They become past masters in a host of industries for the sake of a
family which their faceted eyes never behold and which, nevertheless,
the maternal foresight knows quite well. One becomes a manufacturer of
cotton goods and mills cotton-wool bottles; another sets up as a
basket-maker and weaves hampers out of scraps of flowers; a third turns
mason and builds rooms of cement and domes of road-metal; a fourth
starts a pottery-works, in which the clay is kneaded into shapely vases
and jars and bulging pots; yet another adopts the calling of a pitman
and digs mysterious warm, moist passages underground. A thousand trades
similar to ours and often even unknown to our industrial system are
employed in the preparation of the abode. Next come the victuals of the
expected nurslings: piles of honey, loaves of pollen, stores of
preserved game, cunningly paralyzed. In such works as these, having the
future of the family for their exclusive object, the highest
manifestations of the instinct are displayed under the impulse of
maternity.

In the rest of the entomological order, the mother’s cares are
generally very summary. In most cases, they are confined to the laying
of the eggs in favourable spots, where the grub can find a bed and food
at its own risk and peril. Where education is so rustic, talents are
superfluous. Lycurgus banished the arts from his republic, as
enervating. In like manner, the higher inspirations of the instinct are
banished among insects brought up in Spartan simplicity. The mother
neglects the gentle cares of the cradle; and the prerogatives of the
intellect, the best of all, diminish and disappear, so true is it that
for the animal, even as for ourselves, the family is a source of
perfection.

While the Hymenoptera, so extremely thoughtful of their progeny, fill
us with wonder, the others, which abandon theirs to the chances of good
luck or bad, must seem to us, by comparison, of but little interest.
These others form almost the entirety; at least, to my knowledge, among
the fauna of our country-sides, there is only one other instance of
insects preparing board and lodging for their family, as do the
gatherers of honey and the buriers of baskets full of game.

And, strange to say, those insects vying in maternal tenderness with
the flower-despoiling tribe of Bees are none other than the
Dung-beetles, the dealers in ordure, the scavengers of the meadows
contaminated by the herd. We must pass from the scented corollas of the
flower-bed to the droppings left on the high-road by the mule to find a
second example of devoted mothers and lofty instincts. Nature abounds
in these antitheses. What are our ugliness and beauty, our cleanliness
and dirt to her? With refuse, she creates the flower; from a little
manure, she extracts the blessed grain of the wheat.

Notwithstanding their filthy trade, the Dung-beetles occupy a very
respectable rank. Thanks to their usually imposing size; to their
severe and irreproachably glossy garb; to their short, stout, thickset
shape; to the quaint ornamentation either of their brow or, also, of
their thorax, they cut an excellent figure in the collector’s boxes,
especially when to our own species, oftenest of an ebon black, we add a
few tropical species flashing with gleams of gold and ruddy copper.

They are the sedulous guests of our herds, for which reason several of
them emit a mild flavour of benzoic acid, the aromatic of the
sheepfolds. Their pastoral habits have impressed the nomenclators, who,
too often, alas, careless of euphony, have changed their note this time
and headed their descriptions with such names as Melibæus, Tityrus,
Amyntas, Corydon, Mopsus and Alexis. We have here the whole series of
bucolic denominations made famous by the poets of antiquity. Virgil’s
eclogues have lent their vocabulary for the Dung-beetles’
glorification.

What alacrity around one and the same dropping! Never did adventurers
hurrying from the four corners of the earth display such eagerness in
working a Californian claim. Before the sun becomes too hot, they are
there in their hundreds, large and small, promiscuously, of every sort,
shape and size, hastening to carve themselves a slice of the common
cake. There are some that work in the open air and scrape the surface;
there are some that dig themselves galleries in the thick of the heap,
in search of choice veins; others work the lower stratum and bury their
spoil without delay in the underlying ground; others—the smallest—stand
aside to crumble a morsel that has fallen from the mighty excavations
of their more powerful fellow-workers. Some, the newcomers and, no
doubt, the hungriest, consume their meal on the spot; but the greater
number mean to put by a substance that will allow them to spend long
days in plenty, down in some safe retreat. A nice, fresh dropping is
not found just when you want it, amid the fields bare of thyme; a
windfall of that sort is as manna from the sky; only fortune’s
favourites receive so fair a portion. Wherefore the riches of to-day
are prudently stored for the morrow.

The stercoraceous scent has carried the glad tidings half a mile
around; and all have hastened up to gather provisions. A few laggards
are still arriving, a-wing or on foot.

Who is this that trots towards the heap, fearing lest he come too late?
His long legs move with a sudden, awkward action, as though driven by
some mechanism within his belly; his little red antennæ spread their
fan, a sign of anxious greed. He is coming, he has come, not without
sending some few banqueters sprawling. It is the Sacred Beetle, clad
all in black, the biggest and most famous of our Dung-beetles. Ancient
Egypt held him in veneration and looked upon him as a symbol of
immortality. Here he now sits at table, beside his fellow-guests, each
of whom is giving the last touches to his ball with the flat of his
broad fore-legs or else enriching it with yet one more layer before
retiring to enjoy the fruit of his labours in peace. Let us follow the
construction of the famous ball in all its phases.

The shield, that is to say, the broad, flat edge of the head, is
notched with six angular teeth arranged in a semicircle. This
constitutes the tool for digging and separating, the rake that lifts
and casts aside the unnutritious vegetable fibres, goes for something
better, scrapes and collects it together. A choice is thus made, for
these dainty epicures differentiate between one thing and another: a
casual choice, if the Beetle be interested in his own provender, but a
most scrupulous choice, when it becomes a question of constructing the
maternal ball.

For his own needs, the Beetle is less fastidious and contents himself
with a wholesale selection. The notched shield scoops and digs,
eliminates and gathers somewhat at random. The fore-legs play a mighty
part in the work. They are flattened, curved into the segment of a
circle, supplied with powerful nervures and armed on the outside with
five sturdy teeth. If a powerful effort be needed to remove an obstacle
or to force a way through the thickest part of the heap, the
Dung-beetle makes play with his elbows, that is to say, he flings his
toothed legs to right and left and clears a semi-circular space with a
vigorous thrust of the rake. Room once made, a different kind of work
is found for these same limbs: they collect armfuls of the material
raked together by the shield and push it under the insect’s belly,
between the four hind-legs. These are shaped for the turner’s trade.
The legs, especially the last two, are long and slender, slightly bowed
and ending in a very sharp claw. One has but to look at them to
recognize a pair of spherical compasses capable of embracing a globular
body in their curved branches and improving its form. In fact, their
mission is to shape the ball.

Armful by armful, the material is heaped up under the belly, between
the four legs, which, by a slight pressure, impart their own curve to
it and give it a first fashion. Then, betweenwhiles, the rough-hewn
pill is set spinning betwixt the four branches of the two spherical
compasses; it turns under the Dung-beetle’s belly until it is rolled
into a perfect ball. Should the surface layer lack plasticity and
threaten to peel off, should some too-stringy part refuse to yield to
the action of the wheel, the fore-legs correct the faulty places; their
broad beaters pat the ball to give consistency to the new layer and to
imbed the recalcitrant scraps into the mass.

Under a hot sun, when the work is urgent, one stands amazed at the
turner’s feverish activity. And thus the business proceeds apace: what
was but lately a scanty pellet is now a ball the size of a walnut; soon
it will be a ball the size of an apple. I have seen greedy-guts
manufacture a ball the size of one’s fist. Here, of a certainty, is
food in the larder for days to come!

The provisions are made. The next thing is to withdraw from the fray
and carry the victuals to a fitting place. Here the most striking
characteristics of the Scarab begin to show themselves. The Dung-beetle
sets out without delay; he embraces the sphere with his two long
hind-legs, whose terminal claws, planted in the mass, serve as rotatory
pivots; he obtains a purchase with the middle pair of legs; and, using
the armlets of his fore-legs for leverage, he travels backwards with
his load, bending his body, with his head down and his hinder part in
the air. The hind-legs, the principal factor in the machinery, move
continually, coming and going, shifting the claws to change the axis of
rotation, maintain the equilibrium of the load and push it on by
alternate thrusts to right and left. In this way, the ball finds itself
touching the ground by turns with every point of its surface, a process
which perfects its shape and gives an even consistency to its outer
layer by means of pressure uniformly divided.

And now, cheerily! It moves, it rolls; we shall get there, though not
without accident. Here is a first difficult step: the Beetle is wending
his way athwart a slope and the heavy mass tends to follow the incline;
but the insect, for reasons best known to itself, prefers to cut across
this natural road, a bold plan which a false step or a grain of sand
disturbing the balance may defeat. The false step is made; the ball
rolls to the bottom of the valley; and the insect, toppled over by the
impetus of its load, kicks about, gets up on its legs again and hastens
to harness itself once more. The mechanism is working better than ever.
But look out, you scatterbrain! Follow the dip of the valley: that will
save you labour and mishap; the road is good and level; your ball will
roll quite easily. Not a bit of it! The insect prepares once more to
mount the slope that was already its undoing. Perhaps it suits it to
return to the heights. Against that I have nothing to say: the Scarab’s
opinion is more far-seeing than mine as to the advisability of keeping
to lofty regions. But, at least, take this path, which will lead you up
by a gentle incline! Not at all! If he find himself near some very
steep slope, impossible to climb, that is what the obstinate fellow
prefers. And now begins a labour of Sisyphus. The ball, that enormous
burden, is painfully hoisted, step by step, with infinite precautions,
to a certain height, always backwards. I ask myself by what static
miracle so great a mass can be kept upon the slope. Oh! An ill-planned
movement frustrates all this toil: the ball comes down, dragging the
beetle with it! The escalade is repeated, soon to be followed by
another fall. The attempt is renewed, better-managed this time at the
difficult points; a confounded grass-root, the cause of the previous
tumbles, is carefully turned. We are almost there; but gently, gently!
The ascent is dangerous and a mere nothing may yet spoil all. For see,
a leg slips on a smooth bit of gravel! Down come ball and Dung-beetle,
all mixed up together. And the Beetle begins over again, with
indefatigable persistency. Ten times, a score of times, he will attempt
the thankless ascent, until his obstinacy vanquishes all obstacles, or
until, recognizing the uselessness of his efforts, he takes to the
level road.

The Scarab does not always push his precious ball alone: sometimes he
takes a partner; or, to be accurate, the partner takes him. This is how
the thing usually happens: once his ball is ready, a Dung-beetle issues
from the crowd and leaves the work-yard, pushing his spoil behind him.
A neighbour, one of the newcomers, whose own task is hardly begun,
suddenly drops his work and runs to the ball now rolling, to lend a
hand to the lucky owner, who seems to accept the proffered aid kindly.
Henceforth, the two cronies work as partners. Each does his best to
push the pellet to a place of safety. Was a compact really concluded in
the work-yard, a tacit agreement to share the cake between them? While
one was kneading and moulding the ball, was the other tapping rich
veins whence to extract choice materials and add them to the common
store? I have never observed such a collaboration; I have always seen
each Dung-beetle occupied solely with his own affairs in the works. The
last-comer, therefore, has no acquired rights.

Is it, then, a partnership between the two sexes, a couple intending to
set up house? I thought so for a time. The two beetles, one before, one
behind, pushing the heavy ball with equal zeal, reminded me of a song
which the barrel-organs used to grind out some years ago:


    Pour monter notre menage, hélas! comment feront-nous?
    Toi devant et moi derrière, nous pousserons le tonneau. [1]


The evidence of the scalpel compelled me to abandon this domestic
idyll. There is no outward difference between the two sexes in the
Dung-beetle. I, therefore, dissected the two beetles engaged in
conveying one and the same ball; and they often proved to belong to the
same sex.

Neither community of family nor community of toil! Then what is the
motive for this apparent partnership? It is just simply an attempt at
robbery. The eager fellow-worker, under the deceitful pretence of
lending a helpful hand, nurses the scheme of purloining the ball at the
first opportunity. To make one’s own ball at the heap implies drudgery
and patience; to steal one ready-made, or at least to foist one’s self
as a guest, is a much easier matter. Should the owner’s vigilance
slacken, you can run away with the treasure; should you be too closely
watched, you can sit down to table uninvited, pleading services
rendered. It is, “Heads I win, tails you lose,” in these tactics, so
that pillage is exercised as one of the most lucrative of trades. Some
go to work craftily, in the way I have just described: they come to the
aid of a comrade who has not the least need of them and hide a most
indelicate greed under the cloak of charitable assistance. Others,
bolder perhaps, more confident in their strength, go straight to the
goal and commit robbery with violence.

Scenes are constantly happening such as this: a Scarab walks off,
peacefully and alone, rolling his ball, his lawful property, acquired
by conscientious work. Another comes flying up, I know not whence,
drops down heavily, folds his smoky wings under their elytra and, with
the back of his toothed armlets, knocks over the owner, who is
powerless to ward off the attack in his harnessed posture. While the
dispossessed one struggles to his feet, the other perches himself atop
the ball, the best position from which to repel the assailant. With his
armlets folded under his breast, ready at all points, he awaits events.
The victim of the theft moves round the ball, seeking a favourable spot
at which to attempt the assault; the thief spins round on the roof of
the citadel, constantly facing him. If the first raise himself in order
to scale the wall, the second gives him a cuff that stretches him on
his back. Safe at the top of his fortress, the besieged Beetle would
baffle his adversary’s attempts indefinitely, if the latter did not
change his tactics to recover his property. Sapping is brought into
play to bring down the citadel with the garrison. The ball, shaken from
below, staggers and rolls, carrying with it the robber, who makes
violent efforts to maintain his position on the top. This he succeeds
in doing, though not always, thanks to hurried feats of gymnastics that
enable him to regain a level from which the rolling of his support
tends to drive him. Should a false movement bring him to the ground,
the chances become equal and the struggle turns into a wrestling-match.
Robber and robbed grapple at close quarters, breast to breast. Their
legs twist and untwist, their joints intertwine, their horny armour
clashes and grinds with the rasping sound of filed metal. Then that one
of the two who succeeds in throwing his adversary and releasing himself
hurriedly takes up a position on the top of the ball. The siege is
renewed, now by the robber, now by the robbed, as the chances of the
hand-to-hand conflict may have determined. The former, no doubt a hardy
filibuster and adventurer, often has the best of the fight. Then, after
two or three defeats, the ejected Beetle wearies and returns
philosophically to the heap, there to make himself a new pellet. As for
the other, with all fear of a surprise at an end, he harnesses himself
to the conquered ball and pushes it whither he pleases. I have
sometimes seen a third thief appear upon the scene and rob the robber.
Nor can I honestly say that I was sorry.

I ask myself in vain what Proudhon [2] introduced into Beetle-morality
the daring paradox that “property is based on plunder,” or what
diplomatist taught Dung-beetles the savage maxim that “might is right.”
I have no facts whereby to trace the origin of these spoliations which
have become a custom, of this abuse of strength to capture a lump of
ordure. All that I can say is that theft is in general use among the
Scarab tribe. These Dung-rollers rob one another among themselves with
a calm effrontery of which I know no other instance. I leave it to
future observers to elucidate this curious problem in animal psychology
and I return to the two partners rolling their ball in concert.

Let us call the two fellow-workers partners, although that is not the
proper name for them, seeing that the one forces himself upon the
other, who probably accepts outside help only for fear of a worse evil.
The meeting, however, is absolutely peaceful. The Beetle owning the
ball does not cease work for an instant at the arrival of his
assistant; and the newcomer seems animated by the best intentions and
sets to work on the spot. The way in which the two partners harness
themselves differs. The owner occupies the chief position, the place of
honour: he pushes behind the load, with his hind-legs in the air and
his head down. The assistant is in front, in the reverse position, head
up, toothed arms on the ball, long hind-legs on the ground. Between the
two, the ball rolls along, pushed before him by the first, dragged
towards him by the second.

The efforts of the couple are not always very harmonious, the more so
as the helper has his back to the road to be traversed, while the
owner’s view is impeded by the load. Hence arise constant accidents,
absurd tumbles, taken cheerfully and in good part: each picks himself
up quickly and resumes the same position as before. On level ground,
this system of draught does not correspond with the dynamic force
expended, for lack of precision in the combined movements: the Scarab
at the back would do as well and better if left to himself. And so the
helper, after giving a proof of his good-will at the risk of disturbing
the mechanism, decides to keep still, without, of course, abandoning
the precious ball, which he already looks upon as his: finding is
keeping; a ball touched is a ball gained. He will commit no such
imprudence: the other might give him the slip!

He, therefore, gathers his legs under his belly, flattens himself,
encrusts himself, so to speak, on the ball and becomes one with it.
Henceforth, the whole concern—ball and Beetle clinging to its
surface—rolls along, pushed by the lawful owner. Whether the load
passes over his body, whether he occupies the top, the bottom or the
side of the rolling burden matters little to the intruder, who sits
tight and lies low. A singular helper this, who has himself driven in a
carriage to secure his share of the victuals!

But a steep ascent heaves in sight and gives him a fine part to play.
He now, on the stiff slope, takes the lead, holding the heavy mass with
his toothed arms, while his mate seeks a purchase to hoist the load a
little higher. Thus, by a combination of well-managed efforts, the one
above gripping, the one below pushing, I have seen them together mount
acclivities where the stubborn determination of one alone would have
come to naught. But not all have the same zeal at these difficult
moments: there are some who, on slopes where their assistance is most
needed, seem not in the least aware of the difficulties to overcome.
While the unhappy Sisyphus exhausts himself in endeavours to pass the
dangerous place, the other quietly leaves him to do his best and,
himself encrusted on the ball, rolls down with it, when it comes to
grief, and is hoisted up with it anew.

Let us suppose the Scarab fortunate enough to have found a loyal
partner; or, better still, let us suppose that he has met no
self-invited colleague. The burrow is ready. It is a cavity dug in soft
earth, usually in sand, shallow, the size of one’s fist and
communicating with the outside by a short channel just large enough for
the passage of the ball. As soon as the provisions are safely housed,
the Scarab shuts himself in by stopping up the entrance to his dwelling
with rubbish reserved for the purpose in a corner. Once the door is
closed, no sign outside betrays the banqueting-hall. And, now, welcome
mirth and jollity! All is for the best in the best of all possible
worlds! The table is sumptuously laid; the ceiling tempers the heat of
the sun and allows but a mild, moist heat to penetrate; the calm, the
darkness, the concert of the crickets overhead all favour the digestive
functions. So great has been my illusion that I have caught myself
listening at the door, expecting to hear the revellers burst into that
famous snatch from the opera of Galatée: [3]


    Ah! qu’il est doux de ne rien faire
    Quand tout s’agite autour de nous. [4]


Who would dare disturb the bliss of such a banquet? But the wish to
learn is capable of all things; and I had the courage. I will set down
here the result of my violations of the sanctity of domestic life: the
ball by itself fills almost the whole of the room; the rich repast
rises from floor to ceiling. A narrow passage runs between it and the
walls. Here sit the banqueters, two at most, very often but one, belly
to table, back to the wall. Once the seat is chosen, no one stirs; all
the vital forces are absorbed by the digestive faculties. No little
movements, which might cause the loss of a mouthful; no dainty toying
with the food, which might cause the waste of some. Everything has to
pass, properly and in order. To see them so pensively seated around a
ball of dung, one would think that they were aware of their task as
scavengers of the earth and that they consciously devoted themselves to
that marvellous chemistry which out of filth brings forth the flower,
the joy of our eyes, and the Beetles’ elytra, the ornament of our lawns
in spring. For the purpose of this transcendental work, which is to
turn into live matter the residue discarded by the horse and the mule,
despite the perfection of their digestive organs, the Dung-beetle must
needs be specially equipped. And, in point of fact, anatomy compels us
to admire the prodigious length of his intestine, which, folded and
refolded upon itself, slowly elaborates the materials in its profuse
circuits and exhausts them to the very last serviceable atom. From that
whence the stomach of the herbivorous animal has been able to extract
nothing, this powerful alembic wrings riches that, at a mere touch,
turn into ebon armour in the Sacred Scarab and a breast-plate of gold
and rubies in other Dung-beetles.

Now this wonderful metamorphosis of ordure has to be accomplished in
the shortest possible time: the general health demands it. And so the
Scarab is endowed with matchless digestive powers. Once housed in the
company of food, day and night he will not cease eating and digesting
until the provisions be exhausted. It is easy, with a little practice,
to bring up the Scarab in captivity, in a volery. In this way, I
obtained the following evidence, which will tell us of the high
digestive capacity of the famous Dung-beetle.

When the whole ball has been through the mill, the hermit reappears in
the light of day, seeks his fortune, finds it, shapes himself a new
ball and begins all over again. On a very hot, calm, sultry day—the
atmospheric conditions most favourable to the gastronomic enjoyments of
my anchorites—watch in hand, I observe one of the consumers in the open
air, from eight o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night.
The Scarab appears to have come across a morsel greatly to his taste,
for, during those twelve hours, he never stops feasting, remains
permanently at table, stationary at one spot. At eight o’clock in the
evening, I pay him a last visit. His appetite seems undiminished. I
find the glutton in as fine fettle as at the start. The banquet,
therefore, must have lasted some time longer, until the total
disappearance of the lump. Next morning, in fact, the Scarab is gone
and, of the fine piece attacked on the previous day, naught remains but
crumbs.

Once round the clock and more, for a single sitting at table, is a fine
display of gormandizing in itself; but here is something much better by
way of rapidity of digestion. While, in front of the insect, the matter
is being continuously chewed and swallowed, behind it, with equal
continuity, the matter reappears, stripped of its nutritive particles
and spun into a little black cord, similar to a cobbler’s thread. The
Scarab never evacuates except at table, so quickly are his digestive
labours performed. The apparatus begins to work at the first few
mouthfuls; it ceases its office soon after the last. Without a break
from beginning to end of the meal and always hanging to the discharging
orifice, the thin cord is piled in a heap which is easy to unroll so
long as it is not dried up.

The thing works with the regularity of a chronometer. Every minute, or,
rather, to be accurate, every four-and-fifty seconds, an eruption takes
place and the thread is lengthened by three to four millimetres. [5] At
long intervals, I employ the pincers, unfasten the cord and unroll the
heap along a graduated rule, to estimate the produce. The total
measurement for twelve hours is 2·88 metres. [6] As the meal and its
necessary complement, the work of the digestive apparatus, went on for
some time longer after my last visit, paid at eight o’clock in the
evening by the light of a lantern, it follows that my subject must have
spun an unbroken stercoraceous cord well over three yards in length.

Given the diameter and the length of the thread, it is easy to
calculate its volume. Nor is it difficult to arrive at the exact volume
of the insect by measuring the amount of water which it displaces when
immersed in a narrow cylinder. The figures thus obtained are not
uninteresting: they tell us that, at a single festive sitting, in a
dozen hours, the Scarab digests very nearly its own volume in food.
What a stomach! And especially what a rapidity, what a power of
digestion! From the first mouthfuls, the residuum forms itself into a
thread that stretches, stretches out indefinitely as long as the meal
lasts. In that amazing laboratory, which perhaps never puts up its
shutters, unless it be when victuals are lacking, the material only
passes through, is worked upon at once by the reagents in the stomach
and at once exhausted. We may well believe that a crucible so quick to
purify dirt plays its part in the general hygiene.








CHAPTER II

THE SACRED BEETLE: THE PEAR


A young shepherd, who had been told in his spare time to watch the
doings of the Sacred Beetle, came to me in high spirits, one Sunday, in
the second half of June, to say that he thought the time had come to
commence a search. He had detected the insect issuing from the ground,
had dug at the spot where it made its appearance and had found, at no
great depth, the queer thing which he was bringing me.

Queer it was and calculated to upset the little which I thought I knew.
In shape, it was exactly like a tiny pear that had lost all the colour
of its freshness and turned brown in rotting. What could this curious
object be, this pretty plaything that seemed to come from a turner’s
workshop? Was it made by human hands? Was it a model of the fruit of
the pear-tree intended for some child’s collection? One would say so.

The children come round me; they look at the treasure-trove with
longing eyes; they would like to add it to the contents of their
toy-box. It is much prettier in shape than an agate marble, much more
graceful than an ivory egg or a box-wood top. The material, it is true,
seems none too nicely chosen; but it is firm to the touch and very
artistically curved. In any case, the little pear discovered
underground must not go to swell the collection of nursery treasures
until we have found out more about it.

Can it really be the Scarab’s work? Is there an egg inside it, a grub?
The shepherd assures me that there is. A similar pear, crushed by
accident in the digging, contained, he says, a white egg, the size of a
grain of wheat. I dare not believe it, so greatly does the object which
he has brought me differ from the ball which I expected to see.

To open the puzzling “find” and ascertain its contents would perhaps be
imprudent: such an act of violence might jeopardize the life of the
germ enclosed, always provided that the Scarab’s egg be there, a matter
of which the shepherd seems convinced. And then, I imagine, the
pear-shape, opposed to every accepted idea, is probably accidental. Who
knows if chance has anything like it in store for me in the future? It
were wise to keep the thing as it is, to await events; above all, it
were wise to go in search of information on the spot.

The shepherd was at his post by daybreak the next morning. I joined him
on some slopes that had been lately cleared of their trees, where the
hot summer sun, which strikes so powerfully on the neck, could not
reach us for two or three hours. In the cool air of morning, with the
flock browsing under the care of the sheep-dog, we went in search
together.

Scarabæus’ burrow is soon found: it is recognizable by the recent
mole-hill that surmounts it. My companion digs with a vigorous wrist. I
have lent him my little pocket-trowel, the light, but workmanlike tool
which, incorrigible earth-scraper that I am, I seldom omit to take with
me when I go out. I lie down, the better to see the arrangement and
furnishing of the hypogeum in process of excavation; and I am all eyes.
The shepherd uses the trowel as a lever and, with his free hand, pushes
back the rubbish.

Here we are! A cave opens out and, in the moist warmth of the yawning
vault, I see a splendid pear lying full-length upon the ground. I shall
certainly long remember this first revelation of the maternal work of
the Scarab. My excitement could have been no greater were I an
archæologist digging among the ancient relics of Egypt and lighting
upon the sacred insect of the dead, carved in emerald, in some
Pharaonic crypt. O blessed joys of truth suddenly shining forth, what
others are there to compare with you! The shepherd was in the seventh
heaven: he laughed in response to my smile and was happy in my
gladness.

Luck does not repeat itself: “Non bis in idem,” says the old adage. And
here have I twice had under my eyes this curious shape of the pear.
Could it be the normal shape, not subject to exception? Must we abandon
all thought of a sphere similar to those which the insect rolls on the
ground? Let us continue and we shall see. A second hole is found. Like
the previous one, it contains a pear. The two discoveries are as like
as two peas; they might have issued from the same mould. And a valuable
detail is this: in the second burrow, beside the pear and lovingly
embracing it, is the mother Beetle, engaged, no doubt, in giving it the
finishing touches before leaving the underground cave for good. All
doubts are dispelled: I know the worker and I know the work.

The rest of the morning confirmed these premisses to the full: before
an intolerable sun drove me from the slope explored, I possessed a
dozen pears identical in shape and almost in dimensions. On various
occasions, the mother was present in the workshop.

Let me tell, to finish with this part of our subject, what the future
held in store for me. During the whole of the dog-days, from the end of
June until September, I renewed almost daily my visits to the spots
frequented by the Scarab; and the burrows dug up with my trowel
supplied me with an amount of evidence exceeding my fondest hopes. The
insects brought up in the volery supplied me with further documents,
though these, it is true, were rare and not to be compared with the
riches of the open fields. All told, at least some hundred nests passed
through my hands; and it was always the graceful shape of the pear,
never, absolutely never, the round shape of the pill, never the ball of
which the books tell us.

And now let us unfold the authentic story, calling to witness none save
facts actually observed and reobserved. The Sacred Beetle’s nest is
betrayed on the outside by a heap of shifted earth, by a little
mole-hill formed of the superfluous rubbish which the mother, when
closing up the abode, has been unable to replace, as a part of the
excavation must be left empty. Under this heap is a shallow pit, about
two-fifths of an inch deep, followed by a horizontal gallery, either
straight or winding, which ends in a large hall, spacious enough to
hold a man’s fist. This is the crypt in which the egg lies wrapped in
food and subjected to the incubation of a burning sun, at a few inches
underground; this is the roomy workshop in which the mother, enjoying
full liberty of movement, has kneaded and shaped the future nursling’s
bread into a pear.

This stercoral bread has its main axis lying in a horizontal position.
Its shape and size remind one exactly of those little poires de
Saint-Jean which, thanks to their bright colouring, their flavour and
their early ripeness, delight the children’s tribe. The bulk varies
within narrow limits. The largest dimensions are 45 millimetres in
length by 30 millimetres in width; [7] the smallest are 35 millimetres
by 28. [8]

Without being as polished as stucco, the surface, which is absolutely
regular, is carefully smoothed under a thin layer of red earth. At
first, when of recent construction, soft as potter’s clay, the pyriform
loaf soon, in the course of desiccation, acquires a stout crust that
refuses to yield under the pressure of fingers. Wood itself is no
harder. This bark is the defensive wrapper which isolates the recluse
from this world and allows him to consume his victuals in profound
peace. But, should desiccation reach the central mass, then the danger
becomes extremely serious. We shall have occasion to return to the woes
of the grub exposed to a diet of too-stale bread.

What dough does the Scarab’s bake-house use? Who are the purveyors? The
mule and the horse? By no means. And yet I expected to find it so—and
so would everybody—at seeing the insect draw so eagerly, for its own
use, upon the plentiful garner of an ordinary lump of dung. For that is
where it habitually manufactures the rolling ball which it goes and
consumes in some underground retreat.

Whereas coarse bread, crammed with bits of hay, is good enough for the
mother, she becomes more dainty where her family are concerned. She now
wants fine pastry, rich in nourishment and easily digested; she now
wants the ovine manna: not that which the sheep of a dry habit scatters
in trails of black olives, but that which, elaborated in a less parched
intestine, is kneaded into biscuits all of a piece. That is the
material required, the dough exclusively used. It is no longer the poor
and stringy produce of the horse, but an unctuous, plastic, homogeneous
thing, soaked through and through with nourishing juices. Its
plasticity, its delicacy are admirably adapted to the artistic work of
the pear, while its alimentary qualities suit the weak stomach of the
newborn progeny. Little though the bulk be, the grub will here find
sufficient food.

This explains the smallness of the alimentary pears, a smallness that
made me doubt the origin of my find, before I came upon the mother in
the presence of the provisions. I was unable to see in those little
pears the bill of fare of a future Sacred Beetle, himself so great a
glutton and of so remarkable a size.

Where is the egg in that nutritive mass so novel in shape? One would be
inclined to place it in the centre of the fat, round paunch. This
central point is best-protected against accidents from the outside,
best-endowed with an even temperature. Besides, the budding grub would
here find a deep layer of food on every side of it and would not be
exposed to the mistakes of the first few mouthfuls. Everything being
alike on every side of it, it would not be called upon to choose;
wherever it chanced to apply its novice tooth, it could continue
without hesitation its first dainty repast.

All this seemed so very reasonable that I allowed myself to be led away
by it. In the first pear which I explored, slender layer by slender
layer, with the blade of a penknife, I looked for the egg in the centre
of the paunch, feeling almost certain of finding it there. To my great
surprise, it was not there. Instead of being hollow, the centre of the
pear is full and consists of one continuous, homogeneous alimentary
mass.

My deductions, which any observer in my place would certainly have
shared, seemed very reasonable; the Scarab, however, is of another way
of thinking. We have our logic, of which we are rather proud; the
Dung-kneader has hers, which is better than ours in this contingency.
She has her own foresight, her own discernment of things; and she
places her egg elsewhere.

But where? Why, in the narrow part of the pear, in the neck, right at
the end. Let us cut this neck lengthwise, taking the necessary
precautions, so as not to damage the contents. It is hollowed into a
recess with polished and shiny walls. This is the tabernacle of the
germ, the hatching-chamber. The egg, which is very large in proportion
to the size of the layer, is a long white oval, about 10 millimetres in
length by 5 millimetres in its greatest width. [9] A slight empty space
separates it on all sides from the chamber-walls. There is no contact
with these walls, save at the rear end, which adheres to the top of the
recess. Lying horizontally, following the normal position of the pear,
the whole of it, excepting the point of attachment, rests upon an
air-mattress, most elastic and warmest of beds. Let us observe also
that the top of the nipple, instead of being smooth and compact like
the rest of the pear, is formed of a felt of particles of scrapings,
which allows the air sufficient access for the breathing-needs of the
egg.

We are now informed. Let us next try to understand the Scarab’s logic.
Let us account for the necessity for the pear, that form so strange in
entomological industry; let us seek to explain the convenience of the
curious situation of the egg. It is dangerous, I know, to venture upon
the how and wherefore of things. We easily sink in this mysterious
domain where the moving soil gives way beneath the feet, swallowing the
foolhardy in the quicksands of error. Must we abandon such excursions,
because of the risk? Why should we?

What does our science, so sublime compared with the frailty of our
means, so contemptible in the face of the boundless spaces of the
unknown, what does our science know of absolute reality? Nothing. The
world interests us only because of the ideas which we form of it.
Remove the idea and everything becomes sterile, chaos, empty
nothingness. An omnium-gatherum of facts is not knowledge, but at most
a cold catalogue which we must thaw and quicken at the fire of the
mind; we must introduce thought and the light of reason; we must
interpret.

Let us adopt this course to explain the work of the Sacred Beetle.
Perhaps we shall end by attributing our own logic to the insect. After
all, it will be just as remarkable to see a wonderful agreement prevail
between that which reason dictates to us and that which instinct
dictates to the animal.

A grave danger threatens the Sacred Beetle in its grub state: the
drying-up of the food. The crypt in which the larval life is spent has
a layer of earth, some third of an inch thick, for a ceiling. Of what
avail is this slender screen against the canicular heat that burns the
soil, baking it like a brick to a far greater depth? The grub’s abode
at such times acquires a scorching temperature; when I thrust my hand
into it, I feel the moist heat of a Turkish bath.

The provisions, therefore, even though they have to last but three or
four weeks, are exposed to the risk of drying up before that time and
becoming uneatable. When, instead of the tender bread of the start, the
unhappy worm finds no food for its teeth but a repulsive crust, hard as
a pebble and unassailable, it is bound to perish of hunger. And it
does, in fact, so perish. I have found numbers of these victims of the
August sun who, after eating plentifully of the fresh victuals and
digging themselves a cell, had succumbed, unable to continue biting
into fare too hard for their teeth. There remained a thick shell, a
sort of closed oven, in which the poor wight lay baked and shrivelled
up.

While the worm dies of hunger in the shell turned to stone by
desiccation, the full-grown insect that has finished its
transformations dies there too, for it is incapable of bursting the
enclosure and freeing itself. I shall return later to the final
delivery and will linger no more on this point. Let us occupy ourselves
solely with the woes of the worm.

The drying-up of the victuals is, we say, fatal to it. This is proved
by the grubs found baked in their oven; it is also proved, in a more
precise fashion, by the following experiment. In July, the period of
active nidification, I place in wooden or cardboard boxes a dozen pears
dug up, that morning, from the native spot. These boxes, carefully
closed, are put away in the dark, in my study, where the same
temperature reigns as outside. Well, in none of them is the infant
reared: sometimes the egg shrivels; sometimes the worm is hatched, but
very soon dies. On the other hand, in tin boxes or glass receptacles,
things go very well: not one attempt at rearing fails.

Whence do these differences arise? Simply from this: in the high
temperature of July, evaporation proceeds apace under the pervious
wooden or cardboard screen; the alimentary pear dries up and the poor
worm dies of hunger. In the impermeable tin boxes, in the
carefully-sealed glass receptacles, evaporation does not take place,
the provisions retain their softness and the grubs thrive as well as in
their native burrow.

The insect employs two methods to ward off the danger of desiccation.
In the first place, it compresses the outer layer with all the strength
of its wide armlets, turning it into a protecting rind more homogeneous
and more compact than the central mass. If I smash one of these
well-dried boxes of preserves, the rind usually breaks off sharp and
leaves the kernel in the middle bare. The whole suggests the shell and
the almond of a filbert. The pressure exercised by the mother when
manipulating her pear has influenced the surface layer to a depth of a
few millimetres and from this results the rind; further down, the
pressure has not spread, whence proceeds the central kernel. In the hot
summer months, my housekeeper puts her bread into a closed pan, to keep
it fresh. This is what the insect does, in its fashion: by dint of
compression, it confines the bread of the family in a pan.

The Sacred Beetle goes further still: she becomes a geometrician
capable of solving a fine problem of minimum values. All other
conditions remaining equal, the evaporation is obviously in proportion
to the extent of the evaporating surface. The alimentary mass must
therefore be given the smallest possible surface, in order by so much
to decrease the waste of moisture; nevertheless, this smallest surface
must unite the largest aggregate of nutritive materials, so that the
worm may find sufficient nourishment. Now which is the form that
encloses the greatest bulk within the smallest superficial area?
Geometry answers, the sphere.

The Scarab, therefore, shapes the worm’s allowance into a sphere (we
will pass over the neck of the pear for the moment); and this round
form is not the result of blind mechanical conditions, imposing an
inevitable shape upon the workman; it is not the forcible effect of a
rolling along the ground. We have already seen that, with the object of
easier and swifter transit, the insect kneads the plunder which it
intends to consume at a distance into an exact ball, without moving it
from the spot at which it lies; in a word, we have observed that the
round form precedes the rolling.

In the same way, it will be shown presently that the pear destined for
the worm is fashioned down in the burrow. It undergoes no process of
rolling, it is not even moved. The Scarab gives it the requisite
outline exactly as a modelling artist would do, shaping his clay under
the pressure of the thumb.

Supplied with the tools which it possesses, the insect would be capable
of obtaining other forms of a less dainty curve than its pear-shaped
work. It could, for instance, make the coarse cylinder, the sausage in
use among the Geotrupes; simplifying the work to the utmost, it could
leave the morsel without any settled form, just as it happened to find
it. Things would proceed all the faster and would leave more time for
playing in the sun. But no: the Scarab adopts exclusively the sphere,
so difficult in its precision; she acts as though she knew the laws of
evaporation and geometry from A to Z.

It remains for us to examine the neck of the pear. What can be its
object, its use? The reply forces itself upon us irresistibly. This
neck contains the egg, in the hatching-chamber. Now every germ, whether
of plant or animal, needs air, the primary stimulus of life. To admit
that vivifying combustible, the air, the shell of a bird’s egg is
riddled with an endless number of pores. The pear of the Sacred Beetle
may be compared with the egg of the hen. Its shell is the rind,
hardened by pressure, with a view to avoiding untimely desiccation; its
nutritive mass, its meat, its yolk is the soft ball sheltered under the
rind; its air-chamber is the terminal space, the cavity in the neck,
where the air envelopes the germ on every side. Where would that germ
be better off, for breathing, than in its hatching-chamber projecting
into the atmosphere and giving free play to the interchange of gases
through its thin and easily penetrable wall and especially through the
felt of scrapings that finishes the nipple?

In the centre of the mass, on the other hand, aeration is not so easy.
The hardened rind does not possess the eggshell’s pores; and the
central kernel is formed of compact matter. The air enters it,
nevertheless, for presently the worm will be able to live in it, the
worm, a robust organism less difficult and nice than the first throbs
of life.

These conditions, air and warmth, are so fundamental that no
Dung-beetle neglects them. The nutritive hoards vary in form, as we
shall have occasion to perceive: in addition to the pear, such shapes
as the cylinder, the ovoid, the pill and the thimble are adopted,
according to the species of the manipulator; but, amid this diversity
of outline, one feature of the first importance remains constant, which
is the egg lodged in a hatching-chamber close to the surface, providing
an excellent means for the easy access of air and warmth. And the most
gifted in this delicate art is the Sacred Beetle with her pear.

