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.1

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 [100]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. [101]

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 Sérignan2 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 [102]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 [103]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 [104]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, [105]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 centimetres3 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: [106]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 [107]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, [108]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.4 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. [109]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. [110]

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. [111]

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 [114]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 [115]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, [116]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 [117]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. [118]

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 decimetre1 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 [119]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 [120]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.2 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, [122]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,3 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 decimetres4. 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 [123]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.5 The egg of Geotrupes Hypocrita is a little smaller. [125]

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 [128]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 [129]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 [130]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 [131]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. [132]

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,1 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 [133]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 [134]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 [135]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 [136]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.

[137]

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 [138]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 [139]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.” [141]