I was urging just now that this first of Dung-kneaders behaved with a
logic that rivals our own. At the point to which we have come, the
proof of my statement is established. Nay, better still. Let us submit
the following problem to our leading scientific lights: a germ is
accompanied by a mass of victuals liable soon to be rendered useless by
desiccation. How should the alimentary mass be shaped? Where should the
egg be laid so as to be easily influenced by air and warmth?

The first question of the problem has already been answered. Knowing
that evaporation is in proportion to the extent of the evaporating
surface, science declares that the victuals shall be arranged in a
ball, because the spherical form is that which encloses the greatest
amount of material within the smallest surface. As for the egg, since
it requires a protecting sheath to avoid any harmful contact, it shall
be contained within a thin, cylindrical case; and this case shall be
implanted on the sphere.

Thus the requisite conditions are fulfilled: the provisions, gathered
into a ball, keep fresh; the egg, protected by its slender, cylindrical
sheath, receives the influence of air and warmth without impediment.
The strictly needful has been obtained; but it is very ugly. The
practical has not troubled about the beautiful.

An artist corrects the brute work of reason. He replaces the cylinder
by a semi-ellipsoid, of a much prettier form; he joins this ellipsoid
to the sphere by means of a graceful curved surface; and the whole
becomes the pear, the necked gourd. It is now a work of art, a thing of
beauty.

The Scarab does exactly what the laws of æsthetics dictate to
ourselves. Can she, too, have a sense of beauty? Is she able to
appreciate the elegance of her pear? Certainly, she does not see it:
she manipulates it in profound darkness. But she touches it. A poor
touch hers, rudely clad in horn, yet not insensible, after all, to
nicely-drawn outlines!








CHAPTER III

THE SACRED BEETLE: THE MODELLING


How does the Scarab obtain the maternal pear? It is certain, to begin
with, that this is in no wise shaped by the mechanism of conveyance
along the ground: the shape is incompatible with a rolling in every
direction, at haphazard. We might accept that for the belly of the
gourd; but the neck, the ellipsoid nipple, hollowed into a
hatching-chamber! This delicate work could never result from violent,
unmeasured jerks. The goldsmith’s jewel is not hammered on the
blacksmith’s anvil. Together with other reasons, all good in evidence,
already quoted, the pear-shaped outline delivers us, I hope, once and
for all, from the antiquated belief that placed the egg inside a
roughly-jolted ball.

To produce his masterpiece, the sculptor retires to his den. Even so
the Sacred Beetle. She shuts herself down in her crypt, to model, in
contemplative seclusion, the materials introduced. Two opportunities
offer for obtaining the block to be worked. In the one case, the Scarab
gathers from the heap, according to the method which we know, a choice
block, which is kneaded into a ball on the spot and which is already
spherical before it is set in motion. Were it only a question of
provisions intended for her own meals, she would never act otherwise.

When she thinks the ball of sufficient bulk, if the place do not suit
her wherein to dig the burrow, she sets out with her rolling burden,
walking at random till she lights upon a favourable spot. During the
journey, the ball, without improving upon the perfect sphere which it
was at the start, hardens a little on the surface and becomes encrusted
with earth and little grains of sand. This earthy rind, picked up on
the road, is an authentic sign of a more or less long excursion. The
detail is not without importance; it will serve us presently.

Less frequently, the spot close to the heap whence the block has been
extracted satisfies the insect as suitable for the excavation of the
burrow. The soil is free from pebbles and easy to dig. Here, no journey
is necessary, nor, therefore, any ball convenient for transit. The soft
biscuit of the sheep is gathered and stored as found and enters the
workshop a shapeless mass, either in one piece, or, if need be, in
different lumps.

This case occurs seldom in the natural state, because of the coarseness
of the ground, which abounds with broken stones. Sites practicable for
easy digging are few and far between and the insect has to roam about,
with its burden, to find them. In my voleries, on the other hand, where
the earthy layer has been purged with the sieve, it is the usual case.
Here the earth is easy to dig at any point; wherefore the mother,
working for her laying, is content to lower the nearest morsel
underground, without giving it any definite shape.

Whether the storing without preliminary ball or conveyance be achieved
in the fields or in my voleries, the final result is most striking. One
day, I see a shapeless lump disappear into the crypt. The next day, or
the day after, I visit the workshop and find the artist face to face
with her work. The uncouth mass of the start, the loose shreds
introduced by armfuls have become a pear of perfect accuracy and
conscientious finish.

The artistic object bears the marks of its method of manufacture. The
part that rests upon the bottom of the cavity is crusted over with
earthy particles; all the rest is of a glossy polish. Owing to its
weight, owing also to the pressure exercised when the Scarab
manipulates it, the pear, which is still quite soft, has become soiled
with grains of earth on the side that touches the floor of the
workshop; on the remainder, which is the larger part, it retains the
delicate finish which the insect was able to give it.

The inferences to be drawn from these minutely-observed details are
obvious: the pear is no turner’s work; it has not been obtained by any
sort of rolling on the ground of the spacious studio, for then it would
have been soiled with earth all over. Besides, its projecting neck
precludes this mode of fabrication. It has not even been turned from
one side to the other, as is loudly proclaimed by its unblemished upper
surface. The Scarab, therefore, has moulded it where it lies, without
turning or shifting it in any way; she has modelled it with little taps
of her broad battledores, just as when we saw her model her ball in the
daylight.

Let us now return to the usual case, in the open. The materials then
come from a distance and are introduced into the burrow in the form of
a ball covered with soil on every part of its surface. What will the
insect do with this sphere which contains the paunch of the future pear
ready-made? The answer would present no serious difficulty if, limiting
my ambition to the results obtained, I sacrificed the means employed.
It would be enough for me, as I have often done, to capture the mother
in her burrow with her ball and carry one and all home, to my animal
laboratory, to watch events at first hand.

A large glass jar is filled with earth, sifted, moistened and heaped to
the desired depth. I place the mother and her beloved pill, which she
holds embraced, on the surface of this artificial soil. I stow away the
apparatus in a half-light and wait. My patience is not very long tried.
Urged by the labour of the ovaries, the insect resumes its interrupted
work.

In certain cases, I see it, still on the surface, destroying its ball,
ripping it up, cutting it to pieces, shredding it. This is not in the
least the act of one in despair who, finding herself a captive, breaks
the cherished object in her bewilderment. It is an act of wise
hygienics. A scrupulous inspection of the morsel gathered in haste,
among lawless competitors, is often necessary, for supervision is not
always easy on the harvesting-spot itself, in the midst of thieves and
robbers. The ball may contain a blend of little Onthophagi, of
Aphodians, which have not been noticed in the heat of acquisition.

These involuntary intruders, finding themselves very comfortable in the
heart of the mass, would themselves make good use of the contemplated
pear, much to the detriment of the legitimate consumer. The ball must
be purged of this starveling brood. The mother, therefore, destroys it,
reduces it to atoms, scrutinizes it. Then, out of the collected
remnants, the ball is remade, stripped of its earthy rind. It is
dragged underground and becomes an immaculate pear, always excepting
the surface touching the soil.

Oftener still, the ball is thrust by the mother into the earth of the
jar just as I took it from the burrow, with the wrinkled covering which
it acquired in rolling across country during the journey from the place
where it was found to the spot where the insect intended to use it. In
that case, I find it at the bottom of my jar converted into a pear,
itself wrinkled and encrusted with earth and sand over the whole of its
surface, thus proving that the pear-shaped outline has not demanded a
general recasting of the mass, inside as well as out, but has been
obtained by simple pressure and by drawing out the neck.

This is how, in the vast majority of cases, things happen in the normal
state. Almost all the pears which I dig up in the fields are crusted,
unpolished, some more, others less. If we put on one side the
inevitable encrustations due to the carting across fields, these
blemishes would seem to point to a prolonged rolling in the interior of
the subterranean manor. The few which I find perfectly smooth,
especially those wonderfully neat specimens furnished by my voleries,
dispel this mistake entirely. They show us that, with materials
collected near at hand and stored away unshaped, the pear is modelled
wholly without rolling; they prove to us that, where the others are
concerned, the earthy wrinkles of the rind are not the signs of a
rolling manipulation at the bottom of the workshop, but simply the
marks of a fairly long journey on the surface of the ground.

To be present at the construction of the pear is no easy matter: the
sombre artist obstinately refuses to do any work as soon as the light
reaches her. She needs absolute darkness for her modelling; and I need
light if I would see her at work. It is impossible to unite the two
conditions. Let us try, nevertheless; let us seize by fragments the
truth which hides itself in its fulness.

The arrangements made are as follows: I once more take the large glass
jar. I cover the bottom with a layer of earth a few inches in
thickness. To obtain the transparent workshop necessary for my
observations, I fix a tripod on the earthy layer and, on this support,
a decimetre [10] high, I place a round deal slab of the same diameter
as the jar. The glass-walled chamber thus marked out will represent the
roomy crypt in which the insect works. In the edge of the deal slab, a
hollow is cut, large enough to permit of the passage of the Sacred
Beetle and her ball. Lastly, above this screen, I heap a layer of earth
as deep as the jar allows.

During the operation, a portion of the upper earth falls through the
opening and slips down to the lower space in a wide inclined plane.
This was a circumstance which I had foreseen and which was
indispensable to my plan. By means of this slope, the artist, when she
has found the communicating trap-door, will make for the transparent
den which I have arranged for her. She will make for it, of course,
only provided that she be in perfect darkness. I therefore contrive a
cardboard cylinder, closed at the top, and place the glass apparatus
inside it. Left standing where it is, the opaque sheath will provide
the dusk which the Scarab demands; suddenly raised, it will give the
light which I require on my side.

Things being thus arranged, I go in search of a mother lately removed
from her natural lodging with her ball. A morning is enough to provide
me with what I need. I place the mother and her ball on the surface of
the upper layer of earth; I cap the apparatus with its cardboard
sheath; and I wait. The insect, stubborn at its work so long as the egg
is not deposited, will dig itself a new burrow, dragging its ball with
it as it goes; it will pass through the upper layer of earth, which is
not sufficiently thick; it will come upon the deal board, an obstacle
similar to the broken stones that often bar its passage in the course
of its normal excavations; it will investigate the cause of the
impediment and, finding the opening, will descend through this
trap-door to the lower compartment, which, being free and roomy, will
represent to the insect the crypt whence I have just removed it. Thus
prophesies my foresight. But all this takes time; and I must wait for
the morrow to satisfy my impatient curiosity.

The hour has come: let us go and see. The study-door was left open
yesterday: the mere sound of the door-handle might stop my distrustful
worker. By way of greater precaution, before entering, I put on silent
slippers. And——whoosh! The cylinder is removed. Capital! My
expectations are fully justified.

The Scarab occupies the glazed workshop. I catch her at work, with her
broad foot laid on the rough sketch of the pear. But, startled by the
sudden light, she remains motionless, as though petrified. This lasts a
few seconds. Then she turns her back upon me and awkwardly ascends the
inclined plane, to reach the darkling heights of her gallery. I give a
glance at the work, take note of its shape, its position and its
aspect, and restore darkness with the cardboard sheath. Let us not
prolong the indiscretion, if we would renew the test.

My sudden, brief visit gives us a first insight into the mysterious
work. The ball, at first exactly spherical, now has a stout pad
circumscribing a sort of shallow crater. The work reminds me, in
greatly reduced proportions, of certain prehistoric pots, with round
bellies, thick lips around the mouth and a neck strangled by a narrow
groove. This rude outline of a pear tells us of the insect’s method, a
method identical with that of Pleistoscene man ignorant of the potter’s
wheel.

The plastic ball, girt with a circle at one end, has been hollowed out
in a groove, the starting-point of the neck; it has, moreover, been
drawn out a little into an obtuse projection. In the centre of this
projection, a pressure has been effected, which, causing the matter to
fall back over the edges, has produced the crater, with its shapeless
lips. Circular enlacement and pressure have sufficed for this first
part of the work.

Towards evening, I pay a fresh sudden visit, amid complete silence. The
insect has recovered from its excitement of the morning and gone down
again to its workshop. Flooded with light and baffled by the strange
events to which my artifices give rise, it at once makes off and takes
refuge in the upper storey. The poor mother, persecuted by my
illuminations, runs up into the thick of the darkness, but regretfully,
with hesitating strides.

The work has progressed. The crater has become deeper; the thick lips
have disappeared, are thinner, closer together, drawn out into the neck
of a pear. The object, however, has not changed its place. Its
position, its aspect are exactly as I noted them before. The side that
lay on the ground is still at the bottom, at the same point; the side
that faced upwards is still at the top; the crater that lay on my right
has been replaced by the neck, still on my right. Whence comes a
conclusion completely confirming my previous statements: no rolling;
mere pressure, which kneads and moulds.

The next day, a third visit. The pear is finished. Its neck, yesterday
a yawning sack, is now closed. The egg, therefore, is laid; the work
has been carried through and demands only the finishing touches of
general polishing, touches upon which the mother, so intent on
geometrical perfection, was doubtless engaged at the time when I
disturbed her.

The most delicate part of the affair escapes my observation. I see
quite clearly, in the main, how the hatching-chamber of the egg is
obtained: the thick pad surrounding the original crater is thinned and
flattened out under the pressure of the feet and lengthened into a sack
the mouth of which gradually narrows. Up to this point, the work
provides its own explanation. But we have no explanation of the
exquisite perfection of the cell wherein the egg is to hatch, when we
think of the insect’s rigid tools, the wide, toothed armlets whose
jerky awkwardness suggests the spasmodic movements of an automaton.

With this clumsy equipment, excellently adapted to coarse work though
it be, how does the Scarab obtain the natal dwelling, the oval nest so
daintily polished and glazed within? Does the foot, a regular saw,
fitted with enormous teeth, begin to rival the painter’s brush in
delicacy from the moment when it is inserted through the narrow orifice
of the sack? Why not? I have said elsewhere and this is the occasion to
repeat it: the tool does not make the workman. The insect exerts its
gifts as a specialist with any kind of tool wherewith it is supplied.
It can saw with a plane or plane with a saw, like the model workman of
whom Franklin tells us. The same strong-toothed rake with which the
Sacred Beetle rips the earth is used by her as a trowel and brush
wherewith to glaze the stucco of the chamber in which the grub will be
born.

In conclusion, one more detail concerning this hatching-chamber. At the
extreme end of the neck of the pear, one point is always pretty clearly
distinguished: it bristles with stringy fibres, while the rest of the
neck is carefully polished. This is the plug with which the mother has
closed the narrow opening after placing the egg; and this plug, as its
hairy structure shows, has not been subjected to the pressure which,
throughout the rest of the work, crams the smallest projecting scrap
into the mass and causes it to disappear.

Why this arrangement at the extreme pole, a very curious exception,
when every elsewhere the pear has received the powerful blows of the
insect’s foot? The hind-end of the egg rests against this plug, which,
were it pressed down and driven in, would transmit the pressure to the
germ and imperil its safety. The mother, aware of the risk, blocks up
the hole without ramming the stopper: the air in the hatching-chamber
is thus more easily renewed; and the egg escapes the dangerous
concussion of the compressing paddle.








CHAPTER IV

THE SACRED BEETLE: THE GRUB, THE METAMORPHOSIS, THE HATCHING-CHAMBER


The hatching-chamber is an oval recess about one centimetre [11] in
diameter. The egg is fixed at the bottom of this recess. It is
cylindrical in shape, rounded at both ends, yellowish-white in colour
and having nearly the bulk of a grain of wheat, but shorter. The inner
wall of the recess is plastered with a greenish-brown matter, shiny,
half-fluid, a real cream destined to form the first mouthfuls of the
grub. In order to produce this delicate fare, does the mother select
the quintessence of the ordure? The appearance of the mess tells me
differently and assures me that it is a broth elaborated in the
maternal stomach. The Pigeon softens the corn in her crop and turns it
into a sort of milk-diet which she afterwards disgorges for her brood.
The Dung-beetle has the same fond ways: she half-digests selected
viands and disgorges them as a fine pap, with which she hangs the walls
of the nest wherein her egg is laid. In this manner, the grub, when
hatched, finds an easily-digested food that soon strengthens its
stomach and allows it to attack the underlying layers, which are less
daintily prepared.

A progressive change of diet is here made manifest. On leaving the egg,
the feeble little grub licks the fine sop on the walls of its lodging.
There is not much of it, but it is strengthening and possesses a high
nourishing value. The pap of tender childhood is followed by the
pottage of the weaned nursling.

The time has come for a sight stranger than any yet displayed to me by
the mechanical daring of the insect. Anxious to observe the grub in the
intimacy of its home, I open in the belly of the pear a little
peep-hole half a centimetre square. The head of the recluse at once
appears in the opening, to enquire what is happening. The breach is
perceived. The head disappears. I can just see the white chine turning
about in the narrow cabin; and, then and there, the window which I have
contrived is closed with a soft, brown paste, which soon hardens.

The inside of the cabin, said I to myself, is no doubt a semi-fluid
porridge. Turning upon itself, as is shown by the sudden slide of the
back, the grub has collected an armful of this material and, completing
the circuit, has stuck its load, by way of mortar, in the breach
considered dangerous. I remove the closing plug. The grub acts as
before, puts its head at the window, withdraws it, spins round upon
itself like a fruit-stone slipping in its shell and forthwith produces
a second plug as ample as the first. Forewarned of what was coming,
this time I saw more clearly.

What a mistake was mine! I am not too greatly thunderstruck, however:
in the exercise of its defensive skill, the animal often employs
methods which our imagination would not dare to contemplate. It is not
the head that is presented at the breach, after the preliminary
twisting: it is the opposite extremity. The grub does not bring an
armful of its alimentary dough, gathered by scraping the walls: it
excretes upon the aperture to be closed; a much more economical
proceeding. Sparingly measured out, the rations must not be wasted:
there is just enough to live upon. Besides, the cement is of better
quality; it soon sets. Lastly, the urgent repairs are more quickly
effected, if the intestines lend their kindly aid.

They do, in point of fact, and to an astonishing degree. Five, six
times in succession and oftener, I remove the fixed plug; and, time
after time, the mortar discharges a copious ejaculation from its
apparently inexhaustible reservoir, which is ever at the mason’s
service, without an interval for rest. The grub is already beginning to
resemble the Sacred Beetle, whose stercoral prowess we know: it is a
past master in the art of dunging. It possesses above any other animal
in the world an intestinal deftness which anatomy will undertake to
explain to us, partly, later on.

The plasterer and the mason have their trowels. In the same way, the
grub, that zealous repairer of breaches made in its home, has a trowel
of its own. The last segment is lopped off slantwise, and carries on
its dorsal surface a sort of inclined plane, a broad disk surrounded by
a fleshy pad. In the middle of the disk is a gash, forming the
cementing-aperture. Behold the fair-sized trowel, flattened out and
supplied with a rim to prevent the compressed matter from flowing away
in useless waste.

As soon as the plastic gush is laid down in a lump, the levelling and
compressing instrument sets to work to introduce the cement well into
the irregularities of the breach, to push it right through the
thickness of the ruined portion, to give it consistency, to level it.
After this stroke of the trowel, the grub turns round: it comes and
bangs and pushes the work with its wide forehead and improves it with
the tip of its mandibles. Wait a quarter of an hour and the repaired
portion will be as firm as the rest of the shell, so quickly does the
cement set. Outside, the repairs are betrayed by the rough prominence
of the material forced outwards, which remains inaccessible to the
trowel; but, inside, there is no trace of the breakage: the usual
polish has been restored at the injured spot. A plasterer stopping a
hole in a wall in our rooms could produce no better piece of work.

Nor do the worm’s talents end here. With its cement, it becomes a
mender of pots and pans. Let me explain. I have compared the outside of
the pear, which, when pressed and dried, becomes a strong shell, with a
jar containing fresh food. In the course of my excavations, sometimes
made on difficult soil, I have happened occasionally to break this jar
with an ill-directed blow of the trowel. I have collected the
potsherds, pieced them together, after restoring the worm to its place,
and kept the whole thing in one by wrapping it in a bit of old
newspaper.

On reaching home, I have found the pear put out of shape, no doubt, and
seamed with scars, but just as solid as ever. During the walk, the grub
had restored its ruined dwelling to condition. Cement injected into the
cracks joined the pieces together; inside, a thick plastering
strengthened the inner wall, so much so that the repaired shell was
quite as good as the untouched shell, but for the irregularity of the
outside. In its artistically-mended stronghold, the worm found the
peace essential to its existence.

Let us now give a brief description of the grub, without stopping to
enumerate the articulations of the palpi and antennæ, irksome details
of no immediate interest. It is a fat worm and has a fine, white skin,
with pale slate-coloured reflections proceeding from the digestive
organs, which are visible transparently. Bent into a broken arch or
hook, it is not unlike the grub of the Cockchafer, but has a much more
ungainly figure, for, on its back, at the sudden bend of the hook, the
third, fourth and fifth segments of the abdomen swell into an enormous
protuberance, a tumour, a pouch so prominent that the skin seems on the
point of bursting under the pressure of the contents. This is the
animal’s most striking feature: the fact that it carries a wallet.

The head is small in proportion to the size of the grub, slightly
convex and bright red, studded with a few pale bristles. The legs are
fairly long and sturdy, ending in a pointed tarsus. The grub does not
use them as limbs of progression. Taken from its shell and placed upon
the table, it struggles in clumsy contortions without succeeding in
shifting its position; and the cripple betrays its anxiety by repeated
eruptions of its mortar.

Let us also mention the terminal trowel, the last segment lopped into a
slanting disk and rimmed with a fleshy pad. In the centre of this
inclined plane is the open stercoral gash, which thus, by a very
unusual inversion, occupies the upper surface. An enormous hump and a
trowel: that gives you the animal in two words.

We must not finish the history of the grub without saying a few words
on its internal structure. Anatomy will show us the works wherein the
cement employed in so original a manner is manufactured. The stomach or
chylific ventricle is a long, thick cylinder, starting from the
creature’s neck after a very short gullet. It measures about three
times the length of the animal. In its last quarter, it carries a
voluminous lateral pouch distended by the food. This is a subsidiary
stomach in which the supplies are stored so as to yield their nutritive
principles more thoroughly. The chylific ventricle is much too long to
lie straight in the grub’s bowels and bends back upon itself, in front
of its appendix, in the form of a large loop occupying the dorsal
surface. It is to contain this loop and the lateral pouch that the back
is swollen into a protuberance. The grub’s wallet is, therefore, a
second paunch, an annexe, as it were, of the stomach, which is itself
incapable of holding the voluminous digestive apparatus. Four very
fine, very long tubulures, irregularly entwined, four Malpighian
vessels mark the limits of the chylific ventricle.

Next comes the intestine, narrow, cylindrical, rising forwards. The
intestine is followed by the rectum, which pushes backwards. This
latter, which is of exceptional size and fitted with powerful walls, is
wrinkled across, bloated and distended by its contents. Here is the
roomy warehouse in which the scoriæ of the digestion accumulate; here
is the mighty ejaculator, always ready to provide cement.

The grub gets bigger as it eats the wall of its house from the inside.
Little by little, the belly of the pear is scooped out into a cell
whose capacity grows in proportion to the growth of the inhabitant.
Ensconced in its hermitage, furnished with board and lodging, the
recluse waxes stout and fat. What more does it want?

In four or five weeks, the complete development is obtained. The
apartment is ready. The worm sheds its skin and becomes a chrysalis.
There are very few in the entomological world to vie in sober beauty
with the tender creature which, with its wing-cases laid in front of it
like a wide-creased scarf and its fore-legs folded under its head, as
when the full-grown Scarab counterfeits death, suggests the idea of a
mummy maintained by its bandages in a sacerdotal pose. Semi-translucent
and honey-yellow, it looks as though it were cut from a block of amber.
Imagine it hardened in this state, mineralized, made incorruptible: it
would be a splendid topaz jewel.

In this marvel, so severe and dignified in shape and colouring, one
point above all captivates me and gives me at last the solution of a
far-reaching problem. Are the front-legs furnished with a tarsus, yes
or no? This is the great business that makes me forget the jewel for
the sake of a structural detail. Let us then return to a subject that
excited me in my early days; for the answer has come at last, late, it
is true, but certain and indisputable.

By a very strange exception, the full-grown Sacred Beetle and his
congeners are without front tarsi; they lack on their fore-legs that
five-jointed finger which is the rule among the highest division of
Coleoptera, the Pentamera. The other limbs, on the contrary, follow the
common law and possess a very well-shaped tarsus. Is the formation of
the toothed armlets original or accidental?

At first sight, an accident seems probable enough. The Scarab is a
strenuous miner and a great pedestrian. Always in contact with the
rough soil, whether in walking or digging; used, moreover, for constant
leverage when the insect is rolling its ball backwards, the fore-legs
are much more exposed than the others to the danger of spraining and
twisting their delicate finger, of putting it out of joint, of losing
it entirely, from the very first moment when the work begins.

Lest this explanation should appeal to any of my readers, I will hasten
to undeceive them. The absence of the front fingers is not the result
of an accident. The proof of what I say lies here, under my eyes,
without the possibility of a rejoinder. I examine the nymph’s legs with
the magnifying-glass: those in front have not the least vestige of a
tarsus; the toothed limb ends bluntly, without a trace of a terminal
appendage. In the others, on the contrary, the tarsus is as distinct as
possible, notwithstanding the shapeless, gnarled condition due to the
swaddling-bands and the humours of the chrysalis state. It suggests a
finger swollen with chilblains.

If the evidence of the nymph were not sufficient, there would be that
of the perfect insect which, casting its rejected mummy-clothes and
moving for the first time in its shell, wields fingerless armlets. The
fact, therefore, is established for certain: the Sacred Beetle is born
maimed; his mutilation dates from his birth.

“Very well,” reply our fashionable theorists, “the Sacred Beetle is
mutilated from the start; but his remote ancestors were not. They were
formed according to the general rule, they were correct in structure
down to this slight digital detail. There were some who, in the course
of their rude task as diggers and rollers, wore out that delicate,
cumbrous, useless member; and, finding themselves better equipped for
their work by this accidental amputation, they bequeathed it to their
successors, to the great benefit of the race. The present insect
profits by the improvement obtained by a long array of ancestors, and,
acting under the stimulus of vital competition, gives permanence to an
advantageous condition due to chance.”

O ingenuous theorists, so triumphant on paper, so vain in the face of
reality, listen to me for yet one moment more! If the loss of the front
fingers be a fortunate thing for the Sacred Beetle, who faithfully
hands down the leg of yore fortuitously maimed, why should it not be so
with the other members, if they too happened to lose by chance their
terminal appendage, a small, powerless filament, almost utterly
unserviceable, and, owing to its delicacy, a cause of grievous
conflicts with the roughness of the soil?

The Sacred Beetle is not a climber, but an ordinary pedestrian,
supporting himself upon the point of an iron-shod stick, by which I
mean the stout spine or prickle wherewith the tip of the leg is armed.
He does not have to hold on by his claws to some hanging branch, as
does the Cockchafer. And it would therefore, meseems, be entirely to
his advantage to rid himself of the four remaining fingers, projecting
sideways, idle on the march, inactive in the construction and carriage
of the ball. Yes, that would mean progress, for the simple reason that
the less hold one gives to the enemy the better. It remains to be seen
if chance ever produces this state of things.

It does and very often. At the end of the fine season, in October, when
the insect has worn itself out in digging, in carrying balls and in
modelling pears, the maimed, the victims of work, form the great
majority. I see them, both in my voleries and outside, displaying every
degree of amputation. Some have lost the finger on their four hind-legs
altogether; others retain a stump, a couple of joints, a single joint;
those which are least damaged have a few members left intact.

This is certainly the mutilation pleaded by the theorists. And it is no
accident, occurring at long intervals: every year, the cripples
outnumber the others at the time when the winter-season is at hand. In
their final labours, they seem no more embarrassed than those who have
been spared by the trials of life. On both sides, I find the same
quickness of movement, the same dexterity in kneading the
ammunition-bread which will enable them to bear the first rigours of
winter philosophically underground. In the scavenger’s work, the maimed
vie with the others.

And these cripples form a race; they spend the bad season underground;
they wake up in the spring, return to the surface and take part, for a
second, sometimes even for a third time, in life’s great festival.
Their descendants ought to profit by an improvement which has been
renewed year by year, ever since Scarabs came into the world, and which
has certainly had time to become fixed and to convert itself into a
settled habit. But they do nothing of the sort. Every Sacred Beetle
that breaks his shell, with not one exception, is endowed with the four
tarsi prescribed by rule.

Well, theorists, what say you to that? For the two front legs, you
offer a sort of an explanation; and the four others contradict you
flatly. Have you not been taking fancy for truth?

Then what is the cause of the original mutilation of the Scarab? I will
confess plainly that I know nothing at all about it. Nevertheless,
those two maimed members are very strange: so strange, in the endless
order of insects, that they have exposed the masters, the greatest
masters, to lamentable blunders. Let us listen first to Latreille, [12]
the prince of descriptive entomologists. In his account of the insects
which ancient Egypt painted or carved upon her monuments, [13] he
quotes the writings of Horapollo, an unique document which has been
preserved for us in the papyri for the glorification of the sacred
insect:


   “One would feel tempted at first,” he says, “to set down as fiction
    what Horapollo says of the number of that Scarab’s fingers.
    According to him, there are thirty. Nevertheless, this computation,
    judged by the way in which he looks at the tarsus, is perfectly
    correct, for this part consists of five joints; and, if we take
    each of them for a finger, the legs being six in number and each
    ending in a five-jointed tarsus, the Sacred Beetles obviously have
    thirty fingers.”


Forgive me, illustrious master: the total number of joints is but
twenty, because the two front legs are devoid of tarsi. You have been
carried away by the general law. Losing sight of the singular
exception, which was certainly known to you, you said thirty, swayed
for a moment by that overwhelmingly positive law. Yes, the exception
was known to you, so much so that the figure of the Sacred Beetle
accompanying your account, a figure drawn from the insect and not from
the Egyptian monuments, is irreproachably accurate: it has no tarsi on
its fore-legs. The blunder is excusable, in view of the strangeness of
the exception.

What did Horapollo himself see? Apparently what we see in our day. If
Latreille’s explanation be right, as everything seems to denote, if the
Egyptian author began by counting thirty fingers according to the
number of joints in the tarsi, it is because his enumeration was based
in his mind upon the facts of the general situation. He was guilty of a
mistake which was not very reprehensible, seeing that, some thousand
years later, masters like Latreille and Mulsant were guilty of it in
their turn. The only culprit in all this business is the exceptional
structure of the insect.

“But,” I may be asked, “why should not Horapollo have seen the exact
truth? Perhaps the Scarab of his century had tarsi which the insect
does not possess to-day. In that case, it has been altered by the
patient work of time.”

Before answering this evolutionary objection, I will wait for some one
to show me a natural Scarab of Horapollo’s date. The hypogea which so
religiously guard the cat, the ibis and the crocodile must also contain
the sacred insect. All that I have at my disposal is a few figures
representing the Sacred Beetle as we find him engraved on the monuments
or carved in fine stone as an amulet for the mummies. The ancient
artist is remarkably faithful in the execution of the whole; but his
graver, his chisel have not troubled about details so insignificant as
those of the tarsi.

Ill-supplied though I be with documents of this kind, I greatly doubt
whether carving or engraving will solve the problem. Even if an image
with front tarsi were discovered somewhere or other, the question would
be no further advanced. One could always plead a mistake, carelessness,
a leaning towards symmetry. The doubt, as long as it prevails in
certain minds, can only be removed by the ancient insect in a natural
state. I will wait for it, convinced beforehand that the Pharaonic
Scarab differed in no way from our own.

Let us not take leave of the old Egyptian author just yet, in spite of
his usually incomprehensible jargon, with its senseless allegories. He
sometimes has views that are strikingly correct. Is it a chance
coincidence? Or is it the result of serious observation? I should be
gladly inclined to adopt the latter opinion, so perfect is the
agreement between his statements and certain biological details of
which our own science was ignorant until quite lately. Where the
intimate life of the Scarab is concerned, Horapollo is much
better-informed than ourselves.

In particular, he writes as follows:


   “The Scarab buries her ball in the ground, where she remains hidden
    for twenty-eight days, a space of time equal to that of a
    revolution of the moon, during which period the offspring of the
    Scarab quickens. On the twenty-ninth day, which the insect knows to
    be that of the conjunction of the sun and moon and of the birth of
    the world, it opens the ball and throws it into the water. From
    this ball issue animals that are Scarabs.”


Let us dismiss the revolution of the moon, the conjunction of the sun
and moon, the birth of the world and other astrological absurdities,
but remember this: the twenty-eight days of incubation required by the
ball underground, the twenty-eight days during which the Scarab is born
to life. Let us also remember the indispensable intervention of water
to bring the insect out of its burst shell. These are precise facts,
falling within the domain of true science. Are they imaginary? Are they
real? The question deserves investigation.

Antiquity knew nothing of the wonders of the metamorphosis. To
antiquity, a grub was a worm born of corruption. The poor creature had
no future to lift it from its abject condition: as worm it appeared and
as worm it had to disappear. It was not a mask under which a superior
form of life was being elaborated; it was a definite entity, supremely
contemptible and doomed soon to return to the rottenness that gave it
birth.

To the Egyptian author, therefore, the Scarab’s larva was unknown. And
if, by chance, he had had before his eyes the shell of the insect
inhabited by a fat, big-bellied worm, he would never have suspected in
the foul and ugly animal the sober beauty of the future Scarab.
According to the ideas of the time, ideas long maintained, the sacred
insect had neither father nor mother: an error excusable in the midst
of the simplicity of the ancients, for here the two sexes are outwardly
indistinguishable. It was born of the ordure that formed its ball; and
from its birth dated the appearance of the nymph, that amber gem
displaying, in a perfectly recognizable form, the features of the
full-grown insect.

In the eyes of all antiquity, the Sacred Beetle begins to be born to
life at the moment when he can be recognized, not before; else we
should have the as yet unsuspected worm of affiliation. The
twenty-eight days, therefore, during which, as Horapollo tells us, the
offspring of the insect quickens, represent the nymphal phase. This
period has been the object of special attention in my studies. It
varies, but within narrow limits. The notes taken mention thirty-three
days as the longest duration and twenty-one as the shortest. The
average, supplied by a score of observations, is twenty-eight days.
This identical number twenty-eight, this number of four weeks appears
as such and oftener than the others. Horapollo spoke truly: the real
insect takes life in the interval of a lunar month.

The four weeks past, behold the Scarab in his final shape: the shape,
yes, but not the colouring, which is very strange when the chrysalis
casts its skin. The head, legs and thorax are a dark red, except the
denticulations, which are a smoky brown. The abdomen is an opaque
white; the wing-cases are a transparent white, very faintly tinged with
yellow. This majestic dress, combining the red of the cardinal’s
cassock with the white of the priest’s alb, is but temporary and turns
darker by degrees, to make way for a uniform of ebon black. About a
month is necessary for the horny armour to acquire a firm consistency
and a definite hue.

At last, the Scarab is fully matured. Awaking within him is the
delicious restlessness of an approaching liberty. He, hitherto the son
of the darkness, foresees the gladness of the light. His longing is
great to burst the shell, to emerge from below ground and come into the
sun; but the difficulty of liberating himself is far from small. Will
he escape from the natal cradle, now become an odious prison? Or will
he not escape? It depends.

It is generally in August that the Sacred Beetle is ripe for the
delivery: in August, save for rare exceptions, the most torrid, dry and
scorching month of the year. Should there not then come, from time to
time, a shower that to some slight extent assuages the panting earth,
then the cell to be burst and the wall to be broken through defy the
strength and patience of the insect, which is powerless against all
that hardness. By dint of a prolonged desiccation, the soft original
matter has become an insuperable rampart; it has turned into a sort of
brick baked in the oven of the dog-days.

I need hardly say that I have not failed to experiment with the insect
in these difficult circumstances. Pear-shaped shells are gathered
containing the full-grown Scarab, who is on the point of issuing, in
view of the lateness of the season. These shells, already dry and very
hard, are laid in a box where they retain their aridity. A little
earlier in one case, a little later in the other, I hear the sharp
grating of a rasp inside each shell. It is the prisoner working to make
himself an outlet by scraping the wall with the rake of his shield and
fore-feet. Two or three days elapse and the delivery seems to make no
progress.

I come to the assistance of a pair of them by myself opening a
loop-hole with the point of a knife. According to my idea, this first
breach will help the egress of the recluse by offering him a place to
start upon, an exit that only needs widening. But not at all: these
favoured ones advance no quicker with their work than the rest.

In less than a fortnight, silence prevails in all the shells. The
prisoners, worn out with ineffectual efforts, have perished. I break
the caskets containing the deceased. A meagre pinch of dust,
representing hardly an average pea in bulk, is all that the sturdy
implements—rasp, saw, harrow and rake—have succeeded in sundering from
the invincible wall.

Other shells, of a similar hardness, are wrapped in a wet rag and
enclosed in a flask. When the moisture has soaked through them, I
relieve them of their wrapper and keep them in the corked flask. This
time, events take a very different turn. Softened to a nicety by the
wet rag, the shells burst, ripped open by the shove of the prisoner,
who props himself boldly on his legs, using his back as a lever; or
else, scraped away at one point, they crumble to pieces and yawn with a
wide breach. The success is complete. In each case, the delivery is
effected without impediment; a few drops of water have brought them the
joys of the sun.

For the second time, Horapollo was right. Certainly, it is not the
mother, as the old author says, who throws her ball into the water: it
is the clouds that provide the liberating ablution, the rain that
facilitates the ultimate release. In the natural state, things must
happen as in my experiments. In August, in a burnt soil, under a thin
screen of earth, the shells, baked like bricks, are for most of the
time as hard as pebbles. It is impossible for the insect to wear out
its casket and escape from it. But, should a shower come upon the
scene—that life-giving baptism which the seed of the plant and the
family of the Scarab alike await within the ashes of the soil—should a
little rain fall, soon the fields will present the appearance of a
resurrection.

The earth is soaked. This is the wet rag of my experiment. At its
touch, the shell recovers the softness of its early days, the casket
becomes yielding; the insect makes play with its legs, pushes with its
back; it is free. It is, in fact, in the month of September, during the
first rains which herald the coming autumn, that the Scarab leaves the
native burrow and comes to enliven the pastoral sward, even as the
former generation enlivened it in the spring. The clouds, hitherto so
chary, have come at last to set him free.

Under conditions of exceptional coolness of the earth, the bursting of
the shell and the emerging of its occupant can occur at an earlier
period; but, in ground scorched by the fierce sun of summer, as is
usually the case in these parts, the Scarab, however eager he may be to
see the light, must needs wait for the first rains to soften his
stubborn shell. A downpour means to him a question of life and death.
Horapollo, that echo of the Egyptian magi, saw true when he made water
play its part in the insect’s birth.

But let us drop the jargon of antiquity and its shreds of truth; let us
not neglect the first acts of the Sacred Beetle on leaving his shell;
let us be present at his prentice steps in the open-air life. In
August, I break the casket in which I hear the helpless prisoner
fretting. The insect, the only one of its species, is placed in a
volery. Provisions are fresh and plentiful. This is the moment, I say
to myself, when we take refreshment after so long an abstinence. Well,
I am wrong: the new recruit sets no store by the victuals,
notwithstanding my invitations, my appeals to the appetizing heap. What
he wants above all is the joys of light. He climbs the metal trellis,
sets himself in the sun and there, motionless, takes his fill of its
beams.

What passes through his dull-witted scavenger’s brain during this first
bath of radiant light? Probably nothing. He enjoys the unconscious
happiness of a flower blooming in the sun.

At last, the insect goes to the victuals. A ball is constructed
according to all the rules. There is no apprenticeship, no first
attempt: the spherical form is obtained as regularly as though after
long practice. A burrow is dug wherein to eat in peace the
lately-kneaded bread. Here we find the novice thoroughly versed in his
art. No experience, however prolonged, will add anything to his
talents.










THE SPANISH COPRIS


CHAPTER V

THE SPANISH COPRIS


To show instinct performing on behalf of the egg what reason, ripened
by study and experience, would advise is a result of no mean
philosophic import; and I find myself seized with a scruple aroused by
scientific austerity. Not that I wish to give science a forbidding
aspect: I am convinced that one can say excellent things without
employing a barbarous vocabulary. Clearness is the supreme politeness
of whoso wields a pen. I do my best to observe it. And the scruple that
stops me is of another kind.

I ask myself if I am not here the victim of an illusion. I say to
myself:

“The Sacred Beetles and others are manufacturers of balls, of pills.
That is their trade, learnt we know not how, prescribed perhaps by
their structure, in particular by their long legs, some of which are
slightly curved. When working for the egg, what wonder if they continue
underground their special craft as ball-making artisans?”

Setting aside the neck of the pear and the jutting tip of the ovoid,
details the interpretation of which presents quite other difficulties,
there remains the most important mass as regards bulk, the globular
mass, a repetition of that which the insect makes outside the burrow;
there remains the ball with which the Sacred Beetle plays in the sun,
sometimes without making any other use of it.

Then what does the globulous form, which presents the most efficacious
preventative against desiccation during the heat of summer, do here?
Physically, this property of the sphere and of its near neighbour, the
ovoid, is undeniable; but these shapes offer only a casual concord with
the difficulty overcome. The animal built to roll balls across the
fields also fashions balls underground. If the worm be all the better
for finding tender foodstuffs under its mandibles to the very end, that
is a capital thing for the worm, but it is no reason why we should
extol the instinct of the mother.

To complete my conviction, I shall need a portly Dung-beetle who is a
total stranger to the pill-making craft in matters of every-day life
and who, nevertheless, when the moment of laying is at hand, makes a
sudden change in her habits and shapes her harvest into a ball. Is
there any such in my neighbourhood? Yes, there is; and she is one of
the handsomest and largest, next to the Sacred Beetle. I speak of the
Spanish Copris, who is so remarkable for her suddenly sloping corselet
and for the extravagant horn surmounting her head.

Thick-set, round, dumpy, slow of gait, the Spanish Copris is certainly
not equal to the athletic performances of the Sacred Beetle. The legs,
of very middling length and folded under the belly at the least alarm,
bear no comparison with the stilts of the pill-rollers. Their stiff and
stunted form alone is enough to tell us that the insect would not care
to wander about hampered by a rolling ball.

The Copris is, in point of fact, of a sedentary habit. Once he has
found his provisions, at night or in the evening twilight, he digs a
burrow under the heap. It is a rough cave, large enough to hold a big
apple. Here is introduced, piecemeal, the matter forming the roof or,
at least, lying on the door-sill; here is engulfed, without definite
shape, an enormous supply of victuals, bearing eloquent witness to the
insect’s gluttony. As long as the hoard lasts, the Copris, engrossed in
the pleasures of the table, does not return to the surface. The
hermitage is not abandoned until the larder is emptied, when the insect
recommences its nocturnal searches, finds a new treasure and digs
itself a new temporary establishment.

Plying this trade as a setter-in of ordure without preliminary
manipulation, the Copris, evidently, is absolutely ignorant, for the
time being, of the art of kneading and modelling a globular loaf.
Besides, his short, awkward legs seem radically opposed to any such
art.

In May, or June at latest, comes laying-time. The insect, itself so
ready to fill its belly with the most sordid materials, becomes
particular, where the portion of its family is concerned. Like the
Sacred Beetle, it now wants the soft produce of the sheep, deposited in
a single lump. Even when copious, the cake is buried on the spot in its
entirety. Not a trace of it remains outside. Economy demands that it be
gathered to the last crumb.

You see: no journey, no carting, no preparations. The cake is carried
down to the cellar by armfuls and at the identical spot where it is
lying. The insect repeats, with an eye to its grubs, what it did when
working for itself. As for the burrow, which is marked by a large
mole-hill, it is a roomy cave dug at a depth of some twenty
centimetres. [14] I observe a greater width, a greater perfection than
in the temporary abodes occupied by the Copris at times of revelry.

But let us leave the insect working in a state of liberty. The evidence
supplied by chance meetings would be incomplete, fragmentary and
disconnected. An examination in the volery is much to be preferred; and
the Copris lends himself to this most admirably. Let us first watch the
storing.

In the discreet dusk of the twilight, I see him appear on the threshold
of his burrow. He has mounted from the depths, he has come to gather
his harvest. He has not long to seek: the provisions are there, outside
the door, plentifully served and renewed by my care. Timidly, prepared
to retreat at the least alarm, he walks up to them with a slow and
measured step. The shield cuts and rummages, the fore-legs extract. An
armful is separated from the rest, quite a modest armful, crumbling to
pieces. The Copris drags it backwards and disappears underground. In
less than two minutes, he is back again. Never forgetting his caution,
he questions the neighbouring space with the outspread leaflets of his
antennæ before crossing the threshold of his dwelling.

A distance of two or three inches separates him from the heap. It is a
serious matter for him to venture so far. He would have preferred the
victuals exactly over his door, forming a roof to the house. This would
avoid his having to go out, always a source of anxiety. I have decided
otherwise. To facilitate my observations, I have placed the victuals
just on one side. Little by little, the alarmist grows accustomed to
the open air and accustomed to my presence, which, for that matter, I
render as discreet as possible. The taking down of the armfuls is
repeated indefinitely. They are always shapeless scraps, morsels such
as one might pick off with a small pair of pincers.

Having learnt what I want to know about the method of warehousing, I
leave the insect to its work, which continues for the best part of the
night. On the following days, nothing: the Copris goes out no more.
Enough treasure has been amassed in a single night’s sitting. Let us
wait a while and leave the insect time to stow its harvest as it
pleases.

Before the week is out, I dig up the soil of the volery and lay bare
the burrow, the victualling of which I have partly followed. As in the
fields, it is a spacious hall, with an irregular, surbased ceiling and
an almost level floor. In a corner is a round hole, similar to the
orifice of the neck of a bottle. This is the business-entrance, opening
on a slanting gallery that runs up to the surface. The walls of the
house dug in fresh soil are carefully piled up and possess enough power
of resistance not to give way under the disturbance produced by my
excavations. We can see that, in labouring for the future, the insect
has put forth all its talent, all its strength as a digger, to produce
lasting work. Whereas the marquee in which we feast is a cavity
hurriedly hollowed out, our permanent dwelling is a crypt of larger
dimensions and of a much more finished construction.

I suspect that both sexes take part in the master work: at least, I
often come upon the couple in the burrows destined for the laying. The
roomy and luxurious apartment was no doubt once the wedding-hall; the
marriage was consummated under the great vault to the building of which
the swain has contributed: a gallant way of declaring his ardour. I
also suspect the husband of lending a hand to his partner with the
harvesting and the storing. From what I have gathered, he too, strong
as he is, collects his armfuls and goes down into the crypt. The minute
and tricky work goes much faster with two helping. But, once the house
is well supplied, he retires discreetly, returns to the surface and
goes and settles down elsewhere, leaving the mother to her delicate
functions. His part in the family-mansion is ended.

Now what do we find in this mansion, to which we have seen so many tiny
loads of provisions lowered? A muddled heap of separate morsels? Not in
the least. I always find a single lump, a huge loaf which fills the
box, but for a narrow passage all around, just wide enough to leave the
mother room to move.

This sumptuous lump, a real Twelfth-Night cake, has no fixed shape. I
come across some that are ovoid, suggesting a turkey’s egg in form and
size; I find some that are a flattened ellipsoid, similar to the common
onion; I discover some that are almost round, reminding one of a Dutch
cheese; I see some that are circular and slightly raised on the upper
surface, like the loaves of the Provençal rustic or, better still, the
fougasso à l’iôu [15] wherewith the Easter festival is celebrated. In
every case, the surface is smooth and regularly curved.

There is no mistaking what has happened: the mother has collected and
kneaded into one lump the numerous fragments brought down one after the
other; out of all those particles she has made a homogeneous piece, by
dint of mashing them, amalgamating them, stamping on them. I repeatedly
surprise the baker on the top of the colossal loaf beside which the
Sacred Beetle’s pill cuts so poor a figure: she goes strolling about on
the convex surface, which sometimes measures a decimetre [16] across;
she pats the mass, consolidates it, levels it. I can give but a glance
at the curious scene. As soon as she is perceived, the pastry-cook
slides down the curved slope and huddles out of sight beneath the pie.

To follow the work further, to study its close detail, we must resort
to artifice. The difficulty is almost nil. Either my long practice with
the Sacred Beetle has made me more skilful in methods of research, or
else the Copris is less circumspect and endures more readily the
annoyance of a long captivity; for I succeed, without the least
impediment, in following all the phases of the nest-making at my
heart’s ease.

I employ two methods, each fitted to instruct me as to certain
particulars. Whenever the voleries supply me with a few large cakes, I
move these, with the mother, and place them in my study. The
receptacles are of two sorts, according to whether I want light or
darkness. For light, I employ glass jars with a diameter more or less
the same as that of the burrows, say about a dozen centimetres. [17] At
the bottom of each is a thin layer of fresh sand, quite insufficient to
allow the Copris to bury herself in it, but convenient, nevertheless,
to save the insect from the slippery footing provided by the glass and
to give it the illusion of a soil similar to that of which I have
deprived it. On this layer the jar receives the mother and her loaf.

I need hardly say that the startled insect would not undertake anything
under conditions of light, however softly modulated. It demands
complete obscurity, which I produce by means of a cardboard box
encasing the cylinder. By carefully raising this box a little, I am
able, presently, when I feel inclined, to surprise the captive at her
work and even to follow her doings for a time. The method, the reader
will see, is much simpler than that which I used when I wished to see
the Sacred Beetle engaged in modelling her pear. The easier-going mood
of the Copris lends itself to this simplification, which would be none
too successful with the other. A dozen of these eclipsed apparatus are
thus arranged on the large table in the laboratory. Any one seeing the
set would take them for an assortment of groceries in whity-brown paper
bags.

For darkness, I use flower-pots filled with fresh, heaped sand. The
mother and her cake occupy the lower portion, which is arranged as a
nest by means of a cardboard screen forming a ceiling and supporting
the sand above. Or else I simply put the mother on the surface of the
sand with a supply of provisions. She digs herself a burrow, does her
warehousing, makes herself a nest and things happen as usual. In all
cases, a sheet of glass used as a lid answers for my prisoners’ safety.
I rely upon these several dark apparatus to inform me about a delicate
point the particulars whereof will be set forth in their proper place.

What do the glass jars covered with an opaque sheath teach us? They
teach us much, of a most interesting character, and this to begin with:
the big loaf does not owe its curve—which is always regular,
notwithstanding its varying form—to any rolling process. The inspection
of the natural burrow has already told us that so large a mass could
not have been rolled into a cavity of which it fills almost the whole
space. Besides, the strength of the insect would be unequal to moving
so great a load.

Questioned from time to time, the jar repeats the same conclusion for
our benefit. I see the mother, hoisted atop the piece, feeling here,
feeling there, bestowing little taps, smoothing away the projecting
points, perfecting the thing; never do I catch her looking as though
she wanted to turn the block. It is as clear as daylight: rolling has
nothing whatever to do with the matter.

The dough-maker’s assiduity, her patient cares make me suspect a delay
in the manufacture whereof I was far from dreaming. Why so many
after-touches to the block, why so long a wait before employing it? A
week and more passes, in fact, before the insect, ever pressing and
polishing, decides to use its hoard.

The baker, when he has kneaded his dough to the desired extent,
collects it into a single heap in a corner of the kneading-trough. The
heat of the panary fermentation smoulders better in the heart of the
voluminous mass. The Copris knows this secret of the bake-house. She
collects the sum total of her harvests into a single lump; she
carefully kneads the whole into a provisional loaf which she gives time
to improve by means of an inner labour that makes the paste more
palatable and gives it a degree of consistency favourable to subsequent
manipulations. As long as the chemical work remains unfinished, both
the journeyman-baker and the Copris wait. To the insect this means a
long spell, a week at least.

It is done. The baker’s man divides his lump into smaller lumps, each
of which will become a loaf. The Copris acts likewise. By means of a
circular gash made with the cleaver of the shield and the saw of the
fore-legs, she separates from the main body a section of the prescribed
size. For this stroke of the trencher, no hesitation is needed, no
after-touches that add or subtract. Off-hand and with a plain, decisive
cut, a lump is obtained of the requisite bulk.

It now becomes a question of shaping it. Clasping it as best it can in
its short arms, so incompatible, one would think, with work of this
kind, the insect rounds the section by the one and only means of
pressure. It gravely moves about the hitherto shapeless ball, climbs
up, climbs down; it turns to left and right, above and below;
methodically, it presses a little more here, a little less there; it
improves by new touches, with unchanging patience; and, in twenty-four
hours’ time, the angular piece has become a perfect sphere, the size of
a plum. In a corner of her crammed studio, the podgy artist, with
hardly room to move, has finished her work without once shaking it on
its base; by dint of time and patience, she has obtained the
geometrical globe which her clumsy tools and her confined space seemed
bound to refuse her.

The insect continues for a long time yet to improve and lovingly to
polish its sphere, gently passing its foot to and fro until the least
protuberance has disappeared. Its finikin after-touches look as though
they would never be done. Towards the end of the second day, however,
the globe is pronounced right and proper. The mother climbs to the dome
of her edifice and there, still by simple pressure, hollows out a
shallow crater. In this basin the egg is laid.

Then, with extreme caution, with a delicacy that is most surprising in
such rough tools, the lips of the crater are brought together so as to
form a vaulted roof over the egg. The mother slowly turns, rakes a
little, draws

the material upwards and finishes the closing. This is the most
ticklish work of all. A careless pressure, a miscalculated thrust might
easily jeopardize the life of the germ under its slender ceiling.

From time to time, the work of closing is suspended. The mother,
motionless, with lowered forehead, seems to auscultate the underlying
cavity, to listen to what is happening within. All’s well, it seems;
and the patient labour is resumed: a fine scraping of the sides towards
the summit, which tapers a little and lengthens out. In this way, an
ovoid with the small end uppermost replaces the original sphere. Under
the more or less projecting nipple is the hatching-chamber, with the
egg. Twenty-four hours more are spent in this minute work. Total: four
times round the clock and sometimes longer to construct the sphere,
hollow it out basinwise, lay the egg and shut it in by transforming the
sphere into an ovoid.

The insect goes back to the cut loaf and helps itself to a second
slice, which, by the same manipulations as before, becomes an ovoid
sheltering an egg. The surplus suffices for a third ovoid, pretty often
even for a fourth. I have never seen this number exceeded when the
mother had at her disposal only the materials which she had heaped up
in the burrow.

The laying is over. Here is the mother in her retreat, which is almost
filled by the three or four cradles standing one against the other,
with their poles jutting upwards. What will she do now? Go away, no
doubt, to recruit her strength a little out of doors, after a prolonged
fast. He who thinks this is mistaken. She remains. And yet she has
eaten nothing since she came underground, taking good care not to touch
the loaf, which, divided into equal portions, will be the food of the
family. The Copris is touchingly scrupulous in the matter of the
inheritance: she is a devoted mother, who braves hunger lest her
offspring should starve.

She braves it for a second reason: to mount guard around the cradles.
From the end of June onwards, the burrows are hard to find, because the
mole-hills disappear through the action of some storm, or the wind, or
the feet of the passers-by. The few which I succeed in discovering
always contain the mother dozing beside a group of pills, in each of
which a grub, now nearing its complete development, feasts on the fat
of the land.

My dark apparatus, flower-pots filled with fresh sand, confirm what the
fields have taught me. Buried with provisions in the first fortnight in
May, the mothers do not reappear on the surface, under the glass lid.
They keep hidden in the burrow after laying their eggs; they spend the
sultry dog-days with their ovoids, watching them, no doubt, as the
glass jars, rid of subterranean mysteries, tell us.

They come up again at the time of the first autumnal rains, in
September. But by then the new generation has attained its perfect
form. The mother, therefore, enjoys underground that rare privilege for
the insect, the delight of knowing her family; she hears her sons
scratching at the shell to obtain their liberty; she is present at the
bursting of the casket which she has fashioned so conscientiously;
maybe she helps the exhausted weaklings, if the ground have not been
cool enough to soften their cells. Mother and progeny leave the subsoil
together and arrive together at the autumn banquets, when the sun is
mild and the ovine manna plentiful along the paths.










THE ONTHOPHAGI


CHAPTER VI

THE ONTHOPHAGI


After the notabilities of the Dung-beetle tribe, there remain, in the
very limited radius of my research, the small fry of the Onthophagi, of
whom I could gather a dozen different species around my house. What
will these little ones teach us?

Even more zealous than their larger comrades, they are the first to
hasten to the exploiting of the heap left by the passing mule. They
come up in crowds and stay long, working under the spread table that
gives them shade and coolness. Turn over the heap with your foot. You
will be surprised at the swarming population whose presence no outward
sign betrayed. The largest are scarce the size of a pea, but many are
much smaller still, are dwarfs, no less busy than the others, no less
eager to crumble the filth whose prompt disappearance the public health
demands.

In works of major interest, there is none like the humble, with their
concerted weakness, for realizing immense strength. Swollen by numbers,
the next to nothing becomes an enormous total.

Hurrying in detachments at the first news of the event, assisted
moreover in their wholesome task by their partners, the Aphodians, who
are as weak as they, the tiny Onthophagi soon clear the ground of its
dirt. Not that their appetite is equal to the consumption of such
plentiful provisions. What food do those pigmies need? An atom. But
that atom, selected from among the exudations, must be hunted amid the
fragments of the masticated fodder. Hence, an endless division and
subdivision of the lump, reducing it to crumbs which the sun sterilizes
and the wind dispels. As soon as the work is done—and very well
done—the troop of scavengers goes in search of another refuse-yard.
Outside the period of intense cold, which puts a stop to all activity,
they know no dead season.

And do not run away with the idea that this filthy task entails an
inelegant shape and a ragged dress. The insect knows none of our
squalor. In its world, a navvy dons a sumptuous jerkin; an undertaker
decks himself in a triple saffron sash; a wood-cutter works in a velvet
coat. In like manner, the Onthophagus has his own luxury. True, the
costume is always severe: brown and black are the predominant colours,
now dull, now polished as ebony; but, on this background, what details
of sober and graceful ornament! The graver’s work completes the beauty
of the dress. Tiny chasings in parallel grooves, gnarly beads, dainty
rows of knobs, seed-plots of pearly papillæ are distributed in
profusion among nearly all of them. Yes, the little Onthophagi, with
their stunted bodies and their nimble activity, are really pretty to
look at.

And then how original are their frontal decorations! These peace-lovers
delight in the panoply of war, as though they, the inoffensive ones,
thirsted for battle. Many of them crown their heads with threatening
horns. Let us mention that horned one whose story will occupy us more
particularly. I mean Onthophagus Taurus, clad in raven black. He wears
a pair of long horns, gracefully curved and branching to either side.
No pedigree bull, in the Swiss meadows, can match them for curve or
elegance.

The Onthophagus is a very indifferent artist: his nest is a rudimentary
piece of work, hardly fit to be acknowledged. I obtain it in profusion
from the six species which I have brought up in my jars and
flower-pots. Onthophagus Taurus alone provides me with nearly a
hundred; and I find no two precisely alike, as pieces should be that
come from the same mould and the same laboratory.

To this lack of exact similarity, we must add inaccuracy of shape, now
more, now less accentuated. It is easy, however, to recognize among the
bulk the prototype from which the clumsy nest-builder works. It is a
sack shaped like a thimble and standing erect, with the spherical
thimble-end at the bottom and the circular opening at the top.

Sometimes, the insect establishes itself in the central region of my
apparatus, in the heart of the earthy mass; then, the resistance being
the same in every direction, the sack-like shape is pretty accurate.
But, generally, the Onthophagus prefers a solid basis to a dusty
support and builds against the walls of the jar, especially against the
bottom wall. When the support is vertical, the sack is a short cylinder
divided lengthwise, with a smooth, flat surface against the glass and a
rugged convexity every elsewhere. If the support be horizontal, as is
most frequently the case, the cabin is a sort of undefined oval
pastille, flat at the bottom, bulging and vaulted at the top. To the
general inaccuracy of these contorted shapes, ruled by no very definite
pattern, we must add the coarseness of the surfaces, all of which, with
the exception of the parts touching the glass, are covered with a crust
of sand.

The manner of procedure explains this uncouth exterior. As laying-time
draws nigh, the Onthophagus bores a cylindrical pit and descends
underground to a middling depth. Here, working with the shield, the
chine and the fore-legs, which are toothed like a rake, he forces back
and heaps around him the materials which he has moved, so as to obtain
as best he may a nest of suitable size.

The next thing is to cement the crumbling walls of the cavity. The
insect climbs back to the surface by way of its pit; it gathers on its
threshold an armful of mortar taken from the cake whereunder it has
elected to set up house; it goes down again with its burden, which it
spreads and presses upon the sandy wall. Thus it produces a concrete
casing, the flint of which is supplied by the wall itself and the
cement by the produce of the sheep. After a few trips and repeated
strokes of the trowel, the pit is plastered on every side; the walls,
encrusted with grains of sand, are no longer liable to give way.

The cabin is ready: it now wants only a tenant and stores. First, a
large free space is contrived at the bottom: the hatching-chamber, on
whose inner wall the egg is laid. Next comes the gathering of the
provisions intended for the worm, a gathering made with nice
precautions. Lately, when building, the insect worked upon the outside
of the doughy mass and took no notice of the earthy blemishes. Now, it
penetrates to the very centre of the lump, through a gallery that looks
as though it were contrived with a punch. When trying a cheese, the
buyer employs a hollow cylindrical taster, which he drives well in and
pulls out with a sample taken from the middle of the cheese. The
Onthophagus, when collecting for her grub, goes to work as though
equipped with one of these tasters. She bores an exactly round hole
into the piece which she is exploiting; she goes straight to the
middle, where the material, not being exposed to the contact of the
air, has kept more savoury and pliable. Here and here alone are
gathered the armfuls which, gradually stowed away, kneaded and heaped
up to the requisite extent, fill the sack to the top. Finally, a plug
of the same mortar, the sides of which are made partly of sand and
partly of stercoral cement, roughly closes the cell, in such a way that
an outward inspection does not allow one to distinguish front from
back.

To judge the work and its merit, we must open it. A large empty space,
oval in shape, occupies the rear end. This is the birth-chamber, huge
in dimensions compared with its content, the egg fixed on the wall,
sometimes at the bottom of the cell and sometimes on the side. The egg
is a tiny white cylinder, rounded at either end and measuring a
millimetre [18] in length immediately after it is laid. With no other
support than the spot on which the oviduct has planted it, it stands on
its hind-end and projects into space.

A more or less enquiring glance is quite surprised to find so small a
germ contained in so large a box. What does that tiny egg want with all
that space? When carefully examined within, the walls of the chamber
prompt another question. They are coated with a fine greenish pap,
semi-fluid and shiny, the appearance of which does not agree with the
outward or inward aspect of the lump from which the insect has
extracted its materials. A similar lime-wash is observed in the nest
which the Sacred Beetle, the Copris, the Sisyphus, the Geotrupe and
other makers of stercoraceous preserves contrive in the very heart of
the provisions, to receive the egg; but nowhere have I seen it so
plentiful, in proportion, as in the hatching-chamber of the
Onthophagus. Long puzzled by this brothy wash, of which the Sacred
Beetle provided me with the first instance, I began by taking the thing
for a layer of moisture oozing from the bulk of the victuals and
collecting on the surface of the enclosure without other effort than
capillary action. That was the interpretation which I accepted
originally.

I was wrong. The truth is worthy of attention in a very different way.
To-day, better-informed by the Onthophagus, I know that this lime-wash
itself, this semi-fluid cream, is the product of maternal foresight.

What, then, is this lime-wash found in every cell? The answer is
compulsory: it is a produce of the mother, a special gruel, a milk-food
elaborated for the benefit of the new-born grub.

The young Pigeon puts his beak into that of his parents, who, with
convulsive efforts, force down his gullet first a caseous mash secreted
in the crop and next a broth of grains softened by being partially
digested. He is fed upon disgorged foods, which are helpful to the
weaknesses of an inexperienced stomach. The grub of the Onthophagus is
brought up in much the same way, at the start. To assist its first
attempts at swallowing, the mother prepares for it, in her crop, a
light and strengthening cream.

To pass the dainty from mouth to mouth is, in her case, impossible: the
construction of other cells keeps her busy elsewhere. Moreover—and this
is a more serious detail—the laying takes place egg by egg, at very
long intervals, and the hatching is pretty slow: time would fail, had
the family to be brought up in the manner of the Pigeons. Another
method is perforce needed. The childish pap is disgorged all over the
walls of the cabin in such a way that the nursling finds itself
surrounded by an abundance of bread-and-jam, in which the bread, the
food of the sturdy age, is represented by the uncooked material, as
supplied by the sheep, whereas the jam, the mess of the puny age, is
represented by the same material daintily prepared beforehand in the
mother’s stomach. We shall see the babe presently lick first the jam,
all around it, and then stoutly attack the bread. A child among
ourselves would behave no otherwise.

I should have liked to catch the mother in the act of disgorging and
spreading her broth. I was not able to succeed. Things happen in a
narrow retreat, which the eye cannot enter when the pastry-cook is
busy; and also her fluster at being exhibited in broad daylight at once
stops the work.

If direct observation be lacking, at least the appearance of the
material speaks very clearly and tells us that the Onthophagus, here
rivalling the Pigeon, but with a different method, disgorges the first
mouthfuls for her sons. And the same may be said of the other
Dung-beetles skilled in the art of building a hatching-chamber in the
centre of the provisions.

No elsewhere, in the insect order, except among the Apidæ, who prepare
disgorged food in the shape of honey, is this affection present. The
Dung-workers edify us with their morals. Several of them practise
association in couples and found a household; several anticipate the
suckling, the supreme expression of maternal solicitude, by turning
their crop into a nipple. Life has its freaks. It settles amid ordure
the creatures most highly-endowed with family qualities. True, from
there it mounts, with a sudden flight, to the sublimities of the bird.

The little worm is hatched in about a week: a strange and paradoxical
being. On its back, it has an enormous sugar-loaf hump, the weight of
which drags it over and capsizes it each time it tries to stand on its
legs and walk. At every moment, it staggers and falls under the burden
of the hunch.

Unable to keep its hump upright, the grub of the Onthophagus lies down
on its side and licks the cream of its cell all around it. There is
cream everywhere, on the ceiling, on the walls, on the floor. As soon
as one spot is thoroughly bared, the consumer moves on a little with
the help of its well-shaped legs; it capsizes again and starts licking
again. The room is large and plentifully supplied; and the jam-diet
lasts some time.

The fat babies of the Geotrupe, the Copris and the Sacred Beetle finish
at one brief sitting the dainty wherewith their cabined lodge is hung,
a dainty scantily served and just sufficient to stimulate the appetite
and prepare the stomach for a coarser fare; but the Onthophagus grub,
that lean pigmy, has enough to last it for a week and more. The
spacious natal chamber, which is out of all proportion with the size of
the nursling, has permitted this wastefulness.

At last, the real loaf is attacked. In about a month, everything is
consumed, except the wall of the sack. And now the splendid part played
by the hump stands revealed. Glass tubes, prepared in view of events,
allow me to follow the more and more plump and hunch-backed grub at
work. I see it withdraw to one end of the cell, which has become a
crumbling ruin. Here it builds a casket in which the transformation
will take place. Its materials are the digestive residuum, converted
into mortar and heaped up in the hump. The stercoral architect is about
to construct a masterpiece of elegance out of its own ordure, held in
reserve in that receptacle.

I follow its movements under the magnifying-glass. It buckles itself,
closes the circuit of the digestive apparatus, brings the two poles
into contact and, with the end of its mandibles, seizes a pellet of
dung ejaculated at that moment. This pellet, moulded and measured to
perfection, is very neatly gathered. A slight bend of the neck sets the
rubble-stone in place. Others follow, laid one above the other in
minutely regular courses. Giving a tap here and there with its feelers,
the grub makes sure of the stability of the parts, their accurate
binding, their orderly arrangement. It turns round in the centre of the
work as the edifice rises, even as a mason does when building a tower.

Sometimes, the laid stone becomes loose, because the cement has given
way. The worm takes it up again with its mandibles, but, before
replacing it, coats it with an adhesive moisture. It holds it to its
anus, whence trickles, on the moment, almost imperceptibly, a gummy
consolidating extract. The hump supplies the materials; the intestines
give, if necessary, the connecting glue.

In this way, a nice house is produced, ovoid in shape, polished as
stucco within and adorned on the outside with slightly projecting
scales, similar to those on a cedar-cone. Each of these scales is one
of the rubble-stones out of the hump. The casket is not large: a
cherry-stone would about represent its dimensions; but it is so
accurate, so prettily fashioned that it will bear comparison with the
finest products of entomological industry.








CHAPTER VII

A BARREN PROMISE


In the nymph of Onthophagus Taurus there rises, on the front edge of
the corselet, a single horn, as strong as the two others and shaped
like a cylinder ending in a conical knob. It points forward and is
fixed in the middle of the frontal crescent, projecting a little beyond
it. The arrangement is gloriously original. The carvers of
hieroglyphics would have beheld in it the crescent of Isis wherein dips
the edge of the world.

Other singularities complete the curious nymph. To right and left, the
stomach is armed, on either side, with four little horns resembling
crystal spikes. Total, eleven pieces on the harness: two on the
forehead; one on the thorax; eight on the abdomen. The beast of yore
delighted in queer horns: certain reptiles of the geological period
stuck a pointed spur on their upper eyelids. The Onthophagus, more
daring, sports eight on the sides of his belly, in addition to the
spear which he plants upon his back. The frontal horns may be excused:
they are pretty generally worn; but what does he propose to do with the
others? Nothing. They are passing fancies, jewels of early youth; the
adult insect will not retain the least trace of them.

The nymph matures. The appendages of the forehead, at first quite
crystalline, now show, transparently, a streak of reddish brown, curved
arc-wise. These are real horns taking shape, consistency and colour.
The appendage of the corselet and those of the belly, on the other
hand, preserve their glassy appearance. They are barren sacks, void of
any self-developing germ. The organism produced them in an impetuous
moment; now, scornful, or perhaps powerless, it allows the work to
wither and become useless.

When the nymph sheds its covering and the fine tunic of the adult form
is torn, these strange horns crumble into shreds, which fall away with
the rest of the cast clothing. In the hope of finding at least a trace
of the vanished things, the lens in vain explores the bases but lately
occupied. There is nothing appreciable left: smoothness takes the place
of protuberance; nullity succeeds to reality. Of the accessory panoply
that promised so much, absolutely naught remains: everything has
disappeared, evaporated, so to speak.

Onthophagus Taurus is not the only one endowed with those fleeting
appendages, which vanish wholly when the nymph sheds its clothes. The
other members of the tribe possess similar horny manifestations on
their bellies and corselets. These all disappear entirely in the
perfect insect.

A simple setting forth of the facts does not suffice us: we should like
to guess at the motive of this corniculate display. Is it a vague
memory of the customs of olden time, when life spent its excess of
young sap upon quaint creations, banished to-day from our
better-balanced world? Is the Onthophagus the dwarfed representative of
an old race of horned animals now extinct? Does it give us a faint
image of the past?

The surmise rests upon no valid foundation. The Dung-beetle is recent
in the general chronology of created beings; he ranks among the
last-comers. With him there is no means of going back to the mists of
the past, so favourable to the invention of imaginary precursors. The
geological layers and even the lacustrian layers, rich in Diptera and
Weevils, have so far furnished not the slightest relic of the
Dung-workers. This being so, it is wiser not to refer to distant horned
ancestors as accounting for their degenerate descendant, the
Onthophagus.

Since the past explains nothing, let us turn to the future. If the
thoracic horn be not a reminiscence, it may be a promise. It represents
a timid attempt, which the ages will harden into a permanent weapon. It
lets us assist at the slow and gradual evolution of a new organ; it
shows us life working on a portion of the adult’s corselet, which does
not yet exist, but which is to exist some day. We take the genesis of
the species in the act; the present teaches us how the future is
prepared.

And what does the insect that has conceived the ambition of later
planting a spear upon its chine propose to make of its projected work?
At least as an adjunct of masculine finery, the thing is in fashion
among various foreign Scarabs that feed themselves and their grubs on
vegetable matters in a state of decomposition. These giants among the
wing-cased tribe delight in associating their placid corpulence with
halberds terrible to gaze upon.

Look at this one—Dynastes Hercules his name—an inmate of the rotten
tree-stumps under the torrid West-Indian skies. The peaceable colossus
well deserves his name: he measures three inches long. Of what service
can the threatening rapier of the corselet and the toothed lifting-jack
of the forehead be to him, unless it be to make him look grand in the
presence of his female, herself deprived of these extravagances?
Perhaps also they are of use to him in certain works, even as the
trident helps Minotaurus in crumbling the pellets and carting the
rubbish. Implements of which we do not know the use always strike us as
singular. Having never associated with the West-Indian Hercules, I must
content myself with suspicions touching the purpose of his fearsome
equipment.

Well, one of the subjects in my voleries would achieve a similar savage
finery if he persisted in his attempts. I speak of Onthophagus Vacca.
His nymph has on its forehead a thick horn, one only, bent backward; on
its corselet it possesses a like horn, jutting forward. The two,
approaching their tips, look like a sort of pincers. What does the
insect lack in order to acquire, on a smaller scale, the eccentric
ornament of the West-Indian Scarab? It lacks perseverance. It matures
the appendage of the forehead and allows that of the corselet to perish
atrophied. It succeeds no better than Onthophagus Taurus in its attempt
to grow a pointed stake upon its chine; it loses a glorious opportunity
of making itself fine for the wedding and terrible in battle.

The others are no more successful. I bring up six different species.
All, in the chrysalis state, possess the thoracic horn and the
eight-pointed ventral coronet; not one benefits by these advantages,
which disappear altogether when the adult splits its case. My near
neighbourhood numbers a dozen species of Onthophagi; the world contains
some hundreds. All, natives and foreigners, have the same general
structure; all most probably possess the dorsal appendage at an early
age; and none of them, in spite of the variety of the climate, torrid
in one place, moderate in another, has succeeded in hardening it into a
permanent horn.

Could the future not complete a work the design of which is so very
clearly traced? We ask ourselves this the more readily inasmuch as
every appearance encourages the question. Examine under the
magnifying-glass the frontal horns of Onthophagus Taurus in the pupa
state; then consider as carefully the spear upon the corselet. At
first, there is no difference between them, except the general
configuration. In both cases, we find the same glassy aspect, the same
sheath swollen with a crystalline moisture, the same incipient organ
plainly marked. A leg in formation is not more clearly declared than
the horn on the corselet or those on the forehead.

Can time be lacking for the thoracic growth to organize itself into a
stiff and lasting appendage? The evolution of the nymph is swift; the
insect is perfect in a few weeks. Could it not be that, though this
brief space suffice to promote the maturity of the horns on the
forehead, the thoracic horn requires a longer time to ripen? Let us
prolong the nymphal period artificially and give the germ time to
develop itself. It seems to me that a decrease of temperature,
moderated and maintained for some weeks, for months if necessary,
should be capable of bringing about this result, by delaying the
progress of the evolution. Then, with a gentle slowness, favourable to
delicate formations, the promised organ will crystallize, so to speak,
and become the spear heralded by appearances.

The experiment attracted me. I was unable to undertake it for lack of
the means whereby to produce a cold, even and lasting temperature. What
should I have obtained if my penury had not made me abandon the
enterprise? A retarding of the progress of the metamorphosis, but
nothing more, apparently. The horn on the corselet would have persisted
in its sterility and, sooner or later, would have disappeared.

I have reasons for my conviction. The abode of the Onthophagus while
engaged on his metamorphosis is not deep down; variations of
temperature are easily felt. On the other hand, the seasons are
capricious, especially the spring. Under the skies of Provence, the
months of May and June, if the mistral lend a hand, have periods when
the thermometer drops in such a way as to suggest a return of winter.

To these vicissitudes let us add the influence of a more northerly
climate. The Onthophagi occupy a wide zone of latitude. Those of the
north, less favoured by the sun than those of the south, can, if
changing circumstances assist at the time of the transformation,
undergo long weeks of a decreased temperature which spins out the work
of evolution and ought therefore to permit the thoracic armour, at long
intervals and casually, to consolidate into a horn. Here and there,
then, the conditions of a moderate, or even cold temperature, at the
time of the nymphosis, are realized without the aid of my artifices.

Well, what becomes of this surplus time placed at the service of the
organic labour? Does the promised horn ripen? Not a bit of it: it
withers just as it does under the stimulus of a hot sun. The records of
entomology have never spoken of an Onthophagus carrying a horn upon his
corselet. No one would even have suspected the possibility of such an
armour, if I had not rumoured the strange appearance of the nymph. The
influence of climate, therefore, goes for nothing here.

Pushed further still, the question becomes more complicated. The horny
appendages of the Onthophagus, of the Copris, of Minotaurus and of so
many others are the male’s prerogative; the female is without them or
wears them only on a reduced and very modest scale. We must look upon
these corniculate products as personal ornaments much rather than as
implements of labour. The male makes himself fine for the pairing; but,
with the exception of Minotaurus, who pins down the dry pellet that
needs crushing and holds it in position with his trident, I know none
that uses his armour as a tool. Horns and prongs on the forehead,
crests and crescents on the corselet are jewels of masculine vanity and
nothing more. The other sex requires no such baits to attract suitors:
its femininity is enough; and finery is neglected.

Now here is something to give us food for thought. The nymph of the
Onthophagus of the female sex, a nymph with an unarmed forehead,
carries on its thorax a vitreous horn as long, as rich in promise as
that of the other sex. If this latter excrescence be an
incompletely-realized incipient ornament, then the former would be so
too, in which case the two sexes, both anxious for self-embellishment,
would work with equal zeal to grow a horn upon their thorax. We should
be witnessing the genesis of a species that would not be really an
Onthophagus, but a derivative of the group; we should be beholding the
commencement of singularities banished hitherto from among the
Dung-beetles, none of whom, of either sex, has thought of planting a
spear upon his chine. Stranger still: the female, always the more
humbly attired throughout the entomological order, would be vying with
the male in her propensity for eccentric adornment. An ambition of this
sort leaves me incredulous.

We must therefore believe that, if the possibilities of the future
should ever produce a Dung-beetle carrying a horn upon his corselet,
this upsetter of present customs will not be the Onthophagus succeeding
in maturing the thoracic appendage of the nymph, but rather an insect
resulting from a new model. The creative power throws aside the old
moulds and replaces them by others, fashioned with fresh care, after
plans of an inexhaustible variety. Its laboratory is not a peddling
rag-fair, where the living assume the cast clothes of the dead: it is a
medallist’s studio, where each effigy receives the stamp of a special
die. Its treasure-house of forms, of unbounded wealth, excludes any
niggardly patching of the old to make the new. It breaks up every mould
once used; it does away with it, without resorting to shabby
after-touches.

Then what is the meaning of those horny preparations, which are always
blighted before they come to aught? Without feeling greatly abashed by
my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the
absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit,
that of perfect sincerity.










A DUNG-BEETLE OF THE PAMPAS


CHAPTER VIII

A DUNG-BEETLE OF THE PAMPAS


To travel over the world, by land and sea, from pole to pole; to
cross-question life, under every clime, in the infinite variety of its
manifestations: that surely would be glorious luck for him that has
eyes to see with; and it formed the radiant dream of my young years, at
the time when Robinson Crusoe was my delight. These rosy illusions,
rich in voyages, were soon succeeded by dull, stay-at-home reality. The
jungles of India, the virgin forests of Brazil, the towering crests of
the Andes, beloved by the condor, were reduced, as a field for
exploration, to a patch of pebble-stones enclosed within four walls.

Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not
necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau herborized
with the bunch of chickweed whereon he fed his canary; Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre discovered a world on a strawberry-plant that grew by
accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre, using an
arm-chair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous of
journeys around his room. [19]

This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the
post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the brambles. I go
the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by
short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently, I put questions;
and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply.

The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each
fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis perches; each bush where the pale
Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each
wad-clad blade of grass scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton
bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the leaf-cutter.

If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not suffice, a
longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of the neighbouring
hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into relations with the
Sacred Beetle, the Capricorn, the Geotrupe, the Copris, the Dectus, the
Cricket, the Green Grasshopper, in short, with a host of tribes the
unfolding of whose story would exhaust a human life. Certainly, I have
plenty, I have too much to do with my near neighbours, without going
and wandering in distant regions.

And then, besides, roaming the world, scattering one’s attention over a
host of subjects, is not observing. The travelling entomologist can
stick numerous species, the joy of the collector and the nomenclator,
into his boxes; but to gather circumstantial documents is a very
different matter. A Wandering Jew of science, he has no time to stop.
Where a prolonged stay would be necessary to study this or that fact,
he is hurried by the next stage. We must not expect the impossible of
him in these conditions. Let him pin his specimens to cork tablets, let
him steep them in tafia jars and leave to the sedentary the patient
observations that require time.

This explains the extreme penury of history outside the dry
descriptions of the nomenclator. Overwhelming us with its numbers, the
exotic insect nearly always preserves the secret of its manners.
Nevertheless, it were well to compare what happens under our eyes with
that which happens elsewhere; it were excellent to see how, in the same
corporation of workers, the fundamental instinct varies with climatic
conditions.

Then my travelling regrets return, vainer to-day than ever, unless one
could find a seat on the carpet of which we read in the Arabian Nights,
the famous carpet whereon one had but to sit to be carried
whithersoever he pleased. O marvellous conveyance, far preferable to
Xavier de Maistre’s post-chaise! If only I could find a little corner
on it, with a return-ticket!

I do find it. I owe this unexpected good fortune to a Christian
Brother, to Brother Judulian, of the Lasalle College at Buenos Ayres.
His modesty would be offended by the praises which his debtor owes him.
Let us simply say that, acting on my instructions, his eyes take the
place of mine. He seeks, finds, observes, sends me his notes and his
discoveries. I observe, seek and find with him, by correspondence.

It is done: thanks to this first-rate collaborator, I have my seat on
the magic carpet. Behold me in the pampas of the Argentine Republic,
eager to draw a parallel between the industry of the Dung-beetles of
Sérignan [20] and that of their rivals in the western hemisphere.

A glorious beginning! An accidental find procures me, to start with,
Phanæus Milo, a magnificent insect, blue-black all over. The corselet
of the male juts forward, over the head, in a short, broad, flattened
horn, ending in a trident. The female replaces this ornament with
simple folds. Both carry, in front of their shield, two spikes which
form a trusty digging-implement and also a scalpel for dissecting. The
insect’s squat, sturdy, four-cornered build resembles that of Onitis
Olivieri, one of the rarities of the neighbourhood of Montpellier.

If similarity of shape implied parity of work, we ought unhesitatingly
to attribute to Phanæus Milo short, thick puddings like those made by
Olivier’s Onitis. Alas, structure is a bad guide where the instinct is
concerned! The square-chined, short-legged Dung-worker excels in the
art of manufacturing gourds. The Sacred Beetle himself supplies none
that are more perfect nor, above all, more capacious.

The thick-set insect astonishes me with the elegance of its work, which
is irreproachable in its geometry: the neck is less slender, but
nevertheless combines grace with strength. The model seems derived from
some Indian calabash, the more so as the neck opens wide and the belly
is engraved with an elegant guilloche, produced by the insect’s tarsi.
One seems to see a pitcher protected by a wicker-work covering. The
whole is able to attain and even exceed the size of a hen’s egg.

It is a very curious piece of work and of a rare perfection, especially
when we consider the artist’s clumsy and massive build. Once again, the
tool does not make the workman, among Dung-beetles any more than among
ourselves. To guide the modeller there is something better than a set
of tools: there is what I would call the bump, the genius of the
animal.

Phanæus Milo laughs at difficulties. He does more: he laughs at our
classifications. The word Dung-beetle implies a lover of dung. He sets
no value on it, either for his own use or for that of his offspring.
What he wants is the sanies of corpses. He is to be found under the
carcasses of birds, dogs or cats, in the company of the
undertakers-in-ordinary. The gourd of which I give a drawing overleaf
was lying in the earth under the remains of an owl.

Let him who will explain this conjunction of the appetites of the
Necrophore with the talents of the Scarab. As for me, baffled by tastes
which no one would suspect from the mere appearance of the insect, I
give it up.

I know in my neighbourhood one Dung-beetle and one alone who also works
among the remains of dead bodies. This is Onthophagus Ovatus (Lin.), a
constant frequenter of dead moles and rabbits. But the dwarf undertaker
does not on that account scorn stercoraceous fare: he feasts upon it
like the other Onthophagi. Perhaps there is a two-fold diet here: the
bun for the adult; the highly-spiced, far-gone meat for the grub.

Similar facts are encountered elsewhere with different tastes. The
predatory Hymenopteron takes her fill of honey drawn from the nectaries
of the flowers, but feeds her little ones on game. Game first, then
sugar, for the same stomach. How that digestive pouch must change on
the road! And yet no more than our own, which scorns in later life that
which delighted it when young.

Let us now examine the work of Phanæus Milo more thoroughly. The
calabashes came into my hands in a state of complete desiccation. They
are very nearly as hard as stone; their colour favours a pale
chocolate. Neither inside nor out does the lens discover the small
fibrous particle pointing to a residuum of grasses. The strange
Dung-beetle does not, therefore, employ the bovine cakes, nor anything
similar; he handles products of another class, which are pretty
difficult to specify at first.

Held to the ear and shaken, the object sounds a little as would the
shell of a dry fruit with a stone lying free inside it. Does it contain
the grub, shrivelled by desiccation? Does it contain the dead insect? I
thought so, but I was wrong. It contains something much better than
that for our instruction.

I carefully rip up the gourd with the point of the knife. Under a
homogeneous outer wall, the thickness of which reaches as much as two
centimetres [21] in the largest of my three specimens, is encased a
spherical kernel, which fills the cavity exactly, but without sticking
to the wall at any part. The trifle of free scope allowed to this
kernel accounts for the rattling which I heard when shaking the piece.

The kernel does not differ from the wrapper in the colour and general
appearance of its bulk. But let us break it and examine the shreds. I
recognize tiny fragments of gold, flocks of down, threads of wool,
scraps of meat, the whole drowned in an earthy paste resembling
chocolate.

Placed on a glowing coal, this paste, shredded under the lens and
deprived of its particles of dead bodies, becomes much darker, is
covered with shiny bubbles and sends forth puffs of that acrid smoke in
which we easily recognize burnt animal matter. The whole mass of the
kernel, therefore, is strongly impregnated with sanies.

Treated in the same manner, the wrapper also turns dark, but not to the
same extent; it hardly smokes; it is not covered with jet-black
bubbles; lastly, it does not anywhere contain shreds of carcasses
similar to those in the central nut. In both cases, the residuum of the
calcination is a fine, reddish clay.

This brief analysis tells us all about Phanæus Milo’s table. The fare
served to the grub is a sort of vol-au-vent. The sausage-meat consists
of a mince of all that the two scalpels of the shield and the toothed
knives of the fore-legs have been able to cut away from the carcass:
hair and down, crushed ossicles, strips of flesh and skin. Now hard as
brick, the thickening of that mince was originally a jelly of fine clay
soaked in the juice of corruption. Lastly, the puff-paste crust of our
vol-au-vent is here represented by a covering of the same clay, less
rich in extract of meat than the other.

The pastry-cook gives his pie an elegant shape; he decorates it with
rosettes, with twists, with scrolls. Phanæus Milo is no stranger to
these culinary æsthetics. He turns the crust of his vol-au-vent into a
handsome gourd, ornamented with a finger-print guilloche.

The outer covering, a disagreeable crust, insufficiently steeped in
savoury juices, is not, we can easily guess, intended for consumption.
It is possible that, somewhat later, when the stomach becomes robust
and is not repelled by coarse fare, the grub scrapes a little from the
wall of its pie; but, taken as a whole, until the adult insect emerges,
the calabash remains intact, having acted as a safeguard of the
freshness of the mince-meat at first and as a protecting box for the
recluse from start to finish.

Above the cold pasty, right at the base of the neck of the gourd, is
contrived a round cell with a clay wall continuing the general wall. A
fairly thick floor, made of the same material, separates it from the
store-room. It is the hatching-chamber. Here is laid the egg, which I
find in its place, but dried up; here is hatched the worm, which, to
reach the nourishing ball, must previously open a trap-door through the
partition separating the two storeys.

The worm is born in a little box surmounting the nourishing pile, but
not communicating with it. The budding grub must, therefore, at the
opportune moment, itself pierce the covering of the pot of preserves.
As a matter of fact, later, when the worm is on the sausage-meat, we
find the floor perforated with a hole just large enough for it to pass
through.

Wrapped all round in a thick casing of pottery, the meat keeps fresh as
long as is required by the duration of the hatching-process, a detail
which I have not ascertained; in its cell, which is also of clay, the
egg lies safe. Capital: so far, all is well. Phanæus Milo is thoroughly
acquainted with the mysteries of fortification and the danger of
victuals evaporating too soon. There remain the breathing requirements
of the germ.

To satisfy these, the insect has been equally well-inspired. The neck
of the calabash is pierced, in the direction of its axis, with a tiny
channel which would admit at most the thinnest of straws. Inside, this
conduit opens at the top of the dome of the hatching-chamber; outside,
at the tip of the nipple, it spreads into a wide mouth-piece. This is
the ventilating-shaft, protected against intruders by its extreme
narrowness and by grains of dust which obstruct it a little, without
stopping it up. It is simply marvellous, I said. Was I wrong? If a
construction of this sort is a fortuitous result, we must admit that
blind chance is gifted with extraordinary foresight.

How does the awkward insect manage to carry so delicate and complex a
piece of building through? Exploring the pampas as I do through the
eyes of an intermediary, my only guide in this question is the
structure of the work, a structure whence we can deduct the workman’s
methods without going far wrong. I therefore imagine the labour to
proceed like this: a small carcass is found, the oozing of which has
softened the underlying loam. The insect collects more or less of this
loam, according to the richness of the vein. There are no precise
limits here. If the plastic material abound, the collector is lavish
with it and the provision-box becomes all the more solid. Then enormous
calabashes are obtained, exceeding a hen’s egg in volume and formed of
an outer wall a couple of centimetres thick. [22] But a mass of this
description is beyond the strength of the modeller, is badly handled
and betrays, in its outline, the clumsiness of an over-difficult task.
If the material be rare, the insect confines its harvesting to what is
strictly necessary; and then, freer in its movements, it obtains a
magnificently regular gourd.

The loam is probably first kneaded into a ball and then scooped out
into a large and very thick cup, by means of the pressure of the
fore-legs and the work of the shield. Even thus do the Copris and the
Sacred Beetle act when preparing, on the top of their round ball, the
bowl in which the egg will be laid before the final manipulation of the
ovoid or pear.

In this first business, Phanæus is simply a potter. So long as it be
plastic, any clay serves his turn, however meagrely it be saturated
with the juices emanating from the carcass.

He now becomes a pork-butcher. With his toothed knife, he carves, he
saws some tiny shreds from the rotten animal; he tears off, cuts away
what he deems best suited to the grub’s entertainment. He collects all
these fragments and mixes them with choice loam in the spots where the
sanies abounds. The whole, cunningly kneaded and softened, becomes a
ball obtained on the spot, without any rolling process, in the same way
as the globe of the other pill-manufacturers. Let us add that this
ball, a ration calculated by the needs of the grub, is very nearly
constant in size, whatever the thickness of the final calabash. The
sausage-meat is now ready. It is set in place in the wide-open clay
bowl. Loosely packed, without compression, the food will remain free,
will not stick to its wrapper.

Next, the potter’s work is renewed. The insect presses the thick lips
of the clayey cup, rolls them out and applies them to the forcemeat
preparation, which is eventually contained by a thin partition at the
top and by a thick layer every elsewhere. A large circular pad is left
on the top partition, which is slender in view of the weakness of the
grub that is to perforate it later, when making for the provisions.
Manipulated in its turn, this pad is converted into a hemispherical
hollow, in which the egg is forthwith laid.

The work is finished by rolling out and joining the edges of the little
crater, which closes and becomes the hatching-chamber. Here,
especially, a delicate dexterity becomes essential. At the time that
the nipple of the calabash is being shaped, the insect, while packing
the material, must leave the little channel which is to form the
ventilating-shaft, following the line of the axis. This narrow conduit,
which an ill-calculated pressure might stop up beyond hope of remedy,
seems to me extremely difficult to obtain. The most skilful of our
potters could not manage it without the aid of a needle, which he would
afterwards withdraw. The insect, a sort of jointed automaton, obtains
its channel through the massive nipple of the gourd without so much as
a thought. If it did give it a thought, it would not succeed.

The calabash is made: there remains the decoration. This is the work of
patient after-touches which perfect the curves and leave on the soft
loam a series of stippled impressions similar to those which the potter
of prehistoric days distributed with the end of his thumb over his
big-bellied jars.

That ends the work. The insect will begin all over again under a fresh
carcass; for each burrow has one calabash and no more, even as with the
Sacred Beetle and her pears.










THE GEOTRUPES


CHAPTER IX

THE GEOTRUPES: THE PUBLIC HEALTH


To complete the cycle of the year in the full-grown form, to see one’s
self surrounded by one’s sons at the spring festivals, to double and
treble one’s family: that surely is a most exceptional privilege in the
insect world. The Apids, the aristocracy of instinct, perish, once the
honey-pot is filled; the Butterflies, the aristocracy not of instinct,
but of dress, die when they have fastened their packet of eggs in a
propitious spot; the Carabids, richly cuirassed, succumb when the germs
of a posterity are scattered beneath the stones.

So with the others, except among the gregarious insects, where the
mother survives, either alone or accompanied by her attendants. It is a
general law: the insect is born orphaned of both its parents. Now, by
an unexpected turn of fate, the humble scavenger escapes the stern
destiny that cuts down the proud. The Dung-beetle, sated with days,
becomes a patriarch and really deserves to do so, in consideration of
the services rendered.

There is a general hygiene that calls for the disappearance, in the
shortest possible time, of every putrid thing. Paris has not yet solved
the formidable problem of her refuse, which sooner or later will become
a question of life or death for the monstrous city. One asks one’s self
whether the centre of light be not doomed to be extinguished one day in
the reeking exhalations of a soil saturated with rottenness. What this
agglomeration of millions of men cannot obtain, with all its treasures
of wealth and talent, the smallest hamlet possesses without going to
any expense or even troubling to think about it.

Nature, so lavish of her cares in respect of rural health, is
indifferent to the welfare of cities, if not actively hostile to it.
She has created for the fields two classes of scavengers, whom nothing
wearies, whom nothing repels. One of these—consisting of Flies,
Silphids, Dermestes, Necrophores—is charged with the dissection of
corpses. They cut and hash, they elaborate the waste matter of death in
their stomachs in order to restore it to life.

A mole ripped open by the plough-share soils the path with its
entrails, which soon turn purple; a snake lies on the grass, crushed by
the foot of a wayfarer who thought, the fool, that he was performing a
good work; an unfledged bird, fallen from its nest, has flattened
itself piteously at the foot of the tree that carried it; thousands of
other similar remains, of every sort and kind, are scattered here and
there, threatening danger through their effluvia, if nothing come to
establish order. Have no fear: no sooner is a corpse signalled in any
direction than the little undertakers come trotting along. They work
away at it, empty it, consume it to the bone, or at least reduce it to
the dryness of a mummy. In less than twenty-four hours, mole, snake,
bird have disappeared and the requirements of health are satisfied.

The same zeal for their task prevails in the second class of
scavengers. The village hardly knows those ammonia-scented refuges
whither we repair, in the towns, to relieve our wretched needs. A
little wall no higher than that, a hedge, a bush is all that the
peasant asks as a retreat at the moment when he would fain be alone. I
need say no more to suggest the encounters to which such free and easy
manners expose you! Enticed by the patches of lichen, the cushions of
moss, the tufts of homewort and other pretty things that adorn old
stones, you go up to a sort of wall that supports the ground of a
vineyard. Ugh! At the foot of the daintily-decked shelter, what a
spreading abomination! You flee: lichens, mosses and homewort tempt you
no more. But come back on the morrow. The thing has disappeared, the
place is clean: the Dung-beetles have been that way.

To preserve the eyes from offensive sights too oft repeated is, to
those gallant fellows, the least of offices: a loftier mission is
incumbent on them. Science tells us that the most dreadful scourges of
mankind have their agents in tiny organisms, the microbes, near
neighbours of must and mould, on the extreme confines of the vegetable
kingdom. The terrible germs multiply by countless myriads in the
intestinal discharges at times of epidemic. They contaminate the air
and water, those primary necessities of life; they spread over our
linen, our clothes, our food and thus diffuse contagion. We have to
destroy by fire, to sterilize with corrosives or to bury underground
such things as are soiled with them.

Prudence even demands that we should never allow ordure to linger on
the surface of the ground. It may be harmless, it may be dangerous:
when in doubt, the best thing is to put it out of sight. That is how
ancient wisdom seems to have understood the thing, long before the
microbe explained to us the great need for vigilance. The nations of
the East, more exposed to epidemics than ourselves, had formal laws in
these matters. Moses, apparently echoing Egyptian knowledge in this
connection, prescribed the line of conduct for his people wandering in
the Arabian desert:


   “Thou shalt have a place without the camp,” he says, “to which thou
    mayst go for the necessities of nature, carrying a paddle at thy
    girdle. And, when thou sittest down, thou shalt dig round about
    and, with the earth that is dug up, thou shalt cover that which
    thou art eased of.” (Deut., XXIII., xii–xiv.)


This is a precept of grave import in its simplicity. And we may well
believe that, if Islamism, at the time of its great pilgrimages to the
Kaaba, were to take the same precaution and a few more of a similar
character, Mecca would cease to be an annual seat of cholera and Europe
would not need to mount guard on the shores of the Red Sea to protect
herself against the scourge.

Heedless of hygiene as the Arab, who was one of his ancestors, the
Provençal peasant does not suspect the danger. Fortunately, the
Dung-beetle, that faithful observer of the Mosaic edict, works. It is
his to remove from sight, it is his to bury the germ-crammed matter.

Supplied with implements for digging far superior to the paddle which
the Israelite was to carry at his girdle when urgent business called
him from the camp, he hastens and, as soon as man is gone, digs a pit
wherein the infection is swallowed up and rendered harmless.

The services rendered by these diggers are of the highest importance to
the health of the fields; yet we, who are mainly interested in this
constant work of purification, hardly vouchsafe those sturdy fellows a
contemptuous glance. Popular language overwhelms them with obnoxious
epithets. This appears to be the rule: do good and you shall be
misjudged, you shall be traduced, stoned, trodden underfoot, as witness
the toad, the bat, the hedgehog, the owl and other auxiliaries who, to
serve us, ask nothing but a little tolerance.

Now, of our defenders against the dangers of filth spread shamelessly
in the rays of the sun, the most remarkable, in our climes, are the
Geotrupes: not that they are more zealous than the others, but because
their size makes them capable of bigger work. Moreover, when it becomes
simply a question of their nourishment, they resort by preference to
the materials which we have most to fear.

My neighbourhood is worked by four Geotrupes. Two of them, Geotrupes
Mutator (Marsh) and Geotrupes Sylvaticus (Panz.), are rarities on which
we had best not count for connected studies; the two others, on the
contrary, Geotrupes Stercorarius (Lin.) and Geotrupes Hypocrita
(Schneid.), are exceedingly frequent. Black as ink above, both of them
are magnificently garbed below. One is quite surprised to find such a
jewel-case among the professional scavengers. Geotrupes Stercorarius is
of a splendid amethyst violet on his lower surface, while Geotrupes
Hypocrita is lavish with the ruddy gleams of copper pyrites. These are
the two inmates of my voleries.

Let us ask them first of what feats they are capable as buriers. There
are a dozen, of the two species taken together. The cage is previously
swept clean of what remains of the former provisions, hitherto supplied
without stint. This time, I propose to arrive at what a Geotrupe can
put away at a sitting. At sunset, I serve to my twelve captives the
whole of a heap which a mule has just dropped in front of my door.
There is plenty of it, enough to fill a basket.

On the morning of the next day, the mass has disappeared underground.
There is nothing left outside, or very nearly nothing. I am able to
make a fairly close estimate and I find that each of my Geotrupes,
presuming each of the twelve to have done an equal share of the work,
has stowed away very nearly a cubic decimetre [23] of matter. A Titanic
task, if we remember the insignificant size of the animal, which,
moreover, has to dig the warehouse to which the booty must be lowered.
And all this is done in the space of a night.

So well provided, will they remain quietly underground with their
treasure? Not they! The weather is magnificent. The hour of twilight
comes, gentle and calm. This is the time of the great flights, the
mirthful hummings, the distant explorations on the roads by which the
herds have lately passed. My lodgers abandon their cellars and mount to
the surface. I hear them buzzing, climbing up the wirework, knocking
themselves wildly against the walls. I have anticipated this twilight
animation. Provisions have been collected during the day, plentiful as
those of yesterday. I serve them. There is the same disappearance
during the night. On the morrow, the place is once again swept clean.
And this would continue indefinitely, so fine are the evenings, if I
always had at my disposal the wherewithal to satisfy those insatiable
hoarders.

Rich though his booty be, the Geotrupe leaves it at sunset to sport in
the last gleams of daylight and to go in search of a new workplace.
With him, one would say, the wealth acquired does not count; the only
valid thing is that to be acquired. Then what does he do with his
warehouses, renewed, in favourable times, at each new twilight? It is
obvious that Stercorarius is incapable of consuming provisions so
plentiful in a single night. He has such a superabundance of victuals
in his larder that he does not know how to dispose of them; he is
surfeited with good things by which he will not profit; and, not
satisfied with having his store crammed, the acquisitive plutocrat
slaves, night after night, to store away more.

From each warehouse, set up here, set up there, as things happen, he
deducts the daily meal beforehand; the rest, that is to say, almost the
whole, he abandons. My voleries testify to the fact that this instinct
for burying is more exacting than the consumer’s appetite. The ground
is soon raised, in consequence; and I am obliged, from time to time, to
lower the level to the desired limits. If I dig it up, I find it
choked, throughout its depth, with hoards that have remained intact.
The original earth has become an inextricable conglomerate, which I
must prune with a free hand, if I would not go astray in my future
observations.

Allowing for errors, either of excess or deficiency, which are
inevitable in a subject that does not admit of precise gauging, one
point stands out very clearly from my enquiry: the Geotrupes are
passionate buriers; they take underground a deal more than is necessary
for their consumption. As this work is performed, in varying degrees,
by legions of collaborators, large and small, it is evident that the
purification of the soil must benefit by it to an ample extent and that
the public health is to be congratulated on having this army of
auxiliaries in its service.

In other respects, the plant and, indirectly, a host of different
existences are interested in these interments. What the Geotrupe buries
and abandons the next day is not lost: far from it. Nothing is lost in
the world’s balance-sheet; the stock-taking total is constant. The
little lump of dung buried by the insect will make the nearest tuft of
grass grow a luxuriant green. A sheep passes, crops the bunch of grass:
all the better for the leg of mutton which man is waiting for. The
Dung-beetle’s industry has procured us a savoury mouthful.

In September and October, when the first autumn rains soak the ground
and allow the Sacred Beetle to split his natal casket, Geotrupes
Stercorarius and Geotrupes Hypocrita found their family-establishments,
somewhat makeshift establishments, in spite of what we might have
expected from the name of those miners, so well-styled Geotrupes, that
is to say, “Earth-borers.” When he has to dig himself a retreat that
shall shelter him against the rigours of winter, the Geotrupe really
deserves his name: none can compare with him for the depth of the pit
or the perfection and rapidity of the work. In sandy ground, easily
excavated, I have dug up some that had attained the depth of a metre.
[24] Others carried their digging further still, tiring both my
patience and my implements. There you have the skilled well-sinker, the
incomparable Earth-borer. When the cold sets in, he can go down to some
layer where frost has lost its terrors.

The lodging of the family is another matter. The propitious season is a
short one; time would fail, if each individual grub had to be endowed
with one of those manor-houses. That the insect should devote the
leisure which the approach of winter gives it to digging a hole of
unlimited depth is a capital thing: it makes the retreat doubly safe;
and activity, not yet quite suspended, has for the moment no other
occupation. But, at laying-time, these laborious undertakings are
impossible. The hours pass swiftly. In four or five weeks, a pretty
numerous family has to be housed and victualled, which puts a long,
patiently-sunk pit entirely out of the question.

The burrow dug by the Geotrupe for the benefit of her grub is hardly
deeper than that of the Copris or the Sacred Beetle, notwithstanding
the difference of the seasons. Three decimetres, [25] roughly speaking:
that is all that I find in the fields, where nothing occurs to limit
the depth.

The contents of the rustic dwelling take the form of a sort of sausage
or pudding, which fills the lower part of the cylinder and fits it
exactly. Its length is not far short of a couple of decimetres [26].
This sausage is almost always irregular in shape, now curved, now more
or less dented. These imperfections of the surface are due to the
accidents of a stony ground, which the insect does not always excavate
according to the canons of its art, which favours the straight line and
the perpendicular. The moulded material faithfully reproduces all the
irregularities of its mould. The lower extremity is rounded off like
the bottom of the burrow itself; at the lower end of the sausage is the
hatching-chamber, a round cavity which could hold a fair-sized
hazel-nut. The respiratory needs of the germ demand that the side-walls
should be thin enough to allow easy access to the air. Inside, I catch
the gleam of a greenish, semi-fluid plaster, a dainty which the mother
has disgorged to form the first mouthfuls of the budding worm.

In this round hole lies the egg, without adhering in any way to the
surrounding walls. It is a white, elongated ellipsoid and is of
remarkable bulk in proportion to the insect. In the case of Geotrupes
Stercorarius, it measures seven to eight millimetres in length by four
in its greatest width. [27] The egg of Geotrupes Hypocrita is a little
smaller.










MINOTAURUS TYPHŒUS


CHAPTER X

MINOTAURUS TYPHŒUS


To describe the insect that forms the subject of this chapter,
scientific nomenclature joins two formidable names: that of the
Minotaur, Minos’ bull fed on human flesh in the crypts of the Cretan
labyrinth; and that of Typhœus, one of the giants, sons of Terra, who
tried to scale the heavens. Thanks to the clue of thread which he
received from Minos’ daughter Ariadne, Theseus the Athenian found the
Minotaur, slew him and made his escape, safe and sound, after
delivering his country for ever from the dreadful tribute destined for
the monster’s food.

Typhœus, struck by a thunderbolt on his heaped-up mountains, was hurled
under Mount Etna. He is there still. His breath is the smoke of the
volcano. When he coughs, he spits out streams of lava; when he shifts
his position from one shoulder to the other, he puts Sicily aflutter;
he shakes her with an earthquake.

It is not unpleasant to find an echo of these old fables in the history
of animals. Mythological denominations, so resonant and pleasing to the
ear, entail no inconsistencies with reality, a fault that is not always
avoided by the terms compiled wholly of data gathered from the lexicon.
When vague analogies, in addition, connect the fabled with the
historical, then surnames and forenames both become very happy. Such is
the case with Minotaurus Typhœus (Lin.).

It is the name given to a fair-sized black coleopteron, closely related
to the Earth-borers, the Geotrupes. He is a peaceable, inoffensive
creature, but even better-horned than Minos’ bull. None among our
harness-loving insects wears so threatening an armour. The male carries
on his corselet a sheaf consisting of three steeled spears, parallel to
one another and jutting forward. Imagine him the size of a bull; and
Theseus himself, if he met him in the fields, would hardly dare to face
his terrible trident.

The Typhœus of the legend had the ambition to sack the home of the gods
by stacking one upon the other a pile of mountains torn from their
base; the Typhœus of the naturalists does not climb: he descends; he
bores the ground to enormous depths. The first, with a movement of the
shoulder, sets a province heaving; the second, with a thrust of its
chine, makes his mole-hill tremble as Etna trembles when he stirs who
lies buried within her depths.

Such is the insect wherewith we are concerned.

But what is the use of this history, what the use of all this minute
research? I well know that it will not produce a fall in the price of
pepper, a rise in that of crates of rotten cabbages, or other serious
events of this kind, which cause fleets to be manned and set people
face to face intent upon one another’s extermination. The insect does
not aim at so much glory. It confines itself to showing us life in the
inexhaustible variety of its manifestations; it helps us to decipher in
some small measure the obscurest book of all, the book of ourselves.

The insect is easy to obtain, cheap to feed and not repulsive to
examine organically; and it lends itself far better than the higher
animals to the investigations of our curiosity. Besides, the others are
our near neighbours and do but repeat a somewhat monotonous theme,
whereas the insect, with its unparalleled wealth of instincts, habits
and structure, reveals a new world to us, much as though we were
conferring with the natives of another planet. This is the reason that
makes me constantly renew my unwearied relations with the insect and
hold it in such high esteem.

Minotaurus Typhœus favours the open sandy places where, on their way to
the grazing-ground, the flocks of sheep scatter their trails of black
pellets which constitute his regulation fare. Couples jointly addicted
to nest-building begin to meet in the first days of March. The two
sexes, until then isolated in surface-burrows, are now associated for a
long time to come.

Do the husband and wife recognize each other among their fellows? Are
they mutually faithful? Cases of breach of matrimony are very rare, in
fact unknown, on the part of the mother, who has long ceased to leave
the house; on the other hand, they are frequent on the part of the
father, whose duties often oblige him to come outside. As will be seen
presently, he is, throughout his life, the purveyor of victuals and the
person entrusted with the carriage of the rubbish. Alone, at different
hours of the day, he flings out of doors the earth thrown up by the
mother’s excavations; alone he explores the vicinity of the home at
night, in quest of the pellets whereof his sons’ loaves shall be
kneaded.

Sometimes, two burrows are side by side. Cannot the collector of
provisions, on returning home, easily mistake the door and enter
another’s house? On his walks abroad, does he never happen to meet
ladies taking the air who have not yet settled down; and is he, then,
not forgetful of his first mate and ready for divorce? The question
deserved to be examined. I tried to solve it in the manner that
follows.

Two couples are taken from the ground at a time when the excavations
are in full swing. Indelible marks, contrived with the point of a
needle on the lower edge of the elytra, will enable me to distinguish
them one from the other. The four subjects of my experiment are
distributed at random, one by one, over the surface of a sandy area a
couple of spans thick. A soil of this depth will be sufficient for the
excavations of a night. In case provisions should be needed, a handful
of sheep-droppings is served. A large reversed earthen pan covers the
arena, prevents escape and produces the darkness favourable to mental
concentration.

The next morning provides a splendid response. There are two burrows in
the establishment, no more; the couples have formed again as they were:
each Jack has his Jill. A second experiment, made next day, and a third
meet with the same success: those marked with a point are together,
those not marked are together, at the bottom of the gallery.

Five times more, day after day, I make them set up house anew. Things
now begin to be spoilt. Sometimes, each of the four that are being
experimented on settles apart; sometimes, the same burrow contains the
two males or the two females; sometimes, the same crypt receives the
two sexes, but differently associated from what they were at the start.
I have abused my powers of repetition. Henceforth disorder reigns. My
daily shufflings have demoralized the burrowers; a crumbling home,
always requiring to be begun afresh, has put an end to lawful
associations. Respectable married life becomes impossible from the
moment when the house falls in from day to day.

No matter: the first three experiments, made when alarms, time after
time repeated, had not yet tangled the delicate connecting thread, seem
to point to a certain constancy in the Minotaurus household. He and she
know each other, find each other in the tumult of events which my
mischievous doings force upon them; they show each other a mutual
fidelity, a very unusual quality in the insect class, which is but too
prone to forget its matrimonial obligations.

We recognize one another by our speech, by the sound, the inflection of
our voices. They, on the other hand, are dumb, deprived of all means of
vocal appeal. There remains the sense of smell. Minotaurus finding his
mate makes me think of my friend Tom, the house-dog, who, at his moony
periods, lifts his nose in the air, sniffs the breeze and jumps over
the garden-walls, eager to obey the distant and magical convocation; he
puts me in mind of the Great Peacock Moth, who swiftly covers several
miles to pay his homage to the new-hatched maid.

The comparison, however, is far from perfect. The dog and the big Moth
get wind of the wedding before they know the bride. Minotaurus, on the
other hand, has no experience of long pilgrimages, yet makes his way,
in a brief circuit, to her whom he has already visited; he knows her,
he distinguishes her from the others by certain emanations, certain
individual scents inappreciable to any save the enamoured swain. Of
what do these effluvia consist? The insect did not tell me; and that is
a pity, for it would have taught us things worth knowing about its
feats of smell.

Now how is the work divided in this household? To discover this is not
one of those easy undertakings for which the point of a knife suffices.
He who proposes to visit the burrowing insect at home must have
recourse to arduous sapping. We have here to do not with the apartment
of the Sacred Beetle, the Copris or the others, which is soon laid bare
with a mere pocket-trowel: we have to do with a pit the bottom of which
can be reached only with a stout spade, sturdily wielded for hours at a
stretch. And, if the sun be at all hot, one returns from the drudgery
utterly exhausted.

Oh, my poor joints, grown rusty with age! To suspect the existence of a
fine problem underground and not to be able to dig! The zeal survives,
as ardent as in the days when I used to pull down the spongy slopes
beloved by the Anthophora; the love of research has not abated, but the
strength is lacking. Luckily, I have an assistant, in the shape of my
son Paul, who lends me the vigour of his wrists and the suppleness of
his loins. I am the head, he is the arm.

The rest of the family, including the mother—and she not the least
eager—usually go with us. One cannot have too many eyes when the pit
becomes deep and one has to observe from a distance the minute
documents exhumed by the spade. What the one misses the other
perceives. Huber, [28] when he went blind, studied the bee through the
intermediary of a clear-sighted and devoted adjutrix. I am even
better-off than the great Swiss naturalist. My sight, which is still
fairly good, although exceedingly tired, is aided by the deep-seeing
eyes of all my family. I owe to them the fact that I am able to pursue
my researches: let me thank them here.

We are on the spot early in the morning. We soon find a burrow with a
large mole-hill formed of cylindrical stoppers forced out in one lump
by blows of the rammer. We clear away the mound and a pit of great
depth opens below it. A useful reed, gathered on the way, serves me as
a guide, diving lower and lower down. At last, at about five feet, the
reed touches bottom. We are there, we have reached Minotaurus’ chamber.

The pocket-trowel prudently lays things bare and we see the occupants
appear: the male first and, a little lower, the female. When the couple
are removed, a dark, circular patch shows: this is the end of the
column of victuals. Careful now and let us dig gently! What we have to
do is to cut away the central clod at the bottom of the vat, to isolate
it from the surrounding earth and then, slipping the trowel underneath
and using it as a lever, to extract the block all in a lump. There!
That’s done it! We possess the couple and their nest. A morning of
arduous digging has procured us those treasures: Paul’s steaming back
could tell us at the price of what efforts.

This depth of five feet is not and could not be constant; numbers of
causes induce it to vary, such as the degree of freshness and
consistency of the soil traversed, the insect’s passion for work and
the time available, according to the more or less remote date of the
laying. I have seen burrows go a little lower; I have seen others reach
barely three feet. In any case, Minotaurus, to settle his family,
requires a lodging of exaggerated depth, such as is dug by no other
burrowing insect of my acquaintance. Presently we shall have to ask
ourselves what are the imperious needs that oblige the collector of
sheep-droppings to reside so low down in the earth.

Before leaving the spot, let us note a fact the evidence of which will
be of value later. The female was right at the bottom of the burrow;
above her, at some distance, was the male: both were struck motionless
with fright in the midst of an occupation the nature whereof we are not
yet able to specify. This detail, observed repeatedly in the different
burrows excavated, seems to show that each of the two fellow-workers
has a fixed place.

The mother, more skilled in nursery matters, occupies the lower floor.
She alone digs, versed as she is in the properties of the
perpendicular, which economizes work while giving the greatest depth.
She is the engineer, always in touch with the working-face of the
gallery. The other is her journeyman-mason. He is stationed at the
back, ready to load the rubbish on his horny hod. Later, the excavatrix
becomes a baker: she kneads the cakes for the children into cylinders;
the father is then her baker’s boy. He fetches her from outside the
wherewithal for making flour. As in every well-regulated household, the
mother is minister of the interior, the father minister of the
exterior. This would explain their invariable position in the tubular
home. The future will tell us if these conjectures represent the
reality as it is.

For the moment, let us make ourselves at home and examine at leisure
the central clod so laboriously acquired. It contains preserved
foodstuffs in the shape of a sausage nearly as long and thick as one’s
finger. This is composed of a dark, compact matter, arranged in layers,
which we recognize as the sheep-pellets reduced to morsels. Sometimes,
the dough is fine and almost homogeneous from one end of the cylinder
to the other; more often, the piece is a sort of hardbake, in which
large fragments are held together by a cement of amalgam. The baker
apparently varies the more or less finished confection of her pastry
according to the time at her disposal.

The thing is closely moulded in the terminal pocket of the burrow,
where the walls are smoother and more carefully fashioned than in the
rest of the pit. The point of the knife easily strips it of the
surrounding earth, which peels like a rind or bark. In this way, I
obtain the food-cylinder free of any earthy blemish.

Having done this, let us look into the matter of the egg; for the
pastry has certainly been manipulated in view of a grub. Guided by what
I learnt some time ago from the Geotrupes, who lodge the egg at the
lower end of their pudding, in a special recess contrived in the very
heart of the provisions, I expect to find Minotaurus’ egg right at the
bottom of the sausage. I am ill-informed. The egg sought for is not at
the expected end, nor at the other end, nor at any point whatever of
the victuals.

A search outside the provisions shows it me at last. It is below the
food, in the sand itself, deprived of all the finikin cares dear to
mothers. There is here not a smooth-walled cell, such as the delicate
epidermis of the new-born grub would seem to call for, but a rough
cavity, the result of a mere landslip rather than of maternal industry.
The worm is to be hatched in this rude berth, at some distance from its
provisions. To reach the food, it will have to demolish and pass
through a ceiling of sand some millimetres thick.

With insects held captive in an apparatus of my invention, I have
succeeded in tracing the construction of that sausage. The father goes
out and selects a pellet whose length is greater than the diameter of
the pit. He conveys it to the mouth, either backwards, by dragging it
with his forefeet, or straight ahead, by rolling it along with little
strokes of his shield. He reaches the edge of the hole. Will he hurl
the lump down the precipice with one last push? Not at all: he has
plans that are incompatible with a violent fall.

He enters, embracing the pellet with his legs and taking care to
introduce it by one end. On reaching a certain distance from the
bottom, he has only to slant the piece slightly to make it find a
support at its two ends against the walls of the channel: this because
of the greater length of its main axis. He thus obtains a sort of
temporary flooring suited to receive the burden of two or three
pellets. The whole forms the workshop in which the father means to do
his task without disturbing the mother, who is fully engaged below. It
is the mill whence will be lowered the semolina for making the cakes.

The miller is well-equipped for his work. Look at his trident. On the
solid basis of the corselet stand three sharp spears, the two outer
ones long, the middle one short, all three pointing forwards. What
purpose does this weapon serve? At first sight, one would take it for a
masculine decoration, one of so many others, of very varied forms, worn
by the corporation of Dung-beetles. Well, it is something more than an
ornament: Minotaurus turns his gaud into a tool.

The three unequal points describe a concave arch, wide enough to admit
a spherical sheep-dropping. Standing on his imperfect and shaky floor,
which demands the employment of his four hind-legs, propped against the
walls of the perpendicular channel, how will Minotaurus manage to keep
the elusive olive in position and break it up? Let us watch him at
work.

Stooping a little, he digs his fork into the piece, thenceforth
rendered stationary, for it is caught between the prongs of the
implement. The fore-legs are free; with their toothed armlets they can
saw the morsel, lacerate it and reduce it to particles which gradually
fall through the crevices of the flooring and reach the mother below.

The substance which the miller sends scooting down is not a flour
passed through the bolting-machine, but a coarse grain, a mixture of
pulverized remnants and of pieces hardly ground at all. Incomplete
though it be, this preliminary trituration is of the greatest
assistance to the mother in her tedious job of bread-making: it
shortens the work and allows the best and the middling to be separated
straight away. When everything, including the floor itself, is ground
to powder, the horned miller returns to the upper air, gathers a fresh
harvest and recommences his shredding labours at leisure.

Nor is the baker inactive in her laboratory. She collects the remnants
pouring down around her, subdivides them yet further, refines them and
makes her selection: this, the tenderer part, for the central crumb;
that, tougher, for the crust of the loaf. Turning this way and that,
she pats the material with the battledore of her flattened arms; she
arranges it in layers, which presently she compresses by stamping on
them where they lie, much after the manner of a vine-grower treading
his vintage. Rendered firm and compact, the mass will keep better and
longer.

After some ten days of this united labour, the couple at last obtain
the long, cylindrical loaf. The father has done the grinding, the
mother the kneading.

I have even succeeded in watching the digging of this very deep burrow,
thanks to a complicated series of artifices which it would take too
long to set forth here. The mother is at the bottom of the pit: she
alone attacks the working-face, she alone digs. The male keeps at the
back of his spouse. He gradually collects the rubbish and makes a load
of it which he lifts with his three-pronged fork and hoists outside
with much exhausting labour.

This is the moment to recapitulate Minotaurus’ merits. When the great
colds are over, he sets out in quest of a mate, buries himself with her
and thenceforth remains faithful to her, despite his frequent
excursions out of doors and the meetings to which these are likely to
lead. With indefatigable zeal, he assists the burrower, herself
destined never to leave her home until the emancipation of the family.
For a month and more, he loads the rubbish of the excavation on his
forked hod; he hoists it outside and remains ever patient, never
disheartened by his arduous feats of climbing. He leaves the
comparatively easy work of the excavating rake to the mother and keeps
the more troublesome task, the exhausting carriage through a narrow,
very high and perpendicular gallery, for himself.

Next, the navvy turns himself into a collector of foodstuffs; he goes
after provisions, he gathers the wherewithal for his sons to live upon.
To facilitate the work of his mate, who shreds, stratifies and
compresses the preserves, he once more changes his trade and becomes a
miller. At some distance from the bottom, he bruises and crumbles the
matter found hardened by the sun; he makes it into semolina and flour
that gradually pour down into the maternal bakery. Lastly, worn out by
his efforts, he leaves the house and goes to die outside, at a
distance, in the open air. He has gallantly performed his duty as a
paterfamilias; he has spent himself without stint to secure the
prosperity of his kith and kin.

The mother, on her side, allows nothing to divert her from her
housekeeping. Throughout her working life, she never leaves her home:
domi mansit, as the ancients used to say, speaking of their model
matrons; domi mansit, kneading her cylindrical loaves, filling them
with an egg, watching them until the exodus arrives. When the day comes
for the autumnal merry-makings, she at last returns to the surface,
accompanied by the young people, who disperse at will to feast in the
regions frequented by the sheep. Thereupon, having nothing left to do,
the devoted mother perishes.

Yes, amid the general indifference of fathers for their sons,
Minotaurus displays a very remarkable zeal where his family are
concerned. Forgetful of himself, refusing to be led away by the
delights of spring, when it would be so pleasant to see a little
country, to banquet with his fellows, to tease and flirt with his fair
neighbours, he sticks to his work underground and wears himself out so
as to leave a fortune to his descendants. Here is one who, when he
stiffens his legs for the last time, is well entitled to say:

“I have done my duty; I have worked.”










THE TWO-BANDED SCOLIA


CHAPTER XI

THE TWO-BANDED SCOLIA


If strength were to take precedence of other zoological attributes, the
Scoliæ would reign in the first rank, in the order of the Hymenoptera.
Some of them can be compared in size with the little orange-crested
northern Wren, the Kinglet, who comes down to us, to visit the maggoty
buds, at the time of the first autumnal mists. The largest, the most
imposing of our sting-carriers, the Humble-bee, the Hornet, cut a poor
figure beside certain Scoliæ. Among this group of giants, my region
boasts the Common or Garden Scolia (Scolia Hortorum, van der Lind), who
exceeds four centimetres [29] in length and measures ten [30] from tip
to tip of her outstretched wings, and the Hemorrhoidal Scolia (Scolia
Hemorrhoïdalis, van der Lind), who vies in dimensions with the Garden
Scolia and is distinguished from her, in the main, by the brush of red
bristles at the tip of her belly.

A black livery, with broad yellow patches; tough wings amber as an
onion-skin and shot with purple reflections; coarse, knotted legs,
bristling with rugged hairs; a massive build; a powerful head, helmeted
with a hard skull; a stiff and clumsy gait; a short, silent flight,
devoid of soaring qualities: this, in few words, describes the
appearance of the female, powerfully equipped for her severe task. That
love-lorn idler, the male, is more gracefully horned, more daintily
clad, more elegantly shaped, without altogether losing the character of
sturdiness which is the predominant feature in his mate.

It is not without qualms that the insect-collector finds himself for
the first time in the presence of the Garden Scolia. How is he to
capture the commanding brute, how to protect himself against its sting?
If the effect of the sting be in proportion to the Hymenopteron’s size,
then a prick from the Scolia is something to be dreaded. The Hornet,
once he lugs out, hurts us atrociously. What, then, would it be like if
one were stabbed by this colossus? The prospect of a swelling the size
of your fist and as painful as though it were blistered by a red-hot
iron passes through your mind, just as you are about to cast the net.
And you refrain, you beat a retreat, only too glad not to have aroused
the attention of the dangerous animal.

Yes, I confess to having quailed before my first Scoliæ, eager though I
was to enrich my incipient collection with this glorious insect.
Smarting recollections left behind by the Wasp and the Hornet had
something to say to this excessive prudence. I say excessive, for
to-day, taught by long experience, I have got the better of my former
fears and, if I see a Scolia resting on a thistle-head, I have no
scruples about taking her in the tips of my fingers, with no precaution
of any kind, threatening though her aspect be. My pluck is only
apparent, as I am pleased to inform the novice at Hymenopteron-hunting.
The Scoliæ are very peaceful. Their sting is an implement of work much
rather than a weapon of war: they use it to paralyze the prey intended
for their family; and only in the last extremity do they employ it in
their own defence. Moreover, the lack of suppleness in their movements
enables one nearly always to avoid the sting; and, lastly, if one were
stung, the pain of the prick is almost insignificant. This absence of a
bitter smart in the poison is a pretty constant fact among the
game-hunting Hymenoptera, whose weapon is a surgical lancet intended
for the most delicate physiological operations.

Among the other Scoliæ of my district, I will mention the middle-sized
Two-banded Scolia (Scolia Bifasciata, van der Lind), whom I see yearly,
in September, exploiting the manure-heaps of dead leaves arranged, for
her benefit, in a corner of my yard. Let us watch her performance
comfortably indoors.

After the Cerceris, it is well to study others, hunting an unarmed
prey, a prey vulnerable at all points save the skull, but giving only a
single prick with the sting. Of these two conditions, the Scoliæ
fulfilled one, with their regulation game, the soft grub of Cetonia,
Oryctes or Anoxia, according to their species. Did they fulfil the
second? I was convinced beforehand, judging from the anatomy of the
victims, with its concentrated nervous system, that the sting was
unsheathed but once; I even foresaw the point in which the weapon must
be thrust.

These were statements dictated by the anatomist’s scalpel, without the
least direct proof from observed facts. Stratagems accomplished
underground escaped the eye and seemed to me bound always to escape it.
How, indeed, could one hope that an animal whose art is practised in
the darkness of a manure-heap should be persuaded to work in the full
light of day? I did not reckon on it in the least. Nevertheless, for
conscience’ sake, I tried putting the Scolia in touch with her quarry
under glass. And it was well that I did so, for my success was in the
inverse ratio to my expectations. Never did beast of prey show greater
zeal in attacking under artificial conditions. Every insect
experimented upon rewarded me, sooner or later, for my patience. Let us
watch Scolia Bifasciata at work, operating on her Cetonia grub.

The captive grub tries to escape its terrible neighbour. Turned over on
its back according to its custom, it shuffles along eagerly, going
round and round the glass arena. Soon, the Scolia’s attention is
aroused and is evinced by continual little taps of the tips of its
antennæ upon the table, which now represents the customary soil. The
Hymenopteron falls upon her prey and attacks the monstrous meal by the
hinder end. She climbs upon the Cetonia, using the abdominal extremity
as a lever. The assaulted grub does nothing but scud all the faster on
its back, without rolling itself into a defensive posture. The Scolia
reaches the front part, after falls and accidents that vary greatly,
according to the degree of tolerance of the grub, her temporary mount.
With her mandibles, she nips a point on the upper surface of the
thorax; she places herself across the grub, curves herself into an arch
and tries to touch with the point of her belly the region where the
sting is to be darted. The arch is a little too short to embrace almost
the whole circuit of the corpulent prey, for which reason the efforts
and attempts are made over and over again, at great length. The tip of
the abdomen makes untold exertions, applies itself here, there and
elsewhere and, as yet, stops nowhere. This tenacious searching in
itself proves the importance which the paralyzer attaches to the spot
at which its bistoury is to enter.

Meanwhile, the grub continues to move along on its back. Suddenly, it
buckles and, with a jerk of the head, flings the enemy to a distance.
Undaunted by all her failures, the Hymenopteron stands up, brushes her
wings and recommences the assault of the colossus, almost always by
clambering on the grub by the rear extremity. At last, after any number
of fruitless attempts, the Scolia succeeds in attaining the proper
position. She lies across the grub; her mandibles hold a point of the
thorax on the dorsal face tight-gripped; her body, curved into an arch,
passes under the grub and reaches the neighbourhood of the neck with
the tip of the belly. Placed in grave danger, the Cetonia twists,
buckles, unbuckles, turns and writhes. The Scolia does not interfere.
Holding her victim in a close embrace, she turns with it, allows
herself to be dragged above, below, aside, at the mercy of the
contortions. So fierce is her determination that I am now able to
remove the glass bell and watch the details of the drama in the open.

Soon, notwithstanding the tumult, the tip of the Scolia’s belly feels
that the suitable point is found. Then and not till then is the dart
unsheathed. It is driven home. The thing is done. The grub, but now
active and swollen, suddenly becomes inert and limp. It is paralyzed.
Henceforth, all movement ceases, save in the antennæ and mouth-pieces,
which will continue for a long time to declare a remnant of life.

The place of the wound has never varied in the series of struggles
under the glass bell: it occupies the middle of the dividing line
between the prothorax and the mesothorax, on the ventral surface. Let
us observe that the Cerceris, who operates upon Weevils, which insects
have a concentrated nervous chain like that of the Cetonia grub,
inserts her sting at the same point. The similarity of the nervous
organization occasions a similarity of method. Let us observe also that
the sting of the Scolia remains for some time in the wound and rummages
with a pronounced persistency. To judge by the movements of the tip of
the abdomen, one would say that the weapon is exploring and selecting.
Free to turn about as it pleases within narrow limits, the sting’s
point is probably searching for the little bundle of nerves which it
must prick, or at least sprinkle with poison, in order to obtain a
withering paralysis.

I will not end my report of the duel without relating a few more facts,
of minor importance. The Two-banded Scolia is an ardent persecutor of
the Cetonia. At one sitting, the same mother stabs three grubs, one
after the other, before my eyes. She refuses the fourth, perhaps
through fatigue, or because her poison-phial is exhausted. Her refusal
is but temporary. The next day, she begins anew and paralyzes two
worms; the following day again, but with a zeal that diminishes from
day to day.

The other predatory insects that go on long hunting-expeditions embrace
the prey which they have rendered lifeless, drag it, convey it, each in
its own fashion, and, laden with their burden, long try to escape from
the bell and to reach the burrow. Disheartened by vain attempts, they
abandon it at last. The Scolia does not move her prey, which lies
indefinitely on its back at the spot of sacrifice. After drawing her
dagger from the wound, she leaves her victim alone and starts
fluttering against the walls of the bell, without troubling about it
further. Things must happen in the same way in the manure-heap, under
normal conditions. The paralyzed morsel is not carried elsewhither, to
a special cellar: where the struggle occurred, there it receives, on
its spread belly, the egg whence the consumer of the succulent dainty
will presently emerge. This saves the expense of a house. It goes
without saying that the Scolia does not lay under glass: the mother is
too prudent to expose her egg to the dangers of the open air.

A second detail strikes me: the fierce persistency of the Scolia. I
have seen the fight prolonged for a good quarter of an hour, with
frequent alternations of successes and reverses, before the
Hymenopteron achieved the requisite position and reached with the tip
of her belly the point at which the sting must enter. During her
assaults, which are resumed as soon as repelled, the aggressor
repeatedly applies the extremity of her abdomen against the grub, but
without unsheathing; for I should perceive this by the start of the
animal injured by the prick. The Scolia, therefore, does not sting the
Cetonia anywhere until the desired point offers beneath the weapon. The
fact that no wounds are made elsewhere is not in any way due to the
structure of the grub, which is soft and penetrable at all points,
except the skull. The spot sought by the sting is no less
well-protected than the others by the dermal wrapper.

In the struggle, the Scolia, curved archwise, is sometimes caught in
the vice of the Cetonia, which forcibly contracts and buckles itself.
Heedless of the rough embrace, the Hymenopteron does not let go with
either her teeth or her ventral tip. Then follows a confused scuffle
between the two locked insects, of which first one and next the other
is on the top. When the grub succeeds in ridding itself of its enemy,
it unrolls itself afresh, stretches itself at full length and proceeds
to paddle along on its back with all possible speed. Its defensive
artifices amount to no more than this. At an earlier period, when I had
not yet seen for myself and was obliged to take probability for my
guide, I was willing to grant it the trick of the hedgehog, who rolls
himself into a ball and defies the dog. I thought that, doubled up,
with a force which my fingers had some difficulty in overcoming, it
would in like manner defy the Scolia, who was powerless to unroll it
and disdainful of any point but that of her choice. I wished the grub
to possess and I believed that it did possess this very simple and
efficacious means of defence. But I had too great confidence in its
ingenuity. Instead of copying the hedgehog and remaining contracted, it
flees with its belly in the air; foolishly, it adopts the very posture
which allows the Scolia to make the assault and to reach the point at
which the fatal blow is struck.

Let us pass on to others. I have just captured an Interrupted Scolia
(Colpa Interrupta, Latr.), exploring the sands, no doubt in quest of
game. It is important to make use of her as soon as may be, before her
ardour has been cooled by the tedium of captivity. I know her prey, the
grub of Anoxia Australis; I know, from my old habits of digging, the
spots beloved by the worm: the sand-dunes heaped by the wind at the
foot of the rosemary-shrubs on the slopes of the neighbouring hills. It
will be hard work finding it, for nothing is rarer than a common thing,
when it is needed in a hurry. I call in the aid of my father, an old
man of ninety, but still straight as a wand. Shouldering a shovel and a
three-pronged luchet, we set out under a sun in which you could cook an
egg. Exerting our feeble powers in turns, we cut a trench in the sand
where I hope to find the Anoxia. My hopes are not disappointed. In the
sweat of my brow—never was truer word spoken—after shifting and sifting
through my fingers at least two cubic yards of sandy soil, I am the
fortunate possessor of two grubs. Had I not wanted them, I should have
dug them up by the handful! However, my lean and costly harvest is
sufficient for the moment. To-morrow, I shall send stronger arms to
continue the digging.

And now let us repay ourselves for our trouble by witnessing the drama
under glass. Heavy and clumsy in her ways, the Scolia moves slowly
round the arena. At the sight of the game, her attention wakes up. The
fight is heralded by the same preparations as those displayed by the
Two-banded Scolia: the Hymenopteron polishes her wings and taps the
table with the tips of her antennæ. And now, up, lads, and at ’em! The
attack begins. Unfit to move over a flat surface, because of its short,
weak legs; lacking, moreover, the Cetonia’s eccentric means of
locomotion on its back, the big-bellied worm does not dream of running
away: it rolls itself up. The Scolia, with her powerful nippers, grabs
its skin, now at once place, now at another. Buckled into an arch whose
two ends almost meet, she strives to thrust the tip of her belly into
the narrow opening of the volute formed by the grub. The fight is
conducted quite calmly, without hard blows and with varying fortunes.
It represents the obstinate attempt of a live split ring trying to slip
one of its ends into another live split ring, which displays an equal
obstinacy in remaining closed. The Scolia holds the game in subjection
with her legs and mandibles; she makes her attempt first on one side
and then on the other, without succeeding in unrolling the torus, which
becomes the more contracted the more it feels itself in danger. The
actual circumstances make the operation difficult: the prey slips and
rolls over the table, when the insect goes for it too briskly; points
of support are wanting and the sting cannot reach the desired spot; for
over an hour, one vain attempt follows upon the other, divided by
spells of rest, during which the two adversaries look like two narrow
rings wound one inside the other.

What ought the sturdy Cetonia grub to do in order to defy the
Two-banded Scolia, who is nothing like so strong as her victim? Imitate
the Anoxia, of course, and remain rolled up like a hedgehog until the
enemy retreats. It tries to flee, unrolls itself and thus causes its
own undoing. The other does not budge from its defensive posture and
resists successfully. Is this due to acquired prudence? No, but to the
impossibility of acting otherwise on the polished surface of a table.
Heavy, obese, weak-legged, bent into a hook after the manner of the
common white maggot, the Anoxia grub is unable to shift its position on
a smooth surface; it flounders painfully, lying on its side. What it
wants is the shifting soil wherein, using its mandibles as a spade, it
digs and buries itself.

Let us try if sand will shorten the battle, of which the end does not
yet seem in sight after an hour’s waiting. I lightly sprinkle the
arena. The attack is resumed more fiercely than ever. The grub, feeling
the sand, its natural dwelling-place, now also tries to slip away, the
reckless one! What did I tell you? Its torus does not represent
acquired prudence, but the necessity of the moment. The harsh
experience of past misfortunes has not yet taught it the precious
advantage which it would derive from its volute kept closed as long as
danger lasts. Besides, not all are equally cautious on the firm support
of my table. The biggest even seem ignorant of what they understood so
well in their youth: the art of self-defence by rolling one’s self in a
ball.

I take up my story again with a fine-sized quarry, less liable to slip
under the Scolia’s pushes. The grub, when assailed, does not curl up,
does not contract into a ring, like its predecessor, which was younger
and but half its size. It tosses about clumsily, lying on its side,
half-opened. Its only attempt at defence is to wriggle; it opens,
closes and reopens its big mandibular hooks. The Scolia grabs it at
random, winds her rough, hairy legs around it and, for nearly fifteen
minutes, strives her hardest atop of the rich dainty.

At last, after a series of not very riotous affrays, the favourable
position is gained, the propitious moment arrives and the sting is
planted in the grub’s thorax, at a central spot, under the neck and
level with the fore-legs. The effect is instantaneous: total inertia,
save in the appendages of the head, the antennæ and mouth-pieces. I
find the same results, the same prick at a precise, invariable spot,
among my different operators, captured from time to time with a
successful stroke of the net.

Let us say, in conclusion, that the attack delivered by the Interrupted
Scolia is much less fiery than that of her two-banded sister. This
rough, sand-digging Hymenopteron has a clumsy gait and stiff, almost
automatic movements. She does not easily repeat her dagger-thrust. Most
of those with whom I experimented refused a second victim on the day
after their exploits and on the following day. Half-asleep, they grew
excited only when stimulated through my teasing them with a straw. Nor
does the Two-banded Scolia, that more agile, more enthusiastic
huntress, invariably unsheath when invited so to do. All those Nimrods
are liable to moments of inaction which the presence of a new prey will
not succeed in disturbing.

The Scoliæ have taught me no more than I have said, for lack of
subjects belonging to other species. No matter: the results obtained
constitute, to my mind, no small triumph. After seeing the Scoliæ at
work, I said to myself, guided merely by the anatomical structure of
the victims, that the grubs of Cetonia, of Anoxia, of Oryctes must be
paralyzed with a single prick of the sting; I even specified the point
at which the dagger had to strike, a central point in the immediate
neighbourhood of the fore-legs. Of the three kinds of sacrificers, two
allowed me to be present at their surgical operation, which the third,
I am certain, will not contradict. In both cases, a single blow of the
lancet; in both cases, an inoculation with the poison at the place
settled in advance. No calculator in an observatory could show greater
accuracy in foretelling the position of his planet. An idea may be
considered proved when it attains this mathematical anticipation of the
future, this positive knowledge of the unknown. When will the extollers
of chance achieve a like success? Order calls for order; and chance has
no rule.










THE RINGED CALICURGUS


CHAPTER XII

THE RINGED CALICURGUS


The non-cuirassed victims, pervious to the sting over almost the whole
of their body, such as Common Caterpillars and “Land-surveying”
Caterpillars, Cetonia and Anoxia grubs, whose sole means of defence,
apart from their mandibles, consists in rollings and contortions,
summoned another prey to my glass bell: the Spider, almost as
ill-protected, but armed with formidable poison-fangs. How, more
particularly, does the Ringed Calicurgus, or Pompilus, set to work to
deal with the black-bellied Tarantula, the terrible Lycosa Narbonensis,
who slays mole and sparrow with a bite and imperils the life of man?
How does the bold Pompilus overcome an adversary stronger than herself,
better-endowed in virulence of poison and capable of making a meal of
her assailant? Among the hunting insects, none faces such
disproportionate contests, in which appearances seem to point to the
aggressor as the prey and to the prey as the aggressor.

The problem deserved patient study. True, judging by the Spider’s
structure, I anticipated a single stab in the centre of the thorax; but
this did not explain the victory of the Hymenopteron, emerging safe and
sound from her encounter with a quarry of that description. The matter
must be looked into. The chief difficulty is the scarcity of the
Calicurgus. To obtain the Tarantula is easy enough: the part of the
neighbouring upland as yet untilled by the vine-planters supplies me
with as many as I need. To capture the Calicurgus is a different story.
I count upon her so little that I consider a special search quite
useless. To look for one would, perhaps, be the very way not to find
one. Let us leave it to chance to decide whether I shall have one or
not.

I have one. I caught her unexpectedly on the flowers. The next day, I
lay in a stock of half-a-dozen Tarantulas. Perhaps I shall be able to
use them one after the other, in repeated duels. On my return from my
expedition in search of Lycosæ, chance smiles upon me again and
gratifies my desires to the full. A second Calicurgus presents herself
before my net: she is dragging her heavy, paralyzed Arachnid by the
leg, in the dust of the high-road. I set great store by my find: there
is an urgency about laying the egg; and I believe that the mother will
accept an exchange without much hesitation.

So behold my two captives, each under a glass bell with her Tarantula.
I am all eyes. What a drama I may expect, in a moment! I wait,
anxiously.... But ... but ... what is this? Which of the two is the
attacker? Which of the two the attacked? The characters seem inverted.
The Calicurgus, unfit for climbing up the smooth walls of the bell,
strides along the outer circumference of the arena. With proud, swift
gait and quivering wings and antennæ, she comes and goes. She soon sets
eyes upon the Lycosa, marches up to her without the least sign of fear,
turns around her and seems about to seize one of her legs. But, at that
moment, the Tarantula rises almost perpendicularly, using her four
hind-legs to stand upon and her four front-legs erect, outspread, ready
to thrust and parry. The poison-fangs yawn wide: a drop of venom hangs
from their point. The mere sight of them makes my flesh creep. In this
terrible attitude, presenting her powerful chest and the black velvet
of her belly to her enemy, the Arachnid overawes the Pompilus, who
abruptly turns to the right-about and retreats. The Lycosa then closes
her case of poisoned daggers and returns to her natural position,
standing on her eight legs; but, at the least aggressive movement on
the part of the Hymenopteron, she resumes her threatening posture.

Nay, she does better: suddenly, she leaps and flings herself upon the
Calicurgus, grapples with her nimbly and gnaws her with her fangs. The
other, without replying with her sting, releases herself and emerges
unscathed from the fierce encounter. Time after time, I witness the
attack; and nothing serious ever happens to the Hymenopteron, who
quickly extricates herself and seems to have felt nothing. Her
manœuvres are resumed as boldly and swiftly as at the start.

Does this mean that the creature escaping from the terrible fangs is
invulnerable? Obviously not. A real bite would be fatal to her. Big,
tough Acridians succumb: why should not she, with her delicate
organization, succumb as well? The Arachnid’s daggers, therefore, make
vain feints; their points do not enter the antagonist’s flesh. If the
blows were real, I should see bleeding wounds, I should see the fangs
closed for a moment upon the point seized, whereas all my watchfulness
fails to perceive anything of the sort. Are the fangs powerless, then,
to pierce the Calicurgus’ envelope? Not that either. I have seen them
go through the corselet of the Acridians, which possesses much greater
resisting power and which cracks like a broken breastplate. Once more,
whence comes this strange immunity of the Calicurgus between the legs
and under the daggers of the Tarantula? I do not know. At a time when
she is in mortal danger in front of her enemy, the Lycosa threatens her
with her fangs and cannot bring herself to bite, prevented by a
reluctance which I do not undertake to explain.

Seeing that I am obtaining nothing but alarms and scrimmages devoid of
seriousness, I decide to alter the conditions of the prize-ring and to
make it resemble more closely the natural state. My work-table is but a
poor substitute for the soil; besides, the Arachnid has not her
stronghold, her burrow, which maybe plays a part of some importance in
both attack and defence. A stump of reed is stuck perpendicularly in a
large pan filled with earth. This shall represent the Lycosa’s pit. In
the middle, I plant a few heads of echinops, made appetizing with
honey, as a refectory for the Pompilus; a pair of Crickets, renewed as
soon as consumed, shall keep up the strength of the Tarantula. This
comfortable abode, exposed to the sun, receives the two captives under
a woven-wire cover, well-ventilated and suitable for a long stay.

My artifices lead to no result; the session ends without business done.
A day passes, two days, three days; and still nothing. The Calicurgus
is unremitting in her attentions to the honeyed thistle-heads; the
Tarantula calmly nibbles away at her Cricket. If the other comes within
reach of her, she quickly draws herself up and, with a gesture, orders
her to be off. The artificial burrow, the reed-stump, fulfils its
purpose nicely. Lycosa and Calicurgus take refuge in it by turns, but
without quarrelling. And that is all. The drama of which the prologue
promised so well now seems to me indefinitely postponed.

A last resource remains; and I base great hopes upon it. This is to
move my Calicurgi to the very spot of their investigations and to
install them at the door of the Arachnid’s house, above the natural
burrow. I take the field with an apparatus which I am dragging for the
first time into the open, consisting of a glass cover, another of woven
wire, together with the different instruments necessary to handle and
shift my irascible and dangerous subjects. My search for burrows among
the pebbles and the tufts of thyme and lavender soon meets with
success.

Here is a splendid one. The insertion of a straw informs me that it is
inhabited by a Tarantula of a size suited to my plans. I sweep and
flatten down the neighbourhood of the orifice to receive the wire bell,
under which I place a Pompilus. This is a fitting moment to light one’s
pipe and wait, stretched on the pebbles.... A further disappointment!
Half an hour passes and the Hymenopteron confines herself to turning
round the wire, as she did in my study. Not a sign of cupidity on her
part in the presence of that burrow at the bottom of which I see the
Tarantula’s diamond eyes gleaming.

The wire-work enclosure is replaced by one of glass, the walls of which
cannot be scaled, thus obliging the insect to remain on the ground and
at last to take notice of the pit, which it seems to ignore. This time,
we are more successful. After a few strolls round the circuit, the
Calicurgus casts eyes upon the cavity that yawns beneath her feet. She
goes down it. This boldness staggers me. I should never have dared
expect as much as that. To fling yourself suddenly upon the Tarantula
when she is outside her domain is all very well; but to plunge into the
lair when the terrible animal is waiting for you there with her double
poisoned dagger! What will come of this temerity? A flutter of wings
rises from the depths. Run to earth in her private apartments, the
Lycosa is doubtless struggling with the intruder. That noise of wings
is the song of victory of the Calicurgus, unless, indeed, it be her
death-song. The murderer may well be the murdered. Which of the two
will emerge from below alive?

It is the Lycosa, who hurriedly scampers out and takes up her stand at
the entrance to the burrow in her position of defence, with her fangs
open and her four front-legs outstretched. Is the other stabbed? Not at
all, for she comes out forthwith, not without receiving a cuff, as she
passes, from the Arachnid, who at once returns to her den. Dislodged
from the basement a second and a third time, the Tarantula always comes
up again without a wound, always waits for the invader on the
door-sill, administers punishment and pops in again. In vain I
alternate my two Pompili and change the burrow: I do not succeed in
seeing anything more. Certain conditions, which my stratagems fail to
realize, are lacking to the fulfilment of the drama.

Discouraged by the repetition of my fruitless experiments, I throw up
the game, having gained, however, a fact of some value: the Calicurgus
descends, without the least fear, into the Tarantula’s den and turns
her out. I imagine that things happen in the same way outside my bells.
Evicted from her home, the Arachnid is more timorous and lends herself
better to the attack. Besides, in the constraint of a narrow burrow,
the operator would not be able to wield her lancet with the precision
which her plans demand. The bold incursion shows us once again, more
clearly than the hand-to-hand encounters on my table, the Lycosa’s
reluctance to drive her fangs into her adversary. When the two are face
to face at the bottom of the lair, that surely would be the time of
times to have a word with the enemy. The Tarantula is at home; every
nook and corner of the bastion is familiar to her. The intruder is
constrained in her movements; she does not know her way about. Quick, a
bite, my poor Lycosa, and your persecutor’s done for! You refrain, I
know not why; and your reluctance is the rash one’s salvation. The
silly sheep does not reply to the butcher’s knife with a butt from his
horned forehead. Can you be the sheep of the Calicurgus?

My two subjects are once more installed in my study, under their wire
domes, with the bed of sand, the reed-stump burrow and renewed honey.
They here find their first Lycosæ, feeding on crickets. The
cohabitation extends over three weeks, without other incidents than
scrimmages and threatenings, which become rarer from day to day. No
serious hostility on either side. At last, the Calicurgi die: their day
is past. A pitiful ending to a spirited start.

Shall I abandon the problem? Oh, no! It is not the first that has been
unable to deter me from an eagerly-cherished plan. Fortune favours the
persevering. She proves this by offering me, in September, a fortnight
after the death of my Tarantula-hunters, a different Calicurgus,
captured for the first time. It is Calicurgus Curra, clad in the same
showy style as her predecessors and almost of the same size.

I know nothing about the new-comer: I wonder what she would like. A
spider, that is certain: but which? A huntress of her build calls for
big game: perhaps the Silky Epeira, perhaps the Banded Epeira, the two
fattest Arachnids in the country, next to the Tarantula. The first
hangs her great vertical web, in which the Crickets are caught, from
one brake of brushwood to the next. I shall find her in the copses on
the adjacent hills. The other stretches hers across the ditches and
little water-courses frequented by the Dragon-flies. I shall find her
near the Aygues, on the bank of the irrigation-canals fed by that
torrent. Two excursions procure me the two Epeiræ. Next day, I offer
them together to my captive, who shall choose according to her tastes.

The choice is soon made: Epeira Fasciata obtains the preference. But
she does not yield without protest. At the Hymenopteron’s approach, she
draws herself up and assumes a defensive attitude copied from that of
the Lycosa. The Calicurgus does not mind the threats: under her
harlequin attire, she is quick to strike and swift of foot. A few brisk
cuffs are exchanged and the Epeira lies overturned on her back. The
Calicurgus is on top of her, belly to belly, head to head; with her
legs, she overpowers the Arachnid’s legs; with her mandibles, she grips
the cephalothorax. She curves her abdomen vigorously, bringing it
underneath; she draws her sting and....

One moment, reader, if you please. Where is the sting going to
penetrate? According to what we have learnt from the other paralyzers,
it will be in the chest, to destroy the movement of the legs. You think
so? I believed it too. Well, without wasting time in apologizing for
our very excusable common error, let us confess that the animal is
cleverer than we are. It knows how to make certain of success by means
of a preparatory trick which you and I had not thought of. Oh, what a
school is that of the animals! Is it not a fact that, before striking
the adversary, it is wise to take steps not to be hit yourself?
Calicurgus Scurra does not disregard this counsel of prudence. The
Epeira carries under her throat two sharp daggers, with a drop of
poison at the tip; the Calicurgus is lost if the Arachnid bite her.
Nevertheless, her anæsthetizing operation requires perfect security of
the lancet. What is to be done in this peril, which would perplex the
most confident surgeon? We must first disarm the patient and operate
upon him later.

Behold, the Calicurgus’ sting, aimed from back to front, enters the
Epeira’s mouth, with minute precautions and emphatic persistency. Upon
the instant, the poison-fangs close limply and the formidable prey is
rendered harmless. The Hymenopteron’s abdomen then extends its arch and
drives in the needle behind the fourth pair of legs, on the median
line, almost at the juncture of the belly. The skin is thinner and more
easily penetrable at this spot than elsewhere. The rest of the chest is
covered with a firm breast-plate, which the sting would perhaps not
succeed in perforating. The nerve-centres, the seat of the movement of
the legs, are situated a little higher than the wounded spot; but the
aiming of the weapon from back to front enables it to reach them. This
last blow produces paralysis of the eight legs together.

To enlarge upon the proceeding would spoil the eloquence of this
manœuvre. First, for the protection of the operator, a stab in the
mouth, that fearsomely armed point, to be dreaded above all others;
next, for the protection of the grub, a second stab in the
nerve-centres of the thorax, to destroy all movement. I suspected
indeed that the sacrificers of powerful Arachnids were endowed with
special talents; but I was far from expecting their daring logic, which
disarms before it paralyzes. This must also be the scheme followed by
the Tarantula-huntress, who refused to disclose her secret under my
bells. I know her method now, divulged as it is by a colleague. She
turns the horrible Lycosa on her back, deadens her daggers by stinging
her in the mouth and then, with a single prick of the needle, contrives
the paralysis of the legs at her ease.

I examine the Epeira immediately after the operation and the Tarantula
when the Calicurgus drags her by one leg to her burrow, at the foot of
a wall. For a little while longer, a minute at most, the Epeira
convulsively moves her legs. As long as these dying quivers last, the
Pompilus does not let go of her prey. She seems to be watching the
progress of the paralysis. With the tip of her mandibles, she
repeatedly explores the mouth of the Arachnid, as though to make sure
that the poison-fangs are really harmless. Next, all becomes quiet; and
the Calicurgus makes ready to drag her prey elsewhither. It is then
that I take possession of it.

What strikes me first of all is the absolute inertness of the fangs,
which I tickle with a straw without succeeding in rousing them from
their torpor. The feelers, on the contrary, the feelers, their
immediate neighbours, move backwards and forwards the moment I touch
them. I put the Epeira away safely in a flask and subject her to a
fresh examination a week later. Irritability has returned in part.
Under the stimulus of the straw, I see the limbs move a little,
especially the lower joints, legs and tarsi. The feelers are even more
irritable and mobile. These various movements, however, are devoid of
vigour or coordination; and the Spider cannot use them to turn herself
and still less to shift her position. As for the poison-fangs, I
stimulate them in vain; I do not succeed in inducing them to open, or
even to move. They are, therefore, profoundly paralyzed and in a
special manner. I thought as much, at the beginning, from the peculiar
persistency displayed by the dart in stinging the mouth.

At the end of September, almost a month after the operation, the Epeira
is in the same condition, neither dead nor alive: the feelers still
quiver at the touch of the straw; and nothing else stirs. Finally,
after six or seven weeks of lethargy, real death supervenes, together
with its companion, corruption.

The Tarantula of the Ringed Calicurgus, whom I steal from her owner
while she is dragging her along, offers the same peculiarities for my
inspection. The poison-fangs absolutely refuse to be irritated by the
tickling of the straw, a fresh proof added to that of analogy to show
that the Lycosa, like the Epeira, has been stung in the mouth. The
feelers, on the other hand, are and for weeks remain exceedingly
irritable and mobile. I insist upon this point, the interest of which
will soon become apparent.

It was not possible for me to obtain a second attack from my Calicurgus
Scurra: the tedium of captivity injured the exercise of her talents.
Besides, the Epeira had occasionally something to say to this refusal:
a certain stratagem of war twice employed before my eyes could easily
rout the aggressor. Let me describe the thing, if only to raise a
little in our esteem those silly Arachnids, who, provided with weapons
of perfection, dare not use them against their feebler, but pluckier
assailant.

The Epeira occupies the wall of the woven-wire enclosure, with her
eight legs sprawling over the trellis-work; the Calicurgus moves about
under the top of the dome. Panic-stricken at the sight of the enemy,
the spider drops to the ground, with her belly in the air and her legs
bunched up. The other goes to her, takes hold of her, examines her and
places herself in a position to sting her in the mouth. But she does
not unsheathe her dart. I see her leaning attentively over the
poison-fangs, as though to enquire into the nature of the terrible
machinery; and then she moves away. The spider remains motionless, so
much so that I believe her dead, paralyzed without my knowing it, at a
moment when I was not looking. I take her out of the volery to examine
her at my ease. But no sooner is she laid upon the table than she comes
to life and promptly scurries away. The trickster was shamming for dead
under the Calicurgus’ dagger and so artfully that I was taken in by
her. She hoodwinked one cleverer than myself, the Calicurgus, who
inspected her very closely and did not consider a dead body worthy of
her steel. Perhaps the simpleton already noticed a “high” smell, like
the bear in the fable.

This trick, if trick there be, appears to me to turn most often to the
disadvantage of the Arachnid: Tarantula, Epeira or another, as the case
may be. The Calicurgus, who has just thrown her on her back, after a
brisk wrestling-match, knows well enough that the insect on the ground
is not dead. The Spider, thinking to protect herself, shams the
lifelessness of a corpse; the assailant takes advantage of this to
strike her most dangerous blow, the stab in the mouth. If the
poison-tipped fangs were to open then, to snap, to bite in their
despair, the Calicurgus would never dare expose the tip of her stomach
to their mortal sting. The pretence of death is just what causes the
success of the huntress in her risky operation. We are told, O
ingenuous Epeiræ, that the struggle for life counselled you to adopt
that inert attitude in your own defence. Well, the struggle for life
has shown herself a very bad counsellor. You would do better to believe
in common sense and learn, by degrees, at your cost, that a quick
parry-and-thrust, especially when your resources permit of it, is still
the best way of striking awe into the enemy.










THE OLD WEEVILS


CHAPTER XIII

THE OLD WEEVILS


In winter, when the insect enjoys an enforced rest, the study of
numismatics procures me some delightful moments. I love to interrogate
its metal disks, the records of the petty things which men call
history. In this soil of Provence, where the Greek planted the
olive-tree and the Roman planted the law, the peasant finds coins,
scattered more or less everywhere, when he turns his sod. He brings
them to me and consults me as to their pecuniary value, never as to
their meaning.

What matters to him the inscription on his treasure-trove! Men suffered
of yore, they suffer to-day, they will suffer in the future: to him,
all history is summed up in that! The rest is sheer futility, a pastime
of the idle.

I do not possess this lofty philosophy of indifference to things of the
past. I scratch the piece of money with my finger-nail, I carefully
strip it of its earthy rind, I examine it with the magnifying-glass, I
try to decipher its legend. And my satisfaction is no small one when
the little round bronze or silver disk has spoken. For then I have read
a page of humanity, not in books, which are witnesses open to
suspicion, but in records which are, in a manner, living and which were
contemporary with the persons and the facts.

This bit of silver, flattened by the blow of the punch, talks to me of
the Vocontii: [31] “VOOC ... VOCVNT,” says the inscription. It comes
from the little neighbouring town of Vaison, where Pliny the Naturalist
sometimes went to spend a holiday. Here, perhaps, at the table of his
host, the celebrated compiler, he learnt to appreciate the beccafico,
famous among the epicures of Rome and still renowned to-day, under the
name of grasset, among our Provençal gastronomers. It is a shame that
my bit of silver says nothing of these events, more memorable than a
battle.

It shows, on one side, a head and, on the other, a galloping horse, all
barbarously inaccurate. A child trying its hand for the first time with
the point of a pebble on the fresh mortar of the walls would produce no
more shapeless design. Nay, of a surety, those gallant Allobroges were
no artists.

How greatly superior to them were the foreigners from Phocæa! Here is a
drachma of the Massalietes: [32] ΜΑΣΣΑΛΙΗΤΩΝ. On the obverse, a head of
Diana of Ephesus, chub-faced, full-cheeked, thick-lipped. A receding
forehead, surmounted by a diadem; an abundant head of hair, streaming
down the neck in a cascade of curls; heavy ear-drops, a necklace of
pearls, a bow slung over the shoulder. Thus was the idol decked by the
hands of the pious maidens of Syria. To tell the truth, it is not
beautiful. It is sumptuous, if you will, and preferable, after all, to
the ass’s ears which the beauties of our days wear perched upon their
heads. What a singular freak is fashion, so fruitful in the means of
uglification! Business knows nothing of beauty, says this divinity of
the traders; it prefers the profitable, embellished with luxury. Thus
speaks the drachma.

On the reverse, a lion clawing the earth and roaring wide-mouthed. Not
of to-day alone is the savagery that symbolizes power under the form of
some formidable brute, as though evil were the supreme expression of
strength. The eagle, the lion and other bandits often figure on the
reverse of coins. But the reality is not sufficient; the imagination
invents monstrosities: the centaur, the dragon, the hippogriff, the
unicorn, the double-headed eagle. Are the inventors of these emblems
really superior to the redskin who celebrates the prowess of his
scalping-knife with a bear’s paw, an eagle’s wing or a jaguar’s tooth
stuck into his scalp-lock? We may safely doubt it.

How preferable to these heraldic horrors is the reverse of our own
silver coinage brought into circulation of late years! It shows us a
sower who, with a nimble hand, at sunrise, fills the furrow with the
good seed of thought. It is very simple and it is great; it makes us
think.

The Marseilles drachma has for its sole merit its magnificent relief.
The artist who made the dies was a master of the graver’s tool; but he
lacked the breath of inspiration. The chub-faced Diana is a rakes’
wench and no better.

Here is the NAMASAT of the Volscæ, which became the colony of Nîmes.
Side by side, profiles of Augustus and his minister Agrippa. The
former, with his hard brow, his flat skull, his grasping, broken nose,
inspires me with but little confidence, notwithstanding what gentle
Virgil wrote of him:


                    Deus nobis haec otia fecit.


It is success that makes gods. Had he not succeeded in his criminal
projects, Augustus the divine would have remained Octavius the
scoundrel.

His minister pleases me better. He was a great shifter of stones, who,
with his building operations, his aqueducts, his roads, came to
civilize the rustic Volscæ a little. Not far from my village, a
splendid road crosses the plain in a straight line, starting from the
banks of the Aygues, and climbs up yonder, tedious in its monotonous
length, to cross the Sérignan hills, under the protection of a powerful
oppidum, which, much later, became the old castle, the Castelas. It is
a section of Agrippa’s Road, which joined Marseilles and Vienne. The
majestic ribbon, twenty centuries old, is still frequented. We no
longer see the little brown foot-soldier of the Roman legions upon it;
in his stead, we see the peasant going to market at Orange, with his
flock of sheep or his drove of unruly porkers. And I prefer the latter.

Let us turn over the green-crusted penny. “COL. NEM.,” [33] colony of
Nîmes, the reverse tells us. The inscription is accompanied by a
crocodile chained to a palm-tree from which hang crowns. It is an
emblem of Egypt, conquered by the veterans who founded the colony. The
beast of the Nile gnashes its teeth at the foot of the familiar tree.
It speaks to us of Antony, the rip; it tells us of Cleopatra, whose
nose, had it been an inch shorter, would have changed the face of the
world. Thanks to the memories which it awakens, the scaly-rumped
reptile becomes a superb historical lesson.

In this way, the great lessons of the numismatical science of metals
could follow one another for many a day and be constantly varied
without leaving my near neighbourhood. But there is another science of
numismatics, far superior and less costly, which, with its medals, the
fossils, tells us the history of life. I speak of the numismatics of
stones.

My very window-ledge, the confidant of bygone ages, talks to me of a
vanished world. It is, literally speaking, an ossuary, each particle of
which retains the imprint of past lives. That block of stone has lived.
Spines of sea-urchins, teeth and vertebræ of fish, broken pieces of
shells, shivers of madrepores form a pulp of dead existences. Examined
ashlar by ashlar, my house would resolve itself into a reliquary, a
rag-fair of things that were alive in the days of old.

The rocky layer from which building-materials are derived in these
parts covers, with its mighty shell, the greater portion of the
neighbouring upland. Here the quarry-man has dug for none knows how
many centuries, since the time when Agrippa hewed cyclopean flags to
form the stages and façade of the Orange theatre. And here, daily, the
pick-axe uncovers curious fossils. The most remarkable of these are
teeth, wonderfully polished in the heart of their rough veinstone,
bright with enamel as though still in a fresh state. Some of them are
most formidable, triangular, finely jagged at the edges, almost as
large as one’s hand. What an insatiable abyss, a jaw armed with such a
set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of
the gullet; what mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those serrate
shears! You are seized with a shiver merely at the imaginary
reconstruction of that awful implement of destruction!

The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the order of
Squalidæ. Paleontology calls him Carcharodon Megalodon. The shark of
to-day, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so
far as the dwarf can give an idea of the giant.

Other Squali abound in the same stone, all fierce gullets. It contains
Oxyrhinæ (Oxyrhina Xiphodon, Agass.), with teeth shaped like pointed
cleavers; Hemipristes (Hemipristis Serra, Agass.), whose jaws are
furnished with curved and toothed Malay creeses; Lamiæ (Lamia
Denticulata, Agass.), whose mouths bristle with flexuous, steeled
daggers, flattened on one side, convex on the other; Notidani
(Notidanus Primigenius, Agass.), whose sunk teeth are crowned with
radiate indentations.

This dental arsenal, the eloquent witness of the old butcheries, can
hold its own with the Crocodile of Nîmes, the Diana of Marseilles, the
Horse of Vaison. With its panoply of carnage, it tells me how
extermination came at all times to lop off the surplus of life; it
says:

“On the very spot where you stand meditating upon a shiver of stone, an
arm of the sea once stretched, filled with truculent devourers and
peaceable victims. A long gulf occupied the future site of the Rhône
Valley. Its billows broke at no great distance from your dwelling.”

Here, in fact, are the cliffs of the bank, in such a state of
preservation that, on concentrating my thoughts, I seem to hear the
thunder of the waves. Sea-urchins, Lithodomi, Petricolæ, Pholaidids
have left their signatures upon the rock: hemispherical recesses large
enough to contain one’s fist, round cells, cabins with a narrow
conduit-pipe through which the recluse received the incoming water,
constantly renewed and laden with nourishment. Sometimes, the erstwhile
occupant is there, mineralized, intact to the tiniest details of his
striæ and scales, a frail ornament; more often, he has disappeared,
dissolved, and his house has filled with a fine sea mud, hardened into
a chalky kernel.

In this quiet inlet, some eddy has collected and drowned at the bottom
of the mire, now turned into marl, enormous heaps of shells, of every
shape and size. It is a molluscs’ burying-ground, with hills for
tumuli. I dig up oysters a cubit long and weighing five or six pounds
apiece. One could shovel up, in the immense pile, Scallops, Cones,
Cytheridæ, Mactridæ, Murices, Turritellidæ, Mitridæ and others too
numerous, too innumerable to mention. You stand stupefied before the
vital ardour of the days of old, which was able to supply such a pile
of relics in a mere nook of earth.

The necropolis of shells tells us, besides, that time, that patient
renewer of the order of things, has mown down not only the individual,
a precarious being, but also the species. Nowadays, the neighbouring
sea, the Mediterranean, has almost nothing identical with the
population of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of similarity
between the present and the past, we should have to seek them in the
tropical seas. The climate, therefore, has become colder; the sun is
slowly becoming extinguished; the species are dying out. Thus speak the
numismatics of the stones on my window-ledge.

Without leaving my field of observation, so modest, so limited and yet
so rich, let us once more consult the stone and, this time, on the
subject of the insect. The country round Apt abounds in a strange rock
that breaks off in thin plates, similar to sheets of whitish cardboard.
It burns with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell; and it was
deposited at the bottom of great lakes haunted by crocodiles and giant
tortoises. Those lakes no human eye has ever seen. Their basins have
been replaced by the ridges of the hills; their muds, peacefully
deposited in thin courses, have become mighty banks of rock.

Let us break off a slab and subdivide it into sheets with the point of
a knife, a work as easy as separating the superposed layers of a piece
of paste- or mill-board. In so doing, we are examining a volume taken
from the library of the mountains, we are turning the pages of a
magnificently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far
superior to the Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page are diagrams;
nay, better: realities converted into pictures.

On this page are fish, grouped at random. One might take them for a
dish fried in oil. Back-bones, fins, vertebral links, bones of the
head, crystal of the eye turned to a black globule, everything is
there, in its natural arrangement. One thing alone is absent: the
flesh. No matter: our dish of gudgeons looks so good that we feel an
inclination to scratch off a bit with our finger and taste this
supramillenary preserve. Let us indulge our fancy and put between our
teeth a morsel of this mineral fry seasoned with petroleum.

There is no inscription to the picture. Reflection makes good the
deficiency. It says to us:

“These fishes lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful waters.
Suddenly, swells came and asphyxiated them in their mud-thickened
waves. Buried forthwith in the mire and thus rescued from the agents of
destruction, they have passed through time, will pass through it
indefinitely, under the cover of their winding-sheet.”

The same swells brought from the adjacent rain-swept shores a host of
refuse, both vegetable and animal, so much so that the lacustrian
deposit talks to us also of things on land. It is a general record of
the life of the time.

Let us turn a page of our slab, or rather our album. Here are winged
seeds, leaves drawn in brown prints. The stone herbal vies in botanical
accuracy with a normal herbal. It repeats what the shells had already
told us: the world is changing, the sun is losing its strength. The
vegetation of modern Provence is not what it was in former days; it no
longer includes palm-trees, camphor-yielding laurels, tufted araucarias
and many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong to the torrid
regions.

Continue to turn the pages. We now come to the insects. The most
frequent are the Diptera, of middling size, often very humble flies and
gnats. The teeth of the great Squali astonished us by their soft polish
amid the roughness of their chalky veinstone. What shall we say of
these frail midges preserved intact in their marly shrine? The frail
creature, which our fingers could not grasp without crushing it, lies
undeformed beneath the weight of the mountains!

The six slender legs, which the least thing is enough to disjoint, here
lie spread upon the stone, correct in shape and arrangement, in the
attitude of the insect at rest. There is nothing lacking, not even the
tiny double claws of the extremities. Here are the two wings, unfurled.
The fine net-work of their nervures can be studied under the lens as
clearly as in the Dipteron of the collections, stuck upon its pin. The
antennary tufts have lost none of their subtle elegance; the belly
gives us the number of the rings, edged with a row of atoms that were
cilia.

The carcase of a mastodont, defying time in its sandy bed, already
astonishes us: a gnat of exquisite delicacy, preserved intact in the
thickness of the rock, staggers our imagination.

Certainly, the Mosquito, carried by the rising swells, did not come
from far away. Before his arrival, the hurly-burly of a thread of water
must have reduced him to that annihilation to which he was so near. He
lived on the shores of the lake. Killed by the joys of a morning—the
old age of gnats—he fell from the top of his reed, was forthwith
drowned and disappeared in the muddy catacombs.

Who are those others, those dumpy ones, with hard, convex elytra, the
most numerous next to the Diptera? Their small heads, prolonged into a
snout, tell us plainly. They are proboscidian Coleoptera, Rhynchophora,
or, in less hard terms, Weevils. There are small ones, middling ones,
large ones, similar in dimensions to their counterparts of to-day.

Their attitudes on the chalky slab are not as correct as those of the
Mosquito. The legs are entangled anyhow; the beak, the rostrum is at
one time hidden under the chest, at another projects forward. Some show
it in profile; others—more frequent these—stretch it to one side, as
the result of a twist in the neck.

These dislocated, contorted insects did not receive the swift and
peaceful burial of the Dipteron. Though sundry of them may have lived
on the plants on the banks, the others, the majority, come from the
surrounding neighbourhood, brought by the rains, which warped their
joints in crossing such obstacles as branches and stones. A stout
armour has kept the body unscathed, but the delicate articulations of
the members have given way to some extent; and the miry winding-sheet
received the drowned Beetles as the disorder of the passage left them.

These strangers, come perhaps from afar, supply us with precious
information. They tell us that, whereas the banks of the lake had the
Mosquito as the chief representative of the insect class, the woods had
the Weevil.

Outside the snout-carrying family, the sheets of my Apt rock show me
hardly anything more, especially in the order of the Coleoptera. Where
are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus, the Dung-beetle, the
Capricorn, which the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvests,
would have brought to the lake even as it did the Weevil? There is not
the least vestige of those tribes, so prosperous to-day.

Where are the Hydrophilus, the Gyrinus, the Dytiscus, all inhabitants
of the water? These lacustrians had a great chance of coming down to us
mummified between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days,
they lived in the lake, whose muds would have preserved these horn-clad
insects even more perfectly than the little fishes and especially than
the Dipteron. Well, of those aquatic Coleoptera there is no trace
either.

Where were they, where were those missing from the geological
reliquary? Where were they of the thickets, of the green-sward, of the
worm-eaten trunks: Capricorns, borers of wood; Sacred Beetles, workers
in dung; Carabi, disembowellers of game? One and all were in the limbo
of the time to come. The present of that period did not possess them:
the future awaited them. The Weevil, therefore, if I may credit the
modest records which I am free to consult, is the oldest of the
Coleoptera.

Life, at the start, fashioned oddities which would be screaming
discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the
Saurian, it revelled at first in monsters fifteen and twenty yards
long. It placed horns on their noses and eyes, paved their backs with
fantastic scales, hollowed their necks into spiny wallets, wherein
their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though not with
great success, to give them wings. After these horrors, the procreating
ardour calmed down and produced the charming green Lizard of our
hedges.

When it invented the bird, it filled its beak with the pointed teeth of
the reptile and appended a long, feathered tail unto its rump. These
undetermined and revoltingly ugly creatures were the distant prelude to
the Robin Redbreast and the Dove.

All these primitives are noted for a very small skull, an idiot’s
brain. The brute of antiquity is, first and foremost, an atrocious
machine for snapping, with a stomach for digesting. The intellect does
not count as yet. That will come later.

The Weevil, in his fashion, to a certain extent, repeats these
aberrations. See the extravagant appendage to his little head. It is
here a short, thick snout; there a sturdy beak, round or cut
four-square; elsewhere a crazy reed, thin as a hair, long as the body
and longer. At the tip of this egregious instrument, in the terminal
mouthpiece, are the fine shears of the mandibles; on the sides, the
antennæ, with their first joints set in a groove.

What is the use of this beak, this snout, this caricature of a nose?
Where did the insect find the model? Nowhere. The Weevil is its
inventor and retains the monopoly. Outside his family, no Coleopteron
indulges in these buccal eccentricities.

Observe, also, the smallness of the head, a bulb that hardly swells
beyond the base of the snout. What can it have inside? A very poor
nervous equipment, the sign of exceedingly limited instincts. Before
seeing them at work, we make small account of these microcephali, in
respect of intelligence; we class them among the obtuse, among
creatures bereft of working capacity. These surmises will not be very
largely upset.

Though the Curculio be but little glorified by his talents, this is no
reason for scorning him. As we learn from the lacustrian schists, he
was in the van of the insects with the armoured wing-cases; he was long
stages ahead of the workers in incubation within the limits of
possibility. He speaks to us of primitive forms, sometimes so quaint;
he is, in his own little world, what the bird with the toothed jaws and
the Saurian with the horned eyebrows are in a higher world.

In ever-thriving legions, he has been handed down to us without
changing his characteristics. He is to-day as he was in the old times
of the continents: the prints in the chalky slates proclaim the fact
aloud. Under any such print, I would venture to write the name of the
genus, sometimes even of the species.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form. By consulting
the modern Curculionid, therefore, we shall obtain a very approximate
chapter upon the biology of his predecessors, at the time when Provence
had great lakes filled with crocodiles and palm-trees on their banks
wherewith to shade them. The history of the present will teach us the
history of the past.








CHAPTER XIV

LEAF-ROLLERS


The attainments of the Curculionid mother are, generally speaking,
limited to inserting her eggs at places where the grubs will find
suitable nourishment and occasionally varying the diet with a botanical
judgment of marvellous certainty. She displays little or no industry.
The niceties of the feeding-bottle or the baby-linen do not concern
her. To this rough conception of the duties of maternity, I know but
one exception, the attribute of certain Weevils, who, in order to endow
their young with an alimentary preserve, possess the art of rolling a
leaf, which serves as board and lodging in one.

Among these manufacturers of vegetable sausages, the most skilful is
the Poplar Weevil (Rhynchites Populi, Lin.), who is modest in
proportions, but resplendent in attire. Her back is clad in gleaming
gold and copper; her back is indigo blue. Would you see her at work,
you need but visit the lower twigs of the common black poplar, at the
edge of the meadows, about the end of May.

Whereas, up at the top, the fond spring breezes shake the majestic
green distaff and set the leaves quivering on their flattened stalks,
down below, in a zone of calmer air, the tender shoots of the year
remain quiescent. Here, especially, far from the wind-tossed heights
opposed to labour, the Rhynchites works. And, as the workshop is just
at a man’s height, nothing is more easy than to observe the roller’s
actions.

Easy, yes, but distressing, under a blazing sun, if one would follow
the insect in all the detail of its methods and the progress of its
work. Moreover, this involves a great deal of walking, which takes up
time; and, again, it is not favourable to precise observations, which
require an indefinite amount of leisure and assiduous visits at all
hours of the day. It would, therefore, be greatly preferable to study
the animal comfortably at home; but it is above all things necessary
that she should lend herself to this plan.

The Rhynchites fulfils the condition excellently well. She is a
peaceable enthusiast and works on my table with the same zest as in her
poplar-tree. A few tender shoots, planted in fresh sand, under a
woven-wire cover, and renewed as soon as they begin to fade, take the
place of the tree in my study. The Weevil, not in the least
intimidated, devotes herself to her industry even under the lens of my
magnifying-glass and supplies me with as many scrolls as I could wish
for.

Let us watch her at work. She picks the leaf which she proposes to roll
from the young shoots sprouting in sheaves at the base of the trunk,
but picks it not among the lower leaves, which are already the correct
green and of a firm texture, nor yet among the terminal leaves, which
are in a fair way of growing. Above, they are too young, not wide
enough; below, they are too old, too tough, too hard to manage.

The leaf selected belongs to the intermediate rows. As yet of a
doubtful green, in which yellow predominates, soft and glossy with
varnish, it has, or has very nearly, the final dimensions. Its
denticulations swell into delicate glandular pads, whence oozes a
little of the viscous matter that tars the buds at the moment when
their bracts become disjoined.

A word now on the equipment in respect of tools. The legs are supplied
with double claws shaped like the meat-hooks of a steel-yard. The lower
side of the tarsi carries a thick tuft of white bristles. Thus shod,
the insect clambers very nimbly up the most slippery vertical walls; it
can stand and run like a fly, with its back downwards, on the ceiling
of a glass bell. This characteristic alone is enough to suggest the
subtle sense of equilibrium which the Weevil’s work will demand.

The curved and powerful beak or rostrum, without being exaggerated in
size, spreads at the tip into a spatula ending in a pair of fine,
shear-like mandibles. It makes an excellent bodkin, which plays the
first or leading part in the whole work. The leaf, in fact, cannot be
rolled in its actual condition. It is a live blade which, owing to the
afflux of the sap and the tonicity of the tissues, would resume its
flat formation in proportion as the insect endeavoured to curve it. The
dwarf insect has not the strength to master a piece of these
dimensions, to roll it up so long as it retains the elasticity of life.
This is evident to our eyes; it is evident also to the eyes of the
Weevil.

How is she to obtain the degree of inert suppleness required in the
circumstances? We ourselves would say:

“We must pluck the leaf, let it fall to the earth, and manipulate it on
the ground when it is rightly withered.”

The Curculionid is cleverer than we at this sort of business and does
not share our opinion. What she says to herself is:

“On the ground, amid the obstruction of the grass, my labours would be
impracticable. I want elbow-room; I want the thing to hang in the air,
where there are no obstacles of any kind. And there is a more serious
consideration: my grub would refuse a rank, dried-up sausage; it
insists on food that retains a certain freshness. The scroll which I
intend for its consumption must be not a dead leaf, but an impaired
leaf, not altogether deprived of the juices with which the tree
supplies it. I must wean my joint, but not kill it outright, so that
the dying leaf may remain in its place for the few days during which
the extreme youth of the worm lasts.”

The mother, therefore, having made her selection, takes up her stand on
the stalk of the leaf and there patiently drives in her rostrum,
turning it with a persistency that denotes the great importance of this
thrust of the bodkin. A little wound opens, a fairly deep wound, which
soon becomes a point of mortification.

It is done: the sap-conduits are cut and allow only a scanty proportion
to ooze through to the edge. At the injured point, the leaf gives way
under the weight; it bends vertically, withers a little and soon
acquires the requisite flexibility. The moment has come to work it.

That bodkin-thrust represents, although much less scientifically, the
prick of the hunting Hymenopteron’s sting. The latter wants for her
offspring a prey now dead, now paralyzed; she knows, with the
thoroughness of a consummate anatomist, at what points it behoves her
to insert the sting to obtain either sudden death or merely a cessation
of movement. The Rhynchites requires for her young a leaf rendered
flexible ad hoc, half-alive, paralyzed in a fashion, a leaf that can
easily be shaped into a scroll; she is wonderfully familiar with the
little leaf-stalk, the petiole, in which the vessels that dispense the
foliaceous energy are collected in a tiny bundle; and she inserts her
drill there, there only and never any elsewhere. Thus, at one blow,
without much trouble, she effects the ruin of the aqueduct. Where can
the beaked insect have learnt her astute trade as a drier-up of wells?

The leaf of the poplar is an irregular rhombus, a spear-head whose
sides widen into pointed pinions. The manufacture of the scroll begins
with one of those two lateral corners, the right or left indifferently.
Notwithstanding the hanging posture of the leaf, which makes the upper
or lower surface equally easy of access, the insect never fails to take
its position on the upper side. It has its reasons, dictated by the
laws of mechanics. The upper surface of the piece, which is smoother
and more flexible, has to form the inside of the scroll; the lower
surface, which has greater elasticity because of its powerful veins,
must occupy the outside. The statics of the small-brained Weevil agree
with those of the scientists.

See her at work. She stands on the rolling-line, with three of her legs
on the part already rolled and the three opposite on the part still
free. Solidly fixed, on both sides, with her claws and tufts, she
obtains a purchase with the legs on the one side, while making her
effort with the legs on the other. The two halves of the machine
alternate like motors, so that, at one time, the formed cylinder rolls
over the free blade and, at another, the free blade moves and is laid
upon the scroll already made.

There is nothing regular, however, about these alternations, which
depend upon circumstances known to the animal alone. Perhaps they
merely afford a means of resting for a little while without stopping a
work that does not allow of interruption. In the same way, our two
hands mutually relieve each other by taking it in turns to carry the
burden.

It is impossible to form an exact image of the difficulty overcome,
without watching, for hours on end, the obstinate straining of the
legs, which tremble with exhaustion and threaten to spoil everything if
one of them let go at the wrong moment, or without seeing with what
prudence the roller never releases one claw until the five others are
firmly fixed. On the one side are three points of support, on the other
three points of traction; and the six are shifted, one by one, little
by little, without for a moment allowing their connected mechanical
system to flag. A single instant of forgetfulness or weariness would
cause the rebellious piece to unroll its scroll and escape from the
manipulator’s grasp.

The work is accomplished, moreover, in an uncomfortable position. The
leaf hangs very much on the slant or even vertically. Its surface is
varnished, is smooth as glass. But the worker is shod accordingly. With
her tufted soles, she scales the polished perpendicular; with her
twelve meat-hooks, she tackles the slippery floor. Yet this fine set of
tools does not rid the operation of all its difficulties. I find it no
easy matter to follow the progress of the rolling with the
magnifying-glass. The hands of a watch do not move more slowly. The
insect stands for a long time, at the same point, with its claws firmly
fixed; it is waiting for the leaf to be mastered and to cease
resistance. Here, of course, there is no gumming-process to catch hold
and keep the fresh surfaces glued together. The stability depends
purely upon the flexion acquired. And so it is not unusual for the
elasticity of the piece to overcome the efforts of the worker and
partly to unroll the more or less forward work. Stubbornly, with the
same impassive slowness, the insect begins all over again, replaces the
insubordinate piece. No, the Weevil is not one to allow herself to be
upset by failure: she knows too well what patience and time will do.

The Rhynchites usually works backwards. When her line is finished, she
is careful not to abandon the fold which she has just made and return
to the starting-point to begin another. The part last folded is not yet
fastened sufficiently; if left to itself too soon, it might easily
rebel and flatten out again. The insect, therefore, persists at this
extreme point, which is more exposed than the rest; and then, without
letting go, makes her way backwards to the other end, still with
patient slowness. In this way, an added firmness is imparted to the
fold; and the next fold is prepared. At the end of the line there is a
fresh prolonged halt, followed by a fresh backward motion. Even so does
the husbandman’s plough-share alternate its work on the furrows.

Less frequently, when, no doubt, the leaf is found to be so limp as to
entail no risk, the insect abandons the fold which it has just made,
without going over it again in the opposite direction, and quickly
scrambles to the starting-point to contrive a new one.

There we are at last. Coming and going from top to bottom and from
bottom to top, the insect, by dint of stubborn dexterity, has rolled
its leaf. It is now on the extreme edge of the border, at the lateral
corner opposite to that whereat the work commenced. This is the
keystone upon which the stability of the rest depends. The Rhynchites
redoubles her cares and patience. With the end of her rostrum, expanded
spatulawise, she presses, at one point after the other, the edge to be
fixed, even as the tailor presses the recalcitrant edges of a seam with
his iron. For a long, a very long time, without moving, she pushes and
pushes, awaiting the proper adhesion. Point by point, the whole of the
corner welt is fastidiously sealed.

How is adhesion obtained? If only some thread or other were brought
into play, one would readily look upon the rostrum as a sewing-machine
planting its needle perpendicularly into the stuff. But the comparison
is not allowable: there is no filament employed in the work. The
explanation of the adherence lies elsewhere.

The leaf is young, we said; the fine pads of its denticulations are
glands whence ooze liquid beads of glue. These drops of viscous matter
are the gum, the sealing-wax. With the pressure of its beak, the insect
makes it gush more plentifully from the glands. It then has only to
hold the signet in position and wait for the impress to acquire
consistency. Taken all round, it is our method of sealing a letter. If
it hold ever so little, the leaf, losing its elasticity gradually as it
withers, will soon cease to fly back and will of itself retain the
scroll-form imposed upon it.

The work is done. It is a cigar of the diameter of a thick straw and
about an inch long. It hangs perpendicularly from the end of the
bruised and bent stalk. It has taken the whole of a day to make. After
a short spell of rest, the mother tackles a second leaf and, working by
night, obtains another scroll. Two in twenty-four hours are as much as
the most diligent can achieve.

Now what is the roller’s object? Would she go to the length of
preparing preserves for her own use? Obviously not: no insect, where
itself alone is concerned, devotes such care and patience to the
preparation of food. It is only in view of the family that it hoards so
industriously. The Rhynchites’ cigar forms the future dowry.

Let us unroll it. Here, between the layers of the scroll, is an egg;
often there are two, three, or even four. They are oval, pale-yellow
and like fine drops of amber. Their adhesion to the leaf is very
slight; the least jerk loosens them. They are distributed without
order, pushed more or less deeply in the thickness of the cigar and
always isolated, singly. We find them in the centre of the scroll,
almost at the corner where the rolling begins; we come upon them
between the different layers and even near the edge which is sealed in
glue with the signet of the rostrum.

Without interrupting her work on the scroll, without relaxing the
tension of her claws, the mother has laid them between the lips of the
fold in formation, as she felt them coming, one by one, duly matured,
at the end of her oviduct. She procreates in the midst of her toil in
the factory, between the wheels of the machine that would be thrown out
of gear if she snatched a moment’s rest. Manufacture and laying go
hand-in-hand. Short-lived, with but two or three weeks before her and
an expensive family to settle, the Rhynchites would fear to waste her
time in churching.

This is not all: on the same leaf, not far from the scroll that is
being laboriously rolled, we almost always find the male. What is he
doing there, the idler? Is he watching the work as a mere inquisitive
onlooker, who happened to be passing and stopped to see the machinery
go round? Is he interested in the business? Does he ever feel inclined
to lend a helping hand, in case of need?

One would say so. From time to time, I see him take his stand behind
the manufacturer, in the groove of the fold, hang on to the cylinder
and join for a little in the work. But this is done without zeal and
awkwardly. Half a turn of the wheel, or hardly; and that’s enough for
him. After all, it is not his business. He moves away, to the other end
of the leaf; he waits, he looks on.

Let us give him credit for this attempt: paternal assistance in the
settling of the family is very rare among insects; let us congratulate
him on the help he gives, but not beyond measure: his was an interested
aid. It is to him a means of declaring his flame and urging his merits.

And, in fact, after several refusals, notwithstanding the advances made
by a brief collaboration at the scroll, the impatient one is accepted.
Things happen in the work-yard. For ten minutes, the rolling is
suspended; but the workwoman’s legs, stubbornly contracted, are careful
not to let go: were their effort to cease, the scroll would unroll at
once. There must be no interruption of work for this brief diversion,
the animal’s only pleasure.

The stopping of the machine, which is always held tight so as to keep
the recalcitrant roll in subjection, does not last long. The male
withdraws to a slight distance, without quitting the leaf, and the task
is resumed. Sooner or later, before the seals are put upon the work, a
new visit is paid by the dawdler, who, under pretence of assisting,
plants his claws for a moment into the rolling piece, plucks up courage
and renews his exploits with the same vigour as though nothing had yet
happened. And this is repeated three or four times during the making of
a single cigar, so much so that one asks one’s self whether the
depositing of each germ does not demand the direct cooperation of the
insatiable suitor.

According to entomological rules, once the fun is over, everything
should relapse into calmness and each mother should to work at those
cigars without further disturbance. In this case, the general law
relents. I have never seen a scroll shaped without a male lurking in
the neighbourhood; and, when I have had the patience to wait, I have
always witnessed manifold pairings. These weddings repeated for each
germ puzzle me. Where, relying on the books, I expected uniformity, I
find uncertainty.

This is not an isolated case. I will mention a second and one that is
even more striking. It is supplied by the Capricorn (Cerambyx Heros). I
bring up a few couples in the volery, with sliced pears for food and
oak billets wherein to lay the eggs. Pairing-time lasts during nearly
the whole of July. For four weeks, the great horned one does nothing
but mount his companion, who, gripped by her rider, wanders at will
and, with the tip of her oviduct, selects the fissures in the bark
best-suited to receive the eggs.

At long intervals, the Cerambyx alights and goes to refresh himself
with a piece of pear. Then, suddenly, he stamps his feet as though he
had gone mad; he returns with a frantic rush, clambers into the saddle
and resumes his position, of which he makes free use at all hours of
the night and day.

At the moment when an egg is being deposited, he keeps quiet: with his
hairy tongue, he polishes the back of the egg-layer, which is a
Capricorn’s way of caressing; but, the instant after, he renews his
attempts, which are usually crowned with success. There is no end to
it!

The pairing continues in this manner for a month: it does not cease
until the ovaries are exhausted. Then, mutually worn out, having
nothing more to do on the trunk of the oak, husband and wife separate,
languish for a few days and die.

What conclusion are we to draw from this extraordinary persistency in
the Cerambyx, the Rhynchites and many others? Simply this: our truths
are but provisional; assailed by the truths of to-morrow, they become
entangled with so many contradictory facts that the last word of
knowledge is doubt.

In the spring, while the leaves of the poplar are being worked into
scrolls, another Rhynchites, she also gorgeously attired, makes cigars
of the leaves of the vine. She is a little stouter, of a metallic
gold-green turning to blue. Were she but larger, the splendid Vine
Weevil would occupy a very respectable place among the gems of
entomology.

To attract our eyes, she has something better than the brilliancy of
her appearance: she has her industry, which makes her hated by the
vine-grower, so jealous of his property. The peasant knows her; he even
speaks of her by a special name, an honour rarely bestowed in the world
of the smaller animals.

The rural vocabulary is rich where plants, but very poor where insects
are concerned. A couple of dozen words, inextricably confused owing to
their general character, represent the whole of entomological
nomenclature in the Provençal idiom, which becomes so expressive and so
fertile the moment it has to do with any sort of vegetation, sometimes
even with a poor blade of grass which one would believe known to the
botanist alone.

The man of the soil is interested first and foremost in the plant, the
great foster-mother; the rest leaves him indifferent. Magnificent
adornment, curious habits, marvels of instinct: all these say nothing
to him. But to touch his vine, to eat grass that doesn’t belong to one:
what a heinous crime! Quick, give the malefactor a nickname, to serve
as a penal collar!

This time, the Provençal peasant has gone out of his way to invent a
special word: he calls the cigar-roller the Bécaru. Here the scientific
expression and the rural expression agree fully. Rhynchites and Bécaru
are exact equivalents: each refers to the insect’s long beak.

The Vine Weevil adopts the same method in her work as her cousin of the
poplar. The leaf is first pricked with the rostrum at a spot in the
stalk, which provokes a stoppage of the sap and flexibility in the
withered blade. The rolling begins at the corner of one of the lower
lobes, with the smooth, green upper surface within and the cottony
strongly-veined lower surface without.

But the great width of the leaf and its deep indentations hardly ever
allow of regular work from one end to the other. Abrupt folds occur
instead and repeatedly alter the direction of the rolling, leaving now
the green and now the cottony surface on the outside, without any
appreciable order or arrangement, as though by chance. The poplar-leaf,
with its simple form and its moderate size, gives a neat scroll; the
vine-leaf, with its cumbersome girth and its complicated outline,
produces a shapeless cigar, an untidy parcel.










THE HALICTI


CHAPTER XV

THE HALICTI


Do you know the Halicti? Perhaps not. There is no great harm done: it
is quite possible to enjoy the few pleasures of life without knowing
the Halicti. Nevertheless, when questioned with persistence, those
humble creatures with no history can tell us some very singular things;
and their acquaintance is not to be disdained if we desire to enlarge
our ideas a little upon the bewildering rabble of this world. Since we
have nothing better to do, let us look into these Halicti. They are
worth the trouble.

How shall we recognize them? They are manufacturers of honey, generally
slimmer and slenderer than the Bee of our hives. They constitute a
numerous group that varies greatly in size and colouring. Some there
are that exceed the dimensions of the Common Wasp; others might be
compared with the Domestic Fly, or are even smaller. In the midst of
this variety, which forms the despair of the novice, one characteristic
remains invariable. Every Halictus carries the plainly-legible
certificate of her guild.

Look at the last ring, at the tip of the belly, on the dorsal surface.
If your capture be an Halictus, there will be here a smooth and shiny
line, a narrow groove along which the sting slides up and down when the
insect is on the defensive. This slide for the unsheathed weapon
denotes some member of the Halictus tribe, without distinction of size
or colour. No elsewhere, in the sting-bearing order, is this original
sort of groove in use. It is the distinctive mark, the blazon of the
family.

The works begin in April, discreetly and betrayed only by tiny mounds
of fresh earth. There is no animation in the work-yards. The labourers
show themselves very seldom, so busy are they at the bottom of their
pits. At moments, here and there, the summit of a mole-hill moves and
tumbles down the slopes of the cone: it is a worker coming up with her
armful of rubbish and shooting it outside, without showing herself in
the open. Nothing more for the moment.

May arrives, gay with flowers and sunshine. The navvies of April have
turned themselves into harvesters. At every moment, I see them
settling, all befloured with yellow, atop of the mole-hills turned into
craters. The largest is Halictus Zebrus (Walck), whom I often see
building her nest in the walks of my garden. Let us watch her closely.
When provisioning-time begins, a parasite arrives, coming I know not
whence. She will make us witness an unbridled act of brigandage.

In May, I visit my most populous colony daily, at ten o’clock in the
morning, when the victualling-operations are in full swing. Seated on a
low chair in the sun, with my back bent and my arms upon my knees, I
watch, without moving, until dinner-time. What attracts me is a
parasite, a trumpery Gnat, the daring tyrant of the Halictus.

Has the jade a name? I like to think so, without, however, caring to
waste my time in enquiries that can have little interest for the
reader. Facts clearly stated are preferable to the dry minutiæ of
nomenclature. Let me content myself with giving a brief description of
the culprit. She is a Dipteron five millimetres long. [34] Eyes, dark
red; face, white. Corselet, ashy grey, with five rows of fine black
dots, which are the roots of stiff bristles pointing backwards. Greyish
belly, pale below. Black legs.

She abounds in the colony under observation. Crouching in the sun, near
a burrow, she waits. As soon as the Halictus arrives from the harvest,
her legs yellow with pollen, she darts forth and pursues her, keeping
behind her in all the turns of her wavering flight. At last, the
Hymenopteron suddenly dives indoors. No less suddenly, the other
settles on the mole-hill, quite close to the entrance. Motionless, with
her head turned towards the front-door, she waits for the Bee to finish
her business. The latter reappears at last and, for a few seconds,
stands on the threshold of her dwelling, with her head and thorax
outside the hole. The Gnat, on her side, does not stir.

Often, they are face to face, separated by a space no wider than a
finger’s breadth. Neither of them shows the least excitement. The
Halictus—judging, at least, by her tranquillity—takes no notice of the
parasite lying in wait for her; the parasite, on the other hand,
displays no fear of being punished for her audacity. She remains
imperturbable, she, the dwarf, in the presence of the colossus who
could crush her with a blow of one of her legs.

In vain I peer to discover some sign of apprehension on either side:
nothing in the Halictus points to a knowledge of the danger run by her
family; nor does anything in the Dipteron betray the dread of a severe
correction. Plunderer and plundered stare at each other for a moment;
and that is all.

If she liked, the genial giantess could rip up with her claw the little
bandit that ruins her home; she could crunch her with her mandibles,
pink her with her stiletto. She does nothing of the sort, but leaves
the brigand in peace, to sit quite close, motionless, with her red eyes
fixed on the threshold of the house. Why this fatuous clemency?

The Bee departs. Forthwith, the Gnat walks in, with no more ceremony
than if she were entering her own place. She now chooses among the
victualled cells at her ease, for they are all open; she leisurely
settles her eggs. No one will disturb her until the Bee’s return. To
dust one’s legs with pollen, to distend one’s crop with syrup is a work
that takes long a-doing; and the intruder, therefore, has time to spare
wherein to commit her felony. Moreover, her chronometer is
well-regulated and gives the exact measure of the length of absence.
When the Halictus comes back from the fields, the Gnat has decamped. In
some favourable spot, not far from the burrow, she awaits the
opportunity for a fresh misdeed.

What would happen if a parasite were surprised in her work by the Bee?
Nothing serious. I have seen them, greatly daring, follow the Halictus
right into the cave and remain there for some time while the mixture of
pollen and honey is being prepared. Unable to make use of the paste so
long as the harvester is kneading it, they go back to the open air and
wait on the threshold for the Bee to come out. They return to the
sunlight, unflustered, with calm steps: a clear proof that they have
suffered no unpleasantness in the depths where the Halictus works.

A tap on the Gnat’s neck if she become too enterprising in the
neighbourhood of the cake: that is all that the lady of the house seems
to allow herself, to drive away the intruder. There is no serious
affray between the robber and the robbed. This is apparent from the
bold and undamaged aspect of the dwarf who returns from visiting the
giantess engaged down in the burrow.

The Bee, when she comes home, whether laden with provisions or not,
hesitates for a while; in a series of rapid zigzags, she moves
backwards and forwards, to and fro, at a short distance from the
ground. This intricate flight at first suggests the idea that the
Hymenopteron is trying to lead her persecutress astray by means of an
inextricable net-work of marches and counter-marches. That would
certainly be a prudent move on her part; but so much wisdom appears to
be denied her.

Her perturbation does not concern the enemy, but rather the difficulty
of finding her dwelling, amid the confusion of the mole-hills
encroaching one upon the other and the disorder of the lanes of the
hamlet, which, owing to landslips of fresh rubbish, alter in appearance
from one day to the next. Her hesitation is manifest, for she often
blunders and alights at the entrance to a burrow that is not hers. The
mistake is at once perceived from the petty details of the doorway.

The investigation is resumed with the same flight in swing-like curves,
intermingled with sudden excursions to a distance. At last, the burrow
is recognized. The Halictus dives into it with a rush; but, however
prompt her disappearance underground, the Gnat is there, perched on the
threshold, with her eyes turned to the entrance, waiting for the Bee to
come out, so that she may visit the honey-jars in her turn.

When the house-owner ascends, the other draws back a little, just
enough to leave a free passage and no more. Why should she put herself
out? The meeting is so peaceful that, short of further information, one
would not suspect the presence face to face of a destroyer and
destroyed. Far from being intimidated by the sudden arrival of the
Halictus, the Gnat pays hardly any attention; and, in the same way, the
Halictus takes no notice of her persecutress, unless the bandit pursue
her and worry her on the wing. Then, with a sudden bend, the
Hymenopteron makes off.

The parasite of the Halictus is in a difficult position. The homing Bee
has her booty of honey in her crop and her harvest of flour on the
brushes of her legs: the first is inaccessible to the thief; the second
is in the form of powder and devoid of stable support. And even then it
is quite insufficient. To collect the wherewithal to knead the round
loaf, the journeys have to be repeated. When the necessary amount is
obtained, the Halictus will pound it with the tip of her mandibles and
shape it with her feet into a globule. The Dipteron’s egg, were it
present among the materials, would certainly be in danger during this
manipulation.

The alien egg, therefore, must be laid on the made bread; and, as the
preparation takes place underground, the parasite is under the forced
necessity of going down to the Halictus. With inconceivable daring, she
does go down, even when the Bee is there. Whether through cowardice or
foolish indulgence, the dispossessed insect lets the other have its
way.

The object of the Gnat, with her tenacious lying-in-wait and her
reckless burglaries, is not to feed herself at the harvester’s expense:
she could find the wherewithal to live on in the flowers, with much
less trouble than her thieving trade involves. The most, I think, that
she can allow herself to do in the Halictus’ cellars is demurely to
taste the victuals, in order to ascertain their quality. Her great, her
sole business is to settle her family. The stolen goods are not for
herself, but for her sons.

Let us dig up the pollen-loaves. We shall find them most often crumbled
with no regard to economy, simply abandoned to waste. We shall see two
or three maggots, with pointed mouths, moving in the yellow flour
scattered over the floor of the cell. These are the Dipteron’s progeny.
With them we sometimes find the lawful owner, the worm of the Halictus,
but stunted and emaciated with fasting. His gluttonous companions,
without otherwise molesting him, deprive him of the best of everything.
The wretched starveling dwindles, shrivels and disappears with little
delay. His corpse, a mere atom, blended with the remaining provisions,
supplies the maggots with one mouthful the more.

And what does the mother Halictus do in this disaster? She is free to
visit her grubs at any moment; she has but to put her head into the
passage of the house: she cannot fail to be apprised of their distress.
The squandered loaf, the disorder of swarming vermin are events easily
recognized. Why does she not take the intruders by the skin of the
belly? To crush them with a bite of her mandibles, to fling them out of
doors were the business of a second. And the foolish creature never
thinks of it, leaves the famishers in peace!

She does worse. When the time of the nymphosis comes, the Halictus
mother goes to the cells rifled by the parasite and closes them with an
earthen plug as carefully as she does the rest. This final barricade,
an excellent precaution when the box is occupied by an Halictus in
course of metamorphosis, becomes a screaming absurdity when the
Dipteron has passed that way. Instinct does not hesitate in the face of
this incongruity: it seals up emptiness. I say, emptiness, because the
crafty maggot hastens to decamp the instant that the victuals are
consumed, as though it foresaw an insuperable obstacle for the coming
Fly: it quits the cell before the Hymenopteron closes it.

To rascally guile the parasite adds prudence. All, until there is none
of them left, abandon the clay homes which would be their undoing, once
the entrance was plugged up. The earthy retreat, so grateful to the
tender skin, thanks to its polished coating, so free from humidity,
thanks to its waterproof glaze, ought, one would think, to make an
excellent waiting-place. The maggots will have none of it. Lest they
should find themselves walled in when they become frail Gnats, they go
away and disperse in the neighbourhood of the ascending pit.

My digging operations, in fact, always reveal the pupæ outside the
cells, never inside. I find them enshrined, one by one, in the body of
the clayey earth, in a narrow niche which the emigrant worm has
contrived to make for itself. Next spring, when the hour comes for
leaving, the adult insect has but to creep through the rubbish, which
is easy work.

Another and no less imperative reason compels this change of abode on
the parasite’s part. In July, a second generation of the Halictus is
procreated. The Dipteron, reduced, on her side, to a single brood,
remains in the pupa state and awaits the spring of the following year
before effecting her transformation. The honey-gatherer resumes her
work in the natal hamlet; she avails herself of the pits and cells
constructed in the spring, saving no little time thereby. The whole
elaborate structure has remained in good condition. It needs but a few
repairs to make the old house habitable.

Now what would happen if the Bee, so intent upon cleanliness, were to
find a pupa in the cell which she is sweeping? She would treat the
cumbersome object as she would a piece of old plaster. It would be no
more to her than any other refuse, a bit of gravel, which, seized with
the mandibles, crushed perhaps, would be sent to join the rubbish-heap
outside. Once removed from the soil and exposed to the inclemencies of
the weather, the pupa would inevitably perish.

I admire this lucid foresight of the maggot, which foregoes the comfort
of the moment for the security of the future. Two dangers threaten it:
to be immured in a casket whence the Fly can never issue; or else to
die out of doors, from the harsh effects of the air, when the Bee
sweeps out the restored cells. To avoid this two-fold peril, it
absconds before the door is closed, before the Halictus sets her house
in order in July.

Let us now see what comes of the parasite’s intrusion. In the course of
June, when peace is established in the Halictus’ home, I dig up my
largest colony, comprising some fifty burrows, thoroughly. Not an atom
of the underground distress shall escape my eye. There are four of us
engaged in sifting the excavated earth through our fingers. What one
has examined another takes up and examines in his turn; and then
another and another yet. The returns are heart-rending. We do not
succeed in finding one single nymph of the Halictus. The populous city
has perished in its entirety; and its place has been taken by the
Dipteron. The latter superabounds in the form of pupæ, which I collect
in order to trace their evolution.

The year runs its course; and the little russet barrels, into which the
original maggots have hardened and contracted, remain stationary. They
are seeds endowed with latent life. The heats of July do not rouse them
from their torpor. In that month, the period of the second generation
of the Halictus, there is a sort of truce of God: the parasite rests
and the Bee works in peace. If hostilities were to be resumed straight
away, as murderous in summer as they were in spring, the progeny of the
Halictus, over-endangered, might possibly disappear. The lull of the
second brood puts things in order once more.

In April, when Halictus Zebrus, in search of a good place for her
burrows, wanders with a wavering flight through the garden-walks, the
parasite, on its side, hastens to hatch. Oh, the precise, the terrible
agreement between those two calendars, the calendar of the persecutor
and the persecuted! At the very moment when the Bee comes out, here is
the Gnat: her work of extermination by famine is ready to begin all
over again.

Were this an isolated case, one’s thoughts would not dwell upon it: an
Halictus more or less in the world makes little difference in the
general balance. But, alas, brigandage in all its forms is the rule in
the eternal conflict of living things! From the lowest to the highest,
every producer is imposed upon by the unproductive. Man himself, whose
exceptional rank ought to raise him above such pettiness, excels in
this ferocious eagerness. He says to himself that business means
getting hold of the money of other people, even as the Gnat says to
herself that business means getting hold of the Halictus’ honey. And,
to play the brigand to better purpose, he invents war, the art of
killing wholesale and of doing with glory that which, when done on a
smaller scale, leads to the gallows.

Shall we never behold the realization of that sublime dream which is
sung on Sundays in the smallest village church: Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis! If war affected humanity
alone, perhaps the future would have peace in store for us, seeing that
generous minds are working for it with might and main; but the scourge
also rages in the brute, which, in its obstinate way, will never listen
to reason. Once the evil is laid down as a general condition, it
perhaps becomes incurable. Life in the future, there is every cause to
fear, will be what it is to-day, a perpetual massacre.

Whereupon, by a desperate effort of the imagination, one pictures to
one’s self a giant capable of juggling with the planets. He is
irresistible strength; he is also law and justice. He knows of our
battles, our butcheries, our farm-burnings, our town-burnings, our
brutal triumphs; he knows our explosives, our shells, our
torpedo-boats, our iron-clads and all our cunning engines of
destruction; he knows as well the appalling extent of the appetites
among all creatures, down to the very lowest. Well, if that just, that
mighty one held the earth under his thumb, would he hesitate whether he
ought to crush it?

He would not hesitate. He would let things take their course. He would
say to himself:

“The old belief is right; the earth is a rotten nut, gnawed by the
vermin of evil. It is a barbarous essay, a painful stage towards a
kindlier destiny. Let it be: order and justice are waiting at the end.”










CHAPTER XVI

THE HALICTI: THE PORTRESS


The home dug by the solitary Bee in early spring remains, when summer
comes, the joint inheritance of the members of the family. There were
ten cells, or thereabouts, underground. Now from these cells there have
issued none but females. This is the rule among the three species of
Halicti. They have two generations in each year. That of the spring
consists of females only; that of the summer comprises both males and
females, in almost equal numbers.

The household, therefore, if not reduced by accidents, especially by
the famine-producing Gnat, would consist of half-a-score of sisters,
nothing but sisters, all equally industrious and all capable of
procreating without a nuptial partner. On the other hand, the maternal
dwelling is no hovel; far from it: the entrance-gallery, the principal
room of the house, will serve very well, after a few odds and ends of
refuse have been swept away. This will be so much gained in time, ever
precious to the Bee. The cells at the bottom, the clay cabins, are also
nearly intact. To make use of them, it will be enough to freshen up the
stucco with the polisher of the tongue.

Well, which of the survivors, all equally entitled to the succession,
will inherit the house? There are six of them, seven, or more,
according to the chances of mortality. To whose share will the maternal
dwelling fall?

There is no quarrel between the interested parties. The mansion is
recognized as common property without dispute. The sister Bees come and
go peacefully through the same door, attend to their business, pass and
let the others pass. Down at the bottom of the pit, each has her little
demesne, her group of cells dug at the cost of fresh toil, when the old
ones, now insufficient in number, are occupied. In these recesses, the
rights of individual property prevail: each mother works privately,
jealous of her belongings and her isolation. Every elsewhere, traffic
is free to all.

The exits and entrances in the working fortress provide a spectacle of
the highest interest. A harvester arrives from the fields, the brushes
of her legs dusted with pollen. If the door be open, the Bee at once
dives underground. To tarry on the threshold would mean waste of time;
and the business is urgent. Sometimes, several appear upon the scene
almost at the same moment. The passage is too narrow for two,
especially when they have to avoid any inopportune contact that would
make the floury burden fall to the floor. The nearest to the opening
enters quickly. The others, drawn up on the threshold in the order of
their arrival, respectful of one another’s rights, await their turn. As
soon as the first disappears, the second follows after her and is
herself swiftly followed by the third and then the others, one by one.

Sometimes, again, there is a meeting between a Bee about to come out
and a Bee about to go in. Then the latter draws back a little and makes
way for the former. The politeness is reciprocal. I see some who, when
on the point of emerging from the pit, go down again and leave the
passage free for the one who has just arrived. Thanks to this mutual
spirit of accommodation, the traffic of the household proceeds without
impediment.

Let us keep our eyes open. There is something better than the
well-preserved order of the entrances. When an Halictus appears,
returning from her round of the flowers, we see a sort of trap-door,
which closed the house, suddenly fall and give a free passage. As soon
as the new arrival has entered, the trap rises back into its place,
almost level with the ground, and closes the door anew. The same thing
happens when the Bees go out. At a request from within, the trap
descends, the door opens and the Bee flies away. The outlet is closed
forthwith.

What can this shutter be which, descending or ascending in the cylinder
of the pit, after the fashion of a piston, opens and closes the house
at each departure and at each arrival? It is an Halictus, who has
become the portress of the establishment. With her large head, she
makes an impassable barrier at the top of the entrance-hall. If any one
belonging to the house wants to go in or out, she “pulls the cord,”
that is to say, she withdraws to a spot where the gallery widens and
leaves room for two. The other passes. She then at once returns to the
orifice and blocks it with the top of her head. Motionless, ever on the
look-out, she does not leave her post save to drive away importunate
visitors.

Let us profit by her brief appearances outside. We recognize in her an
Halictus similar to the others, who are now busy harvesting; but the
top of her head is bald and her dress is dingy and threadbare. The
handsome striped belts, alternately brown and ruddy-brown, have almost
vanished from her half-stripped back. Her old, tattered clothes,
well-worn with work, explain the matter clearly.

The Bee who mounts guard and performs the office of a portress at the
entrance to the burrow is older than the others. She is the foundress
of the establishment, the mother of the actual workers, the grandmother
of the present grubs. In the spring-time of her life, three months ago,
she wore herself out in solitary works. Now that her ovaries are dried
up, she takes a well-earned rest. No, rest is hardly the word. She
still works, she assists the household to the best of her power.
Incapable of being a mother for the second time, she becomes a
portress, opens the door to the members of her family and makes
strangers keep their distance.

The suspicious kid, looking through the chink, said to the wolf:

“Show me a white foot, or I shan’t open the door.”

No less suspicious, the grandmother says to each comer:

“Show me the yellow foot of an Halictus, or you won’t be let in.”

None is admitted to the dwelling unless she be recognized as a member
of the family.

See for yourself. Near the burrow passes an Ant, an unscrupulous
adventuress, who would not be sorry to know the meaning of the honeyed
fragrance that rises from the bottom of the cellar.

“Be off, or mind yourself!” says the portress, with a movement of her
neck.

As a rule, the threat suffices. The Ant decamps. Should she insist, the
watcher leaves her sentry-box, flings herself upon the saucy jade,
buffets her and drives her away. The moment the punishment has been
administered, she returns on guard and resumes her sentry-go.

Next comes the turn of a Leaf-cutter (Megachile Albocincta, Pérez),
who, unskilled in the art of burrowing, utilizes, after the manner of
her kind, the old galleries dug by others. Those of Halictus Zebrus
suit her very well, when the terrible Gnat of spring has left them
vacant for lack of heirs. Seeking for a home wherein to stack her
robinia-leaf honey-pots, she often makes a flying inspection of my
colonies of Halicti. A burrow seems to take her fancy; but, before she
sets foot on earth, her buzzing is noticed by the watchwoman, who
suddenly darts out and makes a few gestures on the threshold of her
door. That is all. The Leaf-cutter has understood. She removes herself.

Sometimes, the Megachile has time to alight and insert her head into
the mouth of the pit. In a moment, the portress is there, comes a
little higher and bars the way. Follows a not very serious contest. The
stranger quickly recognizes the rights of the first occupant and,
without insisting, goes to seek an abode elsewhere.

A consummate marauder (Cælioxys Caudata, Spinola), a parasite of the
Megachile, receives a sound drubbing under my eyes. She thought, the
scatter-brain, that she was entering the Leaf-cutter’s establishment!
She soon finds out her error; she meets the portress Halictus, who
administers a severe correction. She makes off at full speed. And so
with the others who, by mistake or ambition, seek to enter the burrow.

The same intolerance exists among grandmothers. About the middle of
July, when the animation of the colony is at its height, two categories
of Halicti are easily distinguishable: the young mothers and the old.
The former, much more numerous, brisk of movement and smartly arrayed,
come and go unceasingly from the burrows to the fields and from the
fields to the burrows. The latter, faded and dispirited, wander idly
from hole to hole. They look as though they had lost their way and were
incapable of finding their homes. Who are these vagabonds? I see
afflicted ones bereft of a family through the act of the odious spring
Gnat. Many burrows have gone under altogether. At the awakening of
summer, the mother found herself alone. She left her empty house and
set off in search of a dwelling where there were cradles to defend, a
guard to mount. But those fortunate nests already have their overseer,
the foundress, who, jealous of her rights, gives her unemployed
neighbour a cold reception. One sentry is enough; two would simply
block the narrow guard-room.

I am privileged at times to witness a fight between two grandmothers.
When the tramp in quest of employment appears outside the door, the
lawful occupant does not move from her post, does not withdraw into the
passage, as she would before an Halictus returning from the fields. Far
from making way, she threatens with her feet and mandibles. The other
hits back, tries to enter notwithstanding. Cuffs are exchanged. The
fray ends by the defeat of the stranger, who goes off to pick a quarrel
elsewhere.

These little scenes afford us a glimpse of certain details of the
highest interest in the manners of Halictus Zebrus. The mother who
builds her nest in the spring no longer leaves her home, once her works
are finished. Shut up at the bottom of the burrow, busied with the
minute cares of housekeeping, or else drowsing, she waits for her
daughters to come out. When, in the summer heats, the life of the
colony recommences, having naught to do outside as a harvester, she
stands sentry at the entrance to the hall, so as to let none in save
the workers of the home, her own daughters. She wards off the
ill-intentioned. None can enter without the door-keeper’s consent.

There is nothing to tell us that the watcher at moments deserts her
post. I never see her leave her house to go and refresh herself at the
flowers. Her age and her sedentary occupation, which implies no great
fatigue, relieve her perhaps of the need of nourishment. Perhaps, also,
the young ones returning from pillage disgorge a drop of the contents
of their crops for her benefit, from time to time. Fed or not, the old
one no longer goes out.

But what she does need is the joys of an active family. Many are
deprived of these. The Dipteron’s burglary has destroyed the household.
The sorely-tried Bees then abandon the deserted burrow. It is these
who, ragged and careworn, wander through the hamlet. They move in short
flights; more often, they remain motionless. It is they who, embittered
in their natures, offer violence to their acquaintances and seek to
dislodge them. They grow rarer and more languid from day to day; then
they disappear for good. What has become of them? The little grey
lizard had his eye on them: they are easy mouthfuls.

Those settled in their own demesne, those who guard the honey-factory
wherein their daughters, the heiresses of the maternal establishment,
work display a wonderful vigilance. The more I visit them, the more I
admire them. In the cool hours of the early morning, when the
harvesters, not finding the pollen-flour sufficiently ripened by the
sun, remain indoors, I see the portresses at their posts, at the top of
the gallery. Here, motionless, their heads flush with the earth, they
bar the door to all invaders. If I look at them too closely, they
retreat a little way and, in the shadow, await the indiscreet
observer’s departure.

I return when the harvest is in full swing, between eight o’clock and
twelve. There is now, as the Halicti go in or out, a succession of
prompt descents to open the door and ascents to close it. The portress
is in the busy exercise of her functions.

In the afternoon, the heat is too great, the workers do not go to the
fields. Retiring to the bottom of the house, they varnish the new
cells, they bake the round loaf that is to receive the egg. The
grandmother is still upstairs, stopping the door with her bald head.
For her, there is no nap during the stifling hours: the general safety
will not allow of it.

I come back again at night-fall, or even later. By the light of a
lantern, I rebehold the overseer, as zealous and assiduous as in the
day-time. The others are resting, but not she, for fear, apparently, of
nocturnal dangers known to herself alone. Does she nevertheless end by
descending to the quiet of the floor below? It seems probable, so
essential must rest be, after the fatigue of such a watch!

It is evident that, guarded in this manner, the burrow is exempt from
calamities similar to those which, too often, dispeople it in May. Let
the Gnat come now, if she dare, to steal the Halictus’ loaves! Her
audacity, her stubborn lurking ways will not conceal her from the
watchful one, who will put her to flight with a threatening gesture or,
if she persist, crush her with her nippers. She will not come; and we
know the reason: until spring returns, she is underground in the pupa
state.

But, in her absence, there is no lack, among the Muscid rabble, of
further sweaters of other insects’ labour. There are parasites for
every sort of business, for every sort of theft. And yet my daily
visits do not catch one of these in the neighbourhood of the July
burrows. How well the rascals know their trade! How well-aware are they
of the guard who keeps watch at the Halictus’ door! There is no foul
deed possible nowadays; and the result is that no Muscid puts in an
appearance and the tribulations of last spring are not repeated.

The grandmother who, dispensed by age from maternal worries, mounts
guard at the entrance of the home and watches over the safety of the
family tells us of sudden births in the genesis of the instincts; she
shows us an immediate capacity which nothing, either in her own past
conduct or in the actions of her daughters, could have led us to
suspect. Timorous in her prime, in the month of May, when she lived
alone in the burrow of her making, she has become gifted, in her
decline, with a superb contempt of danger and dares, in her impotence,
what she never dared do in her strength.

Formerly, when her tyrant, the Gnat, entered her home in her presence,
or, more often, stood at the entrance, face to face with herself, the
silly Bee did not stir, did not even threaten the red-eyed bandit, the
dwarf whose doom she could so easily have sealed. Was it terror on her
part? No, for she attended to her duties with her usual
punctiliousness; no, for the strong do not allow themselves to be thus
petrified by the weak. It was ignorance of the danger, it was sheer
foolishness.

And behold, to-day, the ignoramus of three months ago, without serving
any apprenticeship, knows the peril, knows it well. Every stranger that
appears is kept at a distance, without distinction of size or race. If
the threatening gesture be not enough, the keeper sallies forth and
flings herself upon the persistent one. Poltroonery has developed into
courage.

How has this change been brought about? I should like to picture the
Halictus gaining wisdom from the misfortunes of spring and capable
thenceforth of looking out for danger; I would gladly credit her with
having learnt in the stern school of experience the advantages of a
guard. I must give up the idea. If, by dint of gradual little acts of
progress, the Bee has gradually achieved the glorious invention of a
portress, how comes it that the fear of thieves is intermittent? It is
true that, alone, in May, she cannot stand permanently at her door: the
business of the house takes precedence of everything. But she ought, at
least, as soon as her offspring are persecuted, to know the parasite
and give chase when, at every moment, she finds her almost under her
feet and even in her house. Yet she pays no attention to her.

The harsh trials of the ancestors, therefore, have bequeathed naught to
her of a nature to alter her placid character; and her own tribulations
have nothing to say to the sudden awakening of her vigilance in July.
Like ourselves, the animal has its joys and its troubles. It uses the
former eagerly; it bothers but little about the latter, which is, when
all is said, the best way of realizing an animal enjoyment of life. To
mitigate these troubles and protect the progeny there is the
inspiration of the instinct, which is able to give a portress to the
Halictus without the counsels of experience.

When the victualling is finished, when the Halicti no longer sally
forth on harvesting intent nor return all floured over with their
burden, the old Bee is still at her post, as vigilant as ever. The
final preparations for the brood are made below; the cells are closed.
The door is kept until everything is finished. Then grandmother and
mothers leave the house. Exhausted by the performance of their duty,
they go, somewhere or other, to die.

In September appears the second generation, comprising both males and
females.










THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION


CHAPTER XVII

THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION


The Scorpion is an uncommunicative insect, occult in his manners and
unpleasant to deal with, so much so that his history, apart from the
findings of anatomy, is reduced to little or nothing. The scalpel of
the masters has made us acquainted with his organic structure; but, so
far as I know, no observer has thought of interviewing him, with any
sort of persistence, on the subject of his private habits. Ripped up,
after a preliminary maceration in alcohol, he is very well-known
indeed; acting within the domain of his instincts, he is hardly known
at all. And yet none of the segmented animals were more deserving of a
detailed biography. He has at all times struck the popular imagination,
even to the point of being numbered among the signs of the zodiac.

Fear made the gods, said Lucretius. Deified by terror, the Scorpion is
glorified in the sky by a constellation and in the almanac by the
symbol for the month of October. Let us try to make him speak.

Before housing my animals, let us give a brief description of them. The
common Black Scorpion (Scorpio Europæus, Lin.), distributed over the
greater part of South Europe, is known to all. He frequents the dark
spots near our dwelling-places; on rainy days in autumn, he makes his
way into our houses, sometimes even under our bed-clothes. The hateful
animal causes us more fright than damage. Although not unusual in my
present abode, his visits have never had consequences of the least
seriousness. The weird beast, overrated in reputation, is repulsive
rather than dangerous.

Much more to be feared and much less well-known generally is the
Languedocian Scorpion, isolated in the Mediterranean provinces. Far
from seeking our dwelling-houses, he keeps out of the way, in untilled
solitudes. Beside the Black Scorpion, he is a giant who, when
full-grown, measures eight to nine centimetres in length. [35] His
colouring is that of pale, withered straw.

The tail, which is really the animal’s belly, is a series of five
prismatic joints, like little kegs whose staves meet in undulating
ridges resembling strings of beads. Similar cords cover the arms and
fore-arms of the claws and divide them into long facets. Others run
sinuously along the back and imitate the joints of a cuirass, the
pieces of which might have been collected by a capricious
milling-punch. These bead-like projections produce a fiercely robust
armour, which is characteristic of the Languedocian Scorpion. It is as
though the animal had been fashioned out of chips with blows of the
adze.

The tail ends in a sixth joint, which is vesicular and smooth. This is
the gourd in which the poison, a formidable fluid resembling water in
appearance, is elaborated and held in reserve. A curved, brown and very
sharp sting ends the apparatus. A pore, visible only under the lens,
opens at some distance from the point. Through this, the venomous
humour is injected into the puncture. The sting is very hard and very
sharp-pointed. Holding it between the tips of my fingers, I can push it
through a sheet of cardboard as easily as though I were using a needle.

Owing to its powerful curve, the sting points downwards when the tail
is held in a straight line. To use his weapon, the Scorpion must
therefore raise it, turn it round and strike upwards. In fact, this is
his invariable practice. The tail bends over the animal’s back and
comes forward before pinking the adversary held down with the claws.
The animal, for that matter, is almost always in this posture: whether
in motion or at rest, he curves his tail over his chine. He very rarely
drags it slackened in a straight line.

The pincers, buccal hands suggesting the claws of the Crayfish, are
organs of battle and information. When moving forwards, the animal
holds them in front of him, with the fingers opened, to take stock of
things encountered on the way. When he wants to stab, the claws catch
the adversary and hold him motionless, while the sting operates above
the assailant’s back. Lastly, when he has to nibble a morsel for any
length of time, they serve as hands and keep the prey within reach of
the mouth. They are never used for walking, for support or for the work
of excavation.

That falls to the real legs. These are abruptly truncated and end in a
group of little curved, moveable claws, faced by a short, fine point,
which, in a manner of speaking, serves as a thumb. The stump is
finished off with rough bristles. The whole constitutes an excellent
grapnel, which explains the Scorpion’s capacity for roaming round the
trellis-work of my wire bells, for standing there very long in a
reversed position and, lastly, for clambering up a vertical wall,
notwithstanding his clumsiness and awkwardness.

Below, immediately after the legs, are the combs, strange organs, an
exclusive attribute of the Scorpions. They owe their name to their
structure, consisting of a long row of scales arranged close together
in the manner of the teeth of our ordinary combs. The anatomists are
inclined to ascribe to these the functions of a gearing-apparatus
capable of keeping the couple connected at the moment of pairing.

In order to observe their domestic manners, I lodge my captives in a
large glass volery, with big potsherds to serve them as a refuge. There
are a couple of dozen Scorpions, all told. In April, when the Swallow
returns to us and the Cuckoo sounds his first note, a revolution takes
place among my hitherto peaceable Scorpions. Several of them, in the
colonies which I have established in the open air, in my garden, go
wandering about at night and do not return to their homes. A more
serious matter: often, under the same piece of crockery, are two
Scorpions, of whom one is in the act of devouring the other. Is it a
matter of burglary among insects of the same order, who, falling into
vagabond ways at the commencement of the fine weather, thoughtlessly
enter their neighbours’ houses and there meet with their undoing,
unless they be the stronger? One would almost think it, so calmly is
the intruder eaten up, for days at a time and by small mouthfuls, even
as an ordinary prey would be.

Now here is something to give us a hint. The devoured are invariably of
middling size. Their lighter shade of colouring, their less protuberant
bellies mark them as males, always males. The others, larger, more
paunchy, and a little darker in shade, do not end in this unhappy
fashion. So it is probably not a case of brawls between neighbours who,
jealous of their solitude, soon settle the doom of any visitor and eat
him afterwards, a radical means of putting a stop to further
indiscretions; it is rather a question of nuptial rites tragically
performed by the matron after pairing.

Spring returns once more. I have prepared the large glass cage in
advance and peopled it with five-and-twenty inhabitants, each with his
bit of earthenware. From mid-April onwards, every evening, towards
night-fall, between seven and nine o’clock, great animation reigns
within this crystal palace. That which seemed deserted by day now
becomes a joyous scene. As soon as supper is finished, the whole
household runs out to look at it. A lantern hung outside the panes
allows us to follow events.

It is our diversion after the worries of the day; it is our play-house.
In this theatre of simple folk, the performances are so interesting
that, the moment the lantern is lighted, we all, old and young, come
and take our seats in the pit: all, including even Tom, the house-dog.
Tom, it is true, indifferent to Scorpion affairs, like the genuine
philosopher that he is, lies down at our feet and dozes, but only with
one eye, keeping the other always open on his friends, the children.

Let me try to give the reader an idea of what happens. A numerous
assembly soon gathers near the glass panes in the zone discreetly lit
by the lantern. Every elsewhere, here, there, single Scorpions walk
about and, attracted by the light, leave the shade and hasten to the
illuminated festival. The very moths betray no greater readiness to
flutter to the rays of our lamps. The newcomers mingle with the crowd,
while others, tired with their diversions, withdraw into the shade,
snatch a few moments’ rest and then impetuously return upon the scene.

These hideous devotees of gaiety provide a dance not wholly
unattractive. Some come from afar: gravely they emerge from out the
darkness; then, suddenly, with a rush as swift and easy as a slide,
they join the crowd, in the light. Their agility reminds one of mice
scudding with short steps. They seek one another and fly precipitately
as soon as they touch, as though they had mutually burnt their fingers.
Others, after tumbling about a little with their play-fellows, make off
hurriedly, wildly. They take fresh courage in the dark and return.

At times, there is a brisk tumult: a confused mass of swarming legs,
snapping claws, tails curving and clashing, threatening or fondling, it
is hard to say which. In the affray, under favourable conditions,
double specks light up and gleam like carbuncles. One would take them
for eyes that shoot flashing glances; in reality they are two polished,
reflecting facets, which occupy the front of the head. All, large and
small alike, take part in the brawl; it might be a battle to the death,
a general massacre; and it is just a wanton frolic. Even so do kittens
bemaul each other. Soon, the group disperses; all make off from all
sorts of places, without a scratch, without a sprain.

Behold the fugitives collecting once more before the lantern. They pass
and pass again; they come and go, often meet front to front. He who is
in the greatest hurry walks over the back of the other, who lets him
have his way without any protest but a movement of the crupper. It is
no time for blows: at most, two Scorpions meeting will exchange a cuff,
that is to say, a rap of the caudal staff. In their society, this
friendly thump, in which the point of the sting plays no part, is a
sort of a fisticuff in frequent use.

There are better things than mingled legs and brandished tails: there
are sometimes poses of the highest originality. Front to front and
claws drawn back, two wrestlers assume the acrobat’s “straight bend,”
that is to say, resting only on the fore-quarters, they raise the whole
back of the body, so much so that the chest displays the four little
lung-sacs uncovered. Then the tails, held vertically erect in a
straight line, exchange mutual rubs, glide one over the other, while
their extremities are hooked together and repeatedly fastened and
unfastened. Suddenly, the friendly pyramid falls to pieces and each
runs off hurriedly, without ceremony.

What were those two wrestlers trying to do, in their eccentric posture?
Was it a set-to between two rivals? It would seem not, so peaceful is
the encounter. My subsequent observations were to tell me that this was
the mutual teasing of a betrothed couple. To declare his flame, the
Scorpion does the straight bend.

To continue as I have begun and give a homogeneous picture of the
thousand tiny particulars gathered day by day would have its
advantages: the story would be sooner told; but, at the same time,
deprived of its details, which vary greatly between one observation and
the next and are difficult to group, it would be less interesting.
Nothing must be neglected in the relation of manners so strange and as
yet so little known. At the risk of repeating one’s self here and
there, it is preferable to adhere to chronological order and to tell
the story by fragments, as one’s observations reveal fresh facts. Order
will emerge from this disorder; for each of the more remarkable
evenings supplies some feature that corroborates and completes those
which go before. I will therefore continue my narration in the form of
a diary.

25 April, 1904.—Hullo! What is this, which I have not yet seen? My
eyes, ever on the watch, look upon the affair for the first time. Two
Scorpions face each other, with claws outstretched and fingers clasped.
It is a question of a friendly grasp of the hand and not the prelude of
a battle, for the two partners behave to each other in the most
peaceful way. There is one of either sex. One is paunchy and browner
than the other: that is the female; the other is comparatively slim and
pale: that is the male. With their tails prettily curled, the couple
stroll with measured steps along the pane. The male is ahead and walks
backwards, without jolt or jerk, without any resistance to overcome.
The female follows obediently, clasped by her finger-tips and face to
face with her leader.

The stroll has halts that alter nothing in the manner of the tie; it is
resumed, now here, now there, from end to end of the enclosure. Nothing
shows the object which the strollers have in view. They loiter, they
dawdle, they most certainly exchange ogling glances. Even so, in my
village, on Sundays, after vespers, do the youth of both sexes saunter
along the hedges, every Jack with his Jill.

Often they tack about. It is always the male who decides which fresh
direction the pair shall take. Without releasing her hands, he turns
gracefully to the left or right about and places himself side by side
with his companion. Then, for a moment, with his tail laid flat, he
strokes her spine. The other stands motionless, impassive.

For over an hour, without tiring, I watch these interminable comings
and goings. A part of the household lends me its eyes in the presence
of the strange sight which no one in the world has yet seen, at least
with a vision capable of observing. In spite of the lateness of the
hour, so upsetting to our habits, our attention is concentrated and no
essential thing escapes us.

At last, at about ten o’clock, an event happens. The male has lit upon
a potsherd the shelter of which seems to suit him. He releases his
companion with one hand, with one alone, and, continuing to hold her
with the other, he scratches with his legs and sweeps with his tail. A
grotto opens. He enters and, slowly, without violence, drags the
patient Scorpioness after him. Soon, both have disappeared. A plug of
sand closes the dwelling. The couple are at home.

To disturb them would be a blunder: I should be interfering too soon,
at an inopportune moment, if I tried at once to see what was happening
below. The preliminary stages may last for the best part of the night;
and it does not do for me, who have turned eighty, to sit up so late. I
feel my legs giving way; and my eyes seem full of sand. Let us go to
sleep.

All night long, I dream of Scorpions. They crawl under my bed-clothes,
they pass over my face; and I am not particularly excited, so many
curious things do I see in my imagination. The next morning, at
day-break, I raise the stoneware. The female is alone. Of the male
there is no trace, either in the home or in the neighbourhood. First
disappointment, to be followed by many others.

10 May.—It is nearly seven o’clock in the evening; the sky is overcast
with signs of an approaching shower. Under one of the potsherds is a
motionless couple, face to face, with linked fingers. Cautiously I
raise the potsherd and leave the occupants uncovered, so as to study
the results of the interview at my ease. The darkness of the night
falls and nothing, it seems to me, will disturb the calm of the home
deprived of its roof. A brisk shower compels me to retire. They, under
the lid of the cage, have no need to take shelter against the rain.
What will they do, left to their business as they are, but deprived of
a canopy to their alcove?

An hour later, the rain ceases and I return to my Scorpions. They are
gone. They have taken up their abode under a neighbouring potsherd.
Still with their fingers linked, the female is outside and the male
indoors, preparing the home. At intervals of ten minutes, the members
of my family relieve one another, so as not to lose the exact moment of
the pairing, which appears to me to be imminent. Useless cares: at
eight o’clock, it being now quite dark, the couple, dissatisfied with
the spot, set out on a fresh ramble, hand in hand, and go in search
elsewhere. The male, walking backwards, leads the march, chooses the
dwelling as he pleases; the female follows with docility. It is an
exact repetition of what I saw on the 25th of April. At last, a tile is
found to suit them. The male goes in first, but, this time, without
letting go of his companion for a moment, with one hand or the other.
The nuptial chamber is prepared with a few sweeps of the tail. Gently
drawn towards him, the Scorpioness enters in the wake of her guide.

I visit them a couple of hours later, thinking that I have given them
time enough to finish their preparations. I raise the potsherd. They
are there in the same posture, face to face and hand in hand. I shall
see no more to-day.

The next day, nothing new either. One in front of the other,
meditatively, without stirring a limb, the gossips, holding each other
by the finger-tips, continue their endless interview under the tile. In
the evening, at sunset, after sitting linked together for
four-and-twenty hours, the couple separate. He goes away from the tile,
she remains; and matters have not advanced by an inch.

This observation gives us two facts to remember. After the stroll to
celebrate the betrothal, the couple need the mystery and quiet of a
shelter. Never would the nuptial conclusion take place in the open air,
amid the bustling crowd, in sight of all. Remove the roof of the house,
by night or day, with all possible discretion; and the husband and
wife, who seem absorbed in meditation, march off in search of another
spot. Also, the stay under the cover of a stone is a long one: we have
just seen it spun out to twenty-four hours and even then without a
decisive result.

12 May.—What will this evening’s watch teach us? The weather is calm
and hot, favourable to nocturnal pastimes. A couple has formed: I did
not witness the start. This time the male is greatly inferior in size
to his corpulent mate. Nevertheless, the skinny wight performs his duty
gallantly. Walking backwards, according to rule, with his tail rolled
trumpetwise, he marches the fat Scorpioness around the glass ramparts.
After one circuit follows another, sometimes in the same, sometimes in
the opposite direction.

Stops are frequent. Then the two foreheads touch, bend a little to left
and right, as if there were whispers exchanged in each other’s ears.
The little fore-legs flutter in fevered caresses. What are they saying
to each other? How shall we translate their silent epithalamium into
words?

The whole household turns out to see this curious group, which our
presence in no way disturbs. The pair are pronounced to be “pretty”;
and the expression is not exaggerated. Semi-translucent and shining in
the light of the lantern, they seem carved out of a block of yellow
amber. Their arms outstretched, their tails rolled into graceful
volutes, they wander on with a slow movement and with measured tread.

Nothing puts them out. Should some vagabond, taking the evening air and
keeping to the wall like themselves, meet them on their way, he stands
aside—for he understands these delicate matters—and leaves them a free
passage. Lastly, the shelter of a tile receives the strolling pair, the
male entering first and backwards: that goes without saying. It is nine
o’clock.

The idyll of the evening is followed, during the night, by a hideous
tragedy. Next morning, we find the Scorpioness under the potsherd of
the previous day. The little male is by her side, but slain and more or
less devoured. He lacks the head, a claw, a pair of legs. I place the
corpse in the open, on the threshold of the home. All day long, the
recluse does not touch it. When night returns, she goes out and,
meeting the defunct on her passage, carries him off to a distance to
give him a decent funeral, that is to finish eating him.

This act of cannibalism agrees with what the open-air colony showed me
last year. From time to time, I would find, under the stones, a
pot-bellied female making a comfortable ritual meal off her companion
of the night. I suspected that the male, if he did not break loose in
time, once his functions were fulfilled, was devoured, wholly or
partly, according to the matron’s appetite. I now have the certain
proof before my eyes. Yesterday, I saw the couple enter their home
after the usual preliminary, the stroll; and, this morning, under the
same tile, at the moment of my visit, the bride is consuming her mate.

We are entitled to believe that the poor wretch has attained his ends.
Were he still necessary to the brood, he would not yet be eaten. The
actual couple have therefore been quick about the business, whereas I
see others fail to finish after provocations and contemplations
exceeding in duration the time which it takes the hour-hand to go twice
round the clock. Circumstances which it is impossible to state with
precision—the condition of the atmosphere, perhaps, the electric
tension, the temperature, the individual ardour of the couple—to a
large extent accelerate or delay the finale of the pairing; and this is
what constitutes the serious difficulty for the observer anxious to
seize the exact moment whereat the as yet uncertain function of the
combs might be revealed.

14 May.—It is certainly not hunger that sets my animals in commotion
night after night. The quest of food has nothing to say to their
evening rounds. I have served up a varied bill of fare to the busy
crowd, a fare chosen from that which they appear to like best. It
includes tender morsels in the shape of young Crickets; small Locusts,
fleshier and in better condition than the Acridians; Moths minus their
wings. In a more advanced season, I add Dragon-flies, a
highly-appreciated dish, as is proved by their equivalent, the
full-grown Ant-lion, of whom I often find the scraps, the wings, in the
Scorpions’ cave.

This luxurious game leaves them indifferent; none of them pays
attention to it. Amid the hubbub, the Crickets hop, the Moths beat the
ground with the stumps of their wings, the Dragon-flies quiver; and the
passers-by take no notice. They tread them underfoot, they topple them
over, they push them away with a stroke of the tail; in short, they
absolutely refuse to look at them. They have other business in hand.

Almost all of them move along the glass wall. Some of them obstinately
attempt to scale it: they hoist themselves on their tails, fall down,
try again elsewhere. With their outstretched fists they knock against
the pane; they want to get away at all costs. And yet the grounds are
large enough, there is room for all; the walks lend themselves to long
strolls. No matter: they want to roam afar. If they were free, they
would disperse in every direction. Last year, at the same time, the
colonists of the enclosure left the village and I never saw them again.

The spring pairing-season enjoins journeys upon them. The shy hermits
of yesterday now leave their cells and go on love’s pilgrimage;
heedless of food, they set out in quest of their kind. Among the stones
of their territory there must be choice spots at which meetings take
place, at which assemblies are held. If I were not afraid of breaking
my legs, at night, over the rocky obstacles of their hills, I should
love to assist at their matrimonial festivals, amid the delights of
liberty. What do they do up there, on their bare slopes? Much the same,
apparently, as in the glass enclosure. Having made their choice of a
bride, they take her about, for a long stretch of time, hand in hand,
through the tufts of lavender. If they miss the attractions of my
lantern, they have the moon, that incomparable lamp, to light them.

20 May.—The sight of the first invitation to a stroll is not an event
upon which we can count every evening. Several emerge from under their
stones already linked in couples. In this concatenation of clasped
fingers, they have passed the whole day, motionless, one in front of
the other and meditating. When night comes, they resume, without
separating for a moment, the walk around the glass begun on the evening
before, or even earlier. No one knows when or how the junction was
effected. Others meet unawares in sequestered passages difficult of
inspection. By the time that I see them, it is too late: the equipage
is on the way.

To-day, chance favours me. The acquaintance is made before my eyes, in
the full light of the lantern. A frisky, sprightly male, in his hurried
rush through the crowd, suddenly finds himself face to face with a
passer-by who takes his fancy. She does not say no; and things go
quickly.

The foreheads touch, the claws work; the tails swing with a wide
movement: they stand up vertically, hook together at the tips and
softly stroke each other with a slow caress. The two animals perform
the acrobat’s “straight bend,” in the manner already described. Soon,
the raised bodies collapse; fingers are clasped and the couple starts
on its stroll without more ado. The pyramidal pose, therefore, is
really the prelude to the harnessing. The pose, it is true, is not rare
between two individuals of the same sex who meet; but it is then less
correct and, above all, less marked by ceremony. At such times, we find
movements of impatience, instead of friendly excitations; the tails
strike in lieu of caressing each other.

Let us watch the male, who hurries away backwards, very proud of his
conquest. Other females are met, who form an audience and look on
inquisitively, perhaps enviously. One of them flings herself upon the
ravished bride, embraces her with her legs and makes an effort to stop
the equipage. The male exhausts himself in attempts to overcome this
resistance; in vain he shakes, in vain he pulls: the thing won’t go.
Undistressed by the accident, he throws up the game. A neighbour is
there, close by. Cutting parley short, this time without any further
declaration, he takes her hands and invites her to a stroll. She
protests, releases herself and runs away.

From among the group of onlookers, a second is solicited, in the same
free and easy manner. She accepts, but there is nothing to tell us that
she will not escape from her seducer on the way. But what does the
coxcomb care? There are more where she came from! And what does he
want, when all is said? The first-comer!

This first-comer he ends by finding, for here he is, leading his
conquest by the hand. He passes into the belt of light. Exerting all
his strength, he makes jerky movements of drawing towards him, if the
other refuse to come, but behaves with gentleness, when he obtains a
docile obedience. Pauses, sometimes rather prolonged, are frequent.

Then the male indulges in curious exercises. Bringing his claws, or let
us say, his arms towards him and then again stretching them straight
out, he compels the female to play a similar alternate game. The two of
them form a system of jointed rods, or lazy-tongs, opening and closing
their quadrilateral turn and turn about. After this gymnastic drill,
the mechanism contracts and remains stationary.

The foreheads now touch; the two mouths come together with tender
effusions. The word “kisses” comes to one’s mind to express these
caresses. It is not applicable; for head, face, lips, cheeks, all are
missing. The animal, clipped as though with the pruning shears, has not
even a muzzle. Where we look for a face we are confronted with a dead
wall of hideous jaws.

And to the Scorpion this represents the supremely beautiful! With his
fore-legs, more delicate, more agile than the others, he pats the
horrible mask, which in his eyes is an exquisite little face;
voluptuously he gnaws and tickles with his lower jaws the equally
hideous mouth opposite. It is all superb in its tenderness and
simplicity. The Dove is said to have invented the kiss. But I know that
he had a fore-runner in the Scorpion.

Dulcinea lets her admirer have his way and remains passive, not without
a secret longing to slip off. But how is she to set about it? It is
quite easy. The Scorpioness makes a cudgel of her tail and brings it
down with a bang upon the wrists of her too-ardent wooer, who there and
then lets go. The match is broken off, for the time being. To-morrow,
the sulking-fit will be over and things will resume their course.

25 May.—This blow of the cudgel teaches us that the docile companion
revealed by the first observations is capable of whims, of obstinate
refusals, of sudden divorces. Let us give an example.

This evening, he and she, a seemly couple, are out for a stroll. A tile
is found and appears to suit. Letting go with one claw, so as to have
some freedom of action, the male works with his legs and tail to clear
the entrance. He goes in. By degrees, as the dwelling is dug out, the
female follows him, meekly and gently, so one would think.

Soon, the place and time perhaps not suiting her, she reappears and
half-emerges, backwards. She struggles against her abductor, who, on
his side, pulls her to him, without, as yet, showing himself. A lively
contest ensues, one making every effort outside the cabin, the other
inside. They go backwards and forwards by turns; and success is
undecided. At last, with a sudden exertion, the Scorpioness drags her
companion out.

The unbroken team is in the open; the walk is resumed. For a good hour,
they veer to one side along the pane, veer back to the other and then
return to the tile of just now, to the exact same tile. As the way is
already open, the male enters without delay and pulls like mad.
Outside, the Scorpioness resists. Stiffening her legs, which plough the
soil, and buttressing her tail against the arch of the tile, she
refuses to go in. I like this resistance. What would the pairing be
without the playful toying of the preludes?

Under the stone, however, the ravisher insists and contrives to such
good purpose that the rebel obeys. She enters. It has just struck ten.
If I have to sit up for the rest of the night, I will wait for the
result; I shall turn the potsherd at the fitting moment to catch a
glimpse of what is happening underneath. Good opportunities are rare:
let us make the most of this one. What shall I see?

Nothing at all. In half an hour or less, the refractory one frees
herself, issues from the shelter and flees. The other at once runs up
from the back of the cabin, stops on the threshold and looks out. His
beauty has escaped him. He has been jilted. Sheepishly, he returns
indoors. I follow his example.

June sets in. For fear of a disturbance caused by too brilliant an
illumination, I have hitherto kept the lantern hung outside, at some
distance from the pane. The insufficient light does not allow me to
observe certain details as to the manner in which the couple are linked
when strolling. Do they both play an active part in the scheme of the
clasped hands? Are their fingers interlinked alternately? Or does only
one of the pair act; and, if so, which? Let us ascertain exactly; the
thing is not without importance.

I place the lantern inside, in the centre of the cage. There is a good
light everywhere. Far from being scared, the Scorpions gain in
gladness. They hasten up around the beacon; some even try to climb it,
so as to be nearer the flame. They succeed in doing so by means of the
frames containing the glass squares. They hang on to the edges of the
tin strips and stubbornly, heedless of slipping, end by reaching the
top. There, motionless, lying partly on the glass, partly on the
support of the metal casing, they gaze the whole evening long,
fascinated by the glory of the wick. They remind me of the Great
Peacock Moths that used to hang in ecstasy under the reflector of my
lamp.

At the foot of the beacon, in the full light, a couple loses no time in
doing the straight bend. The two fence prettily with their tails and
then go a-strolling. The male alone acts. With the two fingers of each
claw, he has seized the two fingers of the corresponding claw of the
Scorpioness in a bunch. He alone exerts himself and squeezes; he alone
is at liberty to break the team when he likes: he has but to open his
pincers. The female cannot do so; she is a prisoner, handcuffed by her
seducer.

In rather infrequent cases, one can see even finer things. I have
caught the Scorpion dragging his sweetheart by the two fore-arms; I
have seen him pull her by one leg and by the tail. She had resisted the
advances of the outstretched hand; and the bully, forgetful of all
reserve, had thrown her on her side and clawed hold of her at random.
The thing is quite clear: we have to do with a regular rape, abduction
with violence. Even so did Romulus’ youths rape the Sabine women.








CHAPTER XVIII

THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE FAMILY


Book-knowledge is a poor resource in the problems of life; assiduous
converse with facts is preferable here to the best-stocked library. In
many cases, ignorance is a good thing: the mind retains its freedom of
investigation and does not stray along roads that lead nowhither,
suggested by one’s reading. I have experienced this once again.

An anatomical monograph—the work, indeed, of a master—had told me that
the Languedocian Scorpion is big with young in September. Oh, how much
better should I have done not to consult it! The thing happens much
earlier, at least in my part of the country; and, as the rearing does
not last long, I should have seen nothing, had I tarried for September.
A third year of observation, tiresome to wait for, would have become
necessary, in order at last to witness a sight which I foresaw to be of
the highest interest. But for exceptional circumstances, I should have
allowed the fleeting opportunity to pass, lost a year and perhaps even
abandoned the subject.

Yes, ignorance can have its advantages; the new is found far from the
beaten track. One of our most illustrious masters, little suspecting
the lesson he was giving me, taught me that some time since. One fine
day, Pasteur rang unexpectedly at my front-door: the same who was soon
to acquire such world-wide celebrity. His name was familiar to me. I
had read the scholar’s fine work on the dissymmetry of tartaric acid; I
had followed with the greatest interest his researches on the
generation of Infusoria.

Each period has its scientific crotchet: to-day, we have transformism;
at that time, they had spontaneous generation. With his balloons made
sterile or fecund at will, with his experiments so magnificent in their
severity and simplicity, Pasteur gave the death-blow to the lunacy
which pretended to see life springing from a chemical conflict in the
seat of putrefaction.

In the midst of this contest so victoriously elucidated, I welcomed my
distinguished visitor as best I could. The savant came to me first of
all for certain particulars. I owed this signal honour to my standing
as his colleague in physics and chemistry. Oh, such a poor, obscure
colleague!

Pasteur’s tour through the Avignon region had sericiculture for its
object. For some years, the silk-worm nurseries had been in confusion,
ravaged by unknown plagues. The worms, for no appreciable reason, were
falling into a putrid deliquescence, hardening, so to speak, into
plaster sugar-plums. The downcast peasant saw one of his chief crops
disappearing; after much care and trouble, he had to fling his
nurseries on the dung-heap.

A few words were exchanged on the prevailing blight; and then, without
further preamble, my visitor said:

“I should like to see some cocoons. I have never seen any; I know them
only by name. Could you get me some?”

“Nothing easier. My landlord happens to sell cocoons; and he lives in
the next house. If you will wait a moment, I will bring you what you
want.”

Four steps took me to my neighbour’s, where I crammed my pockets with
cocoons. I came back and handed them to the savant. He took one, turned
and turned it between his fingers; he examined it curiously, as one
would a strange object from the other end of the world. He put it to
his ear and shook it:

“Why, it makes a noise!” he said, quite surprised. “There’s something
inside!”

“Of course there is.”

“What is it?”

“The chrysalis.”

“How do you mean, the chrysalis?”

“I mean the sort of mummy into which the caterpillar changes before
becoming a moth.”

“And has every cocoon one of those things inside it?”

“Obviously. It is to protect the chrysalis that the caterpillar spins.”

“Really!”

And, without more words, the cocoons passed into the pocket of the
savant, who was to instruct himself at his leisure touching that great
novelty, the chrysalis. I was struck by this magnificent assurance.
Pasteur had come to regenerate the silk-worm, while knowing nothing
about caterpillars, cocoons, chrysalises or metamorphoses. The ancient
gymnasts came naked to the fight. The talented combatant of the plague
of our silk-worm nurseries hastened to the battle likewise naked, that
is to say, destitute of the simplest notions about the insect which he
was to deliver from danger. I was staggered; nay, more, I was
wonderstruck.

I was not so much amazed by what followed. Pasteur was occupied at the
time with another question, that of the improvement of wine by heating.
Suddenly changing the conversation:

“Show me your cellar,” he said.

I! I show my cellar, my private cellar, poor I, who, in those days,
with my pitiful teacher’s salary, could not indulge in the luxury of a
little wine and brewed myself a sort of small cider by setting a
handful of moist sugar and some apples already steeped in spoilt cider
to ferment in a cask! My cellar! Show my cellar! Why not my barrels, my
cobwebbed bottles, each labelled with its age and vintage! My cellar!

Full of confusion, I avoided the request and tried to turn the
conversation. But he persisted:

“Show me your cellar, please.”

There was no resisting such firmness. I pointed with my finger to a
corner in the kitchen where stood a chair with no seat to it; and, on
that chair, a demi-john containing two or three gallons:

“That’s my cellar, sir.”

“Is that your cellar?”

“I have no other.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, that is all, alas!”

“Really!”

Not a word more; nothing further from the savant. Pasteur, that was
evident, had never tasted the highly-spiced dish which the vulgar call
la vache enragée. Though my cellar—the dilapidated chair and the more
than half-empty demi-john—said nothing about the fermentation to be
combated by heating, it spoke eloquently of another thing which my
illustrious visitor seemed not to understand. A microbe escaped from it
and a very terrible microbe: that of ill-fortune strangling good-will.

In spite of the unlucky introduction of the cellar, I remain none the
less struck by his serene assurance. He knows nothing of the
transformation of insects; he has just seen a cocoon for the first time
and learnt that there is something inside that cocoon, the rough draft
of the moth that shall be; he is ignorant of what is known to the
meanest school-boy of our southern parts; and this novice, whose
artless questions surprise me so greatly, is about to revolutionize the
hygiene of the silk-worm nurseries. In the same way, he will
revolutionize medicine and general hygiene.

His weapon is thought, heedless of details and soaring over the whole
question. What cares he for metamorphoses, larvæ, nymphæ, cocoons,
pupæ, chrysalises and the thousand and one little secrets of
entomology! For the purposes of his problem, perhaps, it is just as
well to be ignorant of all that. Ideas retain their independence and
their daring flight more easily; movements are freer, when released
from the leading-strings of the known.

Encouraged by the magnificent example of the cocoons rattling in
Pasteur’s astonished ears, I have made it a rule to adopt the method of
ignorance in my investigations into instincts. I read very little.
Instead of turning the pages of books, an expensive proceeding quite
beyond my means, instead of consulting other people, I persist in
obstinately interviewing my subject until I succeed in making him
speak. I know nothing. So much the better: my queries will be all the
freer, now in this direction, now in the opposite, according to the
lights obtained. And if, by chance, I do open a book, I take care to
leave a pigeon-hole in my mind wide open to doubt; for the soil which I
am clearing bristles with weeds and brambles.

For lack of taking this precaution, I very nearly lost a year. Relying
on what I had read, I did not look for the family of the Languedocian
Scorpion until September; and I obtained it quite unexpectedly in July.
This difference between the real and the anticipated date I ascribe to
the disparity of the climate: I make my observations in Provence and my
informant, Léon Dufour, made his in Spain. Notwithstanding the master’s
high authority, I ought to have been on my guard. I was not; and I
should have lost the opportunity if, as luck would have it, the Common
Black Scorpion had not taught me. Ah, how right was Pasteur not to know
the chrysalis!

The Common Scorpion, smaller and much less active than the other, was
brought up, for purposes of comparison, in humble glass jars that stood
on the table in my study. The modest apparatus did not take up much
room and were easy to examine; and I made a point of visiting them
daily. Every morning, before sitting down to blacken a few pages of my
diary with prose, I invariably lifted the piece of cardboard which I
used to shelter my boarders and enquired into the happenings of the
night. These daily visits were not so feasible in the large glass cage,
whose numerous dwellings required a general over-throw, if they were to
be examined one by one and then methodically replaced in condition as
discovered. With my jars of Black Scorpions, the inspection was the
matter of a moment.

It was well for me that I always had this auxiliary establishment
before my eyes. On the 22nd of July, at six o’clock in the morning,
raising the cardboard screen, I found the mother beneath it, with her
little ones grouped on her chine like a sort of white mantlet. I
experienced one of those seconds of sweet contentment which, at
intervals, reward the long-suffering observer. For the first time, I
had before my eyes the fine spectacle of the Scorpioness clad in her
young. The delivery was quite recent; it must have taken place during
the night; for, on the previous evening, the mother was bare.

Further successes awaited me: on the next day, a second mother is
whitened with her brood; the day after that, two others at a time are
in the same condition. That makes four. It is more than my ambition
hoped for. With four families of Scorpions and a few quiet days before
me, I can find sweets in life.

All the more so as fortune loads me with her favours. Ever since the
first discovery in the jars, I have been thinking of the glass cage and
asking myself whether the Languedocian Scorpion might not be as
precocious as her black sister. Let us go quick and see.

I turn over the twenty-five tiles. A glorious success! I feel one of
those hot waves of enthusiasm with which I was familiar at twenty rush
through my old veins. Under three of the lot of tiles, I find a mother
burdened with her family. One has little ones already shooting up,
about a week old, as the sequel of my observations informed me; the two
others have borne their children recently, in the course of last night,
as is proved by certain remnants jealously guarded under the paunch. We
shall see presently what those remnants represent.

July runs to an end, August and September pass and nothing more occurs
to swell my collection. The period of the family, therefore, for both
Scorpions is the second fortnight in July. From that time onward,
everything is finished. And yet, among my guests in the glass cage,
there remain females as big and fat as those from whom I have obtained
an offspring. I reckoned on these too for an increase in the
population; all the appearances authorized me to do so. Winter comes
and none of them has answered my expectations. The business, which
seemed close at hand, has been put off to next year: a fresh proof of
long pregnancy, very singular in the case of an animal of an inferior
order.

I transfer each mother and her product, separately, into medium-sized
receptacles, which facilitate the niceties of the observation. At the
early hour of my visit, those brought to bed during the night have
still a part of the brood sheltered under their belly. Pushing the
mother aside with a straw, I discover, amid the heap of young not yet
hoisted on the maternal back, objects that utterly upset all that the
books have taught me on this subject. The Scorpions, they say, are
viviparous. The learned expression lacks exactitude: the young do not
see the light directly with the formation which we know of.

And this must be so. How would you have the outstretched claws, the
sprawling legs, the shrivelled tails go through the maternal passages?
The cumbrous little animal could never pass through the narrow outlets.
It must needs come into the world packed up and sparing of space.

The remnants found under the mothers, in fact, show me eggs, real eggs,
similar, or very nearly, to those which anatomy extracts from the
ovaries at an advanced stage of pregnancy. The little animal,
economically compressed to the dimensions of a grain of rice, has its
tail laid along its belly, its claws flattened against its chest, its
legs pressed to its sides, so that the small, easy-gliding, oval lump
leaves not the smallest protuberance. On the forehead, dots of an
intense black mark the eyes. The tiny insect floats in a drop of
transparent moisture, which is for the moment its world, its
atmosphere, contained by a pellicle of exquisite delicacy.

These objects are really eggs. There were thirty or forty of them, at
first, in the Languedocian Scorpion’s litter; not quite so many in the
Black Scorpion’s. Interfering too late in the nocturnal lying-in, I am
present at the finish. The little that remains, however, is sufficient
to convince me. The Scorpion is in reality oviparous; only her eggs
hatch very speedily and the liberation of the young follows very soon
after the laying.

Now how does this liberation take place? I enjoy the remarkable
privilege of witnessing it. I see the mother with the point of her
mandibles delicately seizing, lacerating, tearing off and lastly
swallowing the membrane of the egg. She strips her new-born offspring
with the fastidious care and fondness of the sheep and the cat when
eating the fetal wrappers. Not a scratch on that scarce-formed flesh,
not a strain, in spite of the clumsiness of the tool employed.

I cannot get over my surprise: the Scorpion has initiated the living
into acts of maternity bordering on our own. In the distant days of the
coal vegetation, when the first Scorpion appeared, the gentle passions
of childbirth were already preparing. The egg, the equivalent of the
long-sleeping seed, the egg, as already possessed by the reptile and
the fish and later to be possessed by the bird and almost the whole
body of insects, was the contemporary of an infinitely more delicate
organism which ushered in the viviparousness of the higher animals. The
incubation of the germ did not take place outside, in the heart of the
threatening conflict of things; it was accomplished in the mother’s
womb.

The progressive movements of life know no gradual stages, from fair to
good, from good to excellent; they proceed by leaps and bounds, in some
cases advancing, in some recoiling. The ocean has its ebb and flow.
Life, that other ocean, more unfathomable than the ocean of the waters,
has its ebb and flow likewise. Will it have any others? Who can say
that it will? Who can say that it will not?

If the sheep were not to assist by swallowing the wrappers after
picking them up with her lips, never would the lamb succeed in
extricating itself from its swaddling-clothes. In the same way, the
little Scorpion calls for its mother’s aid. I see some that, caught in
stickiness, move about helplessly in the half-torn ovarian sac and are
unable to free themselves. It wants a touch of the mother’s teeth to
complete the deliverance. It is doubtful even whether the young insect
contributes to effect the laceration. Its weakness is of no avail
against that other weakness, the natal envelope, though this be as
slender as the inner integument of an onion-skin.

The young chick has a temporary callosity at the end of its beak, which
it uses to peck, to break the shell. The young Scorpion, condensed to
the dimensions of a grain of rice to economize space, waits inertly for
help from without. The mother has to do everything. She works with such
a will that the accessories of childbirth disappear altogether, even
the few sterile eggs being swept away with the others in the general
flow. Not a remnant lingers behind of the now useless tatters;
everything has returned to the mother’s stomach; and the spot of ground
that has received the laying is swept absolutely clear.

So here we have the young nicely wiped, clean and free. They are white.
Their length, from the forehead to the tip of the tail, measures nine
millimetres [36] in the Languedocian Scorpion and four [37] in the
Black. As the liberating toilet is completed, they climb, first one and
then the other, on the maternal spine, hoisting themselves, without
excessive haste, along the claws, which the Scorpion keeps flat on the
ground, in order to facilitate the ascent. Close-grouped one against
the other, entangled at random, they form a continuous cloth on the
mother’s back. With the aid of their little claws, they are pretty
firmly settled. One finds some difficulty in sweeping them away with
the point of a hair pencil without more or less hurting the feeble
creatures. In this state, neither steed nor burden budges: it is the
fit moment for experimenting.

The Scorpion, clad in her young assembled to form a white muslin
mantlet, is a spectacle worthy of attention. She remains motionless,
with her tail curled on high. If I bring a rush of straw too near the
family, she at once lifts her two claws in an angry attitude, rarely
adopted in her own defence. The two fists are raised in a sparring
posture, the nippers open wide, ready to thrust and parry. The tail is
seldom brandished: to loosen it suddenly would give a shock to the
spine and perhaps make a part of the burden fall to the ground. The
bold, sudden, imposing menace of the fists suffices.

My curiosity takes no notice of it. I push off one of the little ones
and place it facing its mother, at a finger’s breadth away. The mother
does not seem to trouble about the accident: motionless she was,
motionless she remains. Why excite herself about that slip? The fallen
child will be quite able to manage for itself. It gesticulates, it
moves about; and then, finding one of the maternal claws within its
reach, it clambers up pretty nimbly and joins the crowd of its
brothers. It resumes its seat in the saddle, but without, by a long
way, displaying the agility of the Lycosa’s sons, who are expert
riders, versed in the art of vaulting on horseback.

The test is repeated on a larger scale. This time, I sweep a part of
the load to the ground; the little ones are scattered, to no very great
distance. There is a somewhat prolonged moment of hesitation. While the
brats wander about, without quite knowing where to go, the mother at
last becomes alarmed at the state of things. With her two arms—I am
speaking of the chelæ—with her two arms joined in a semi-circle, she
rakes and gathers the sand so as to bring the strayers to her. This is
done awkwardly, clumsily, with no precautions against accidental
crushing. The Hen, with a soft clucking call, makes the wandering
chicks return to the pale; the Scorpion collects her family with a
sweep of the rake. All are safe and sound nevertheless. As soon as they
come in contact with the mother, they climb up and form themselves
again into a dorsal group.

Strangers are admitted to this group, as well as the legitimate
offspring. If, with the camel-hair broom, I dislodge a mother’s family,
wholly or in part, and place it within reach of a second mother,
herself carrying her family, the latter will collect the young ones by
armfuls, as she would her own offspring, and very kindly allow the
newcomers to mount upon her back. One would say that she adopts them,
were the expression not too ambitious. There is no adoption. It is the
same blindness as that of the Lycosa, who is incapable of
distinguishing between her own family and the family of others, and
welcomes all that swarms about her legs.

I expected to come upon excursions similar to those of the Lycosa, whom
it is not unusual to meet scouring the heath with her pack of children
on her back. The Scorpion knows nothing of these diversions. Once she
becomes a mother, for some time she does not leave her home, not even
in the evening, at the hour when others sally forth to frolic.
Barricaded in her cell, not troubling to eat, she watches over the
upbringing of her young.

As a matter of fact, those frail creatures have a delicate test to
undergo: they have, one might say, to be born a second time. They
prepare for it by immobility and by an inward labour not unlike that
which turns the larva into the perfect insect. In spite of their fairly
correct appearance as Scorpions, the young ones have rather indistinct
features, which look as though seen through a mist. One is inclined to
credit them with a sort of child’s smock, which they must throw off in
order to become slim and acquire a definite shape.

Eight days spent without moving, on the mother’s back, are necessary to
this work. Then there takes place an excoriation which I hesitate to
describe by the expression “casting of the skin,” so greatly does it
differ from the true casting of the skin, undergone later at repeated
intervals. For the latter, the skin splits over the thorax; and the
animal emerges through this single fissure, leaving a dry cast garment
behind it, similar in shape to the Scorpion that has just thrown it
off. The empty mould retains the exact outline of the moulded animal.

But, this time, it is something different. I place a few young ones in
course of excoriation on a sheet of glass. They are motionless, sorely
tried, it seems, almost spent. The skin bursts, without special lines
of cleavage; it tears at one and the same time in front, behind, at the
sides; the legs come out of their gaiters, the claws leave their
gauntlets, the tail quits its scabbard. The cast skin falls in rags on
every side at a time. It is a flaying without order and in tatters.
When it is done, the flayed insects present the normal appearance of
Scorpions. They have also acquired agility. Although still pale in
tint, they are nimble, quick to set foot to earth in order to run and
play near the mother. The most striking part of this progress is the
brisk growth. The young of the Languedocian Scorpion measured nine
millimetres in length; they now measure fourteen. [38] Those of the
Black Scorpion have grown from four to six or seven millimetres. [39]
The length increases by one half, which nearly trebles the volume.

Surprised at this sudden growth, one asks one’s self what the cause can
be; for the little ones have taken no food. The weight has not
increased: on the contrary, it has diminished; for we must remember
that the skin has been cast. The volume grows, but not the bulk. It is
therefore a distension up to a certain point and may be compared with
that of inorganic bodies under the influence of heat. A secret change
takes place, which groups the living molecules into a more spacious
combination; and the volume increases without the addition of fresh
materials. One who, possessed of a fine patience and suitably equipped,
cared to follow the rapid changes of this architecture would, I think,
reap a harvest of some value. I, in my penury, abandon the problem to
others.

The remains of the excoriation are white strips, silky rags, which, so
far from falling to the ground, attach themselves to the back of the
Scorpion, especially near the basal segments of the legs, and there
tangle themselves into a soft carpet on which the lately-flayed insects
rest. The steed now carries a saddle-cloth well-adapted to hold her
restless riders in position. Whether these have to alight or to
remount, the layer of tatters, now become a solid harness, affords
supports for rapid evolutions.

When I topple over the family with a slight stroke of the camel-hair
pencil, it is amusing to see how quickly the unhorsed ones resume their
seat in the saddle. The fringes of the housings are grasped, the tail
is used as a lever and, with a bound, the horseman is in his place.
This curious carpet, a real boarding-netting which allows of easy
scaling, lasts, without dislocations, for nearly a week, that is to
say, until the emancipation. Then it comes off of its own accord,
either as a whole or piecemeal, and nothing remains of it when the
young are scattered around.

Meantime, signs of the colouring appear; the tail and belly are tinged
with saffron, the claws assume the soft brilliancy of transparent
amber. Youth beautifies all things. The little Languedocian Scorpions
are really splendid. If they remained thus, if they did not carry a
poison-still, soon to become threatening, they would be pretty
creatures which one would find a pleasure in rearing. Soon the wish for
emancipation awakens in them. They gladly descend from the mother’s
back to frolic merrily in the neighbourhood. If they stray too far, the
mother cautions them and brings them back again by sweeping the rake of
her arms over the sand.

At dozing-time, the sight furnished by the Scorpioness is almost as
good as that of the hen and her chicks resting. Most of the young ones
are on the ground, pressed close against the mother; a few are
stationed on the white saddle-cloth, a delightful cushion. There are
some who clamber up the mother’s tail, perch on the top of the bend and
seem to delight in looking down from that point of vantage upon the
crowd. More acrobats arrive, who dislodge them and take their places.
All want their share in the curiosities provided by the gazebo.

The bulk of the family is around the mother; there is a constant swarm
of brats that crawl under the belly and there squat, leaving their
forehead, with the gleaming black eye-points, outside. The more
restless prefer the mother’s legs, which to them represent a gymnasium;
they here swing as on a trapeze. Next, at their leisure, the whole
troop climb up to the spine again, resume their places, settle down;
and nothing more stirs, neither mother nor little ones.

This period wherein the emancipation is matured and prepared lasts for
a week, exactly as long as the strange labour that trebles the volume
without food. The family remains upon the mother’s back for a
fortnight, all told. The Lycosa carries her young for six or seven
months, during which time they are always active and lively, although
unfed. What do those of the Scorpion eat, at least after the
excoriation that has given them agility and a new life? Does the mother
invite them to her meals and reserve the tenderest morsels of her
repasts for them? She invites nobody; she reserves nothing.

I serve her a Cricket, chosen among the small game that seems to me
best-suited to the delicate nature of her sons. While she gnaws the
morsel, without troubling in the least about her surroundings, one of
the little ones slips down her spine, crawls along her forehead and
leans over to see what is happening. He touches the jaws with the tip
of his leg; then briskly he retreats, startled. He goes away; and he is
well-advised. The abyss engaged in the work of mastication, so far from
reserving him a mouthful, might perhaps snap him up and swallow him
without giving him a further thought.

A second is hanging on behind the Cricket, of whom the mother is
munching the front. He nibbles, he pulls, eager for a bit. His
perseverance comes to nothing: the fare is too tough.

I have seen it pretty often: the appetite awakens; the young would
gladly accept food, if the mother took the least care to offer them
any, especially food adjusted to the weakness of their stomachs; but
she just eats for herself and that is all.

What do you want, O my pretty little Scorpions, who have provided me
with such delightful moments? You want to go away, to some distant
place, in search of victuals, of the tiniest of tiny beasties. I can
see it by your restless roving. You run away from the mother, who, on
her side, ceases to know you. You are strong enough; the hour has come
to disperse.

If I knew exactly the infinitesimal game that suited you and if I had
sufficient time to procure it for you, I should love to continue your
upbringing; but not among the potsherds of the native cage, in the
company of your elders. I know their intolerant spirit. The ogres would
eat you up, my children. Your own mothers would not spare you. You are
strangers to them henceforth. Next year, at the wedding-season, they
would eat you, the jealous creatures! You had better go; prudence
demands it.

Where could I lodge you and how could I feed you? The best thing is to
say good-bye, not without a certain regret on my part. One of these
days, I will take you and scatter you in your territory, the
rock-strewn slope where the sun is so hot. There you will find brothers
and sisters who, hardly larger than yourselves, are already leading
solitary lives, under their little stones, sometimes no bigger than a
thumb-nail. There you will learn the hard struggle for life better than
you would with me.


                                 THE END








NOTES


[1] “When you and I start housekeeping, alas, what shall we do?
     You in front and I behind, we’ll shove the tub along!”

[2] Jean Baptiste Victor Proudhon (1758–1838), author of De la
distinction des biens, Traité du domaine public, etc.—Translator’s
Note.

[3] A light opera, with music by Victor Masse and libretto by Jules
Barbier and Michel Carré (1852).—Translator’s Note.

[4] “Ah, how sweet is far niente,
     When round us throbs the busy world!”

[5] ·11 to ·15 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[6] Close upon 9½ feet.—Translator’s Note.

[7] 1·8 × 1·4 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[8] 1·4 × 1·1 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[9] ·4 × ·2 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[10] 3·9 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[11] ·39 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[12] Pierre André Latreille (1762–1833), one of the founders of
entomological science.—Translator’s Note.

[13] Mémoires du Muséum d’histoire naturelle, vol. v., p. 249.—Author’s
Note.

[14] About eight inches.—Translator’s Note.

[15] An egg-shaped cake baked in Provence at Easter.—Translator’s Note.

[16] 3·93 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[17] Four to five inches.—Translator’s Note.

[18] ·039 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[19] Voyage autour de ma chambre (1795).—Translator’s Note.

[20] Sérignan, in Provence, is the author’s birth-place.—Translator’s
Note.

[21] ·78 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[22] ·78 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[23] About 61 cubic inches.—Translator’s Note.

[24] Over 39 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[25] 11 to 12 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[26] 7½ to 8 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[27] ·27 to ·31 × ·15 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[28] François Huber (1750–1831), the Swiss naturalist. He early became
blind from excessive study and conducted his scientific work thereafter
with the aid of his wife.—Translator’s Note.

[29] 1½ inches.—Translator’s Note.

[30] 4 inches.—Translator’s Note.

[31] The Vocontii inhabited the Viennaise, between the Allobroges on
the north, the Caturiges and the estates of King Cottius on the east,
the Cavares on the west, and the Memini and Vulgientes on the south.
Vasio (Vocontia), now Vaison, was their capital.—Translator’s Note.

[32] From Massalia, the ancient name of Marseilles, of which Phocæa, in
Asia Minor, was the mother city.—Translator’s Note.

[33] Nemansus, the Latin name of Nîmes.—Translator’s Note.

[34] ·2 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[35] 3 to 3½ inches.—Translator’s Note.

[36] ·35 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[37] ·15 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[38] ·35 increased to ·55 inch.—Translator’s Note.

[39] ·15 increased to ·235 or ·275 inch.—Translator’s Note.








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