dining-room where the incredible digestive adventure is to take its course. But destiny, jealous of all undiluted bliss, before admitting him to that spot of sheer delight, imposes upon the grave and probably sententious beetle tribulations without number, which are nearly always complicated by the arrival of an untoward parasite.
Hardly has he begun, by dint of great efforts of his frontal shield and bandy legs, to roll the toothsome sphere backwards, when an indelicate colleague, who has been awaiting the completion of the work, appears and hypocritically offers his services. The other well knows that, in this case, help and services, besides being quite unnecessary, will soon mean partition and dispossession; and he accepts the enforced collaboration without enthusiasm. But, so that their respective rights may be clearly marked, the legal owner invariably retains his original place, that is to say, he pushes the ball with his forehead, whereas the compulsory guest, on the other side, pulls it towards him. And thus it jogs along between the two gossips, amid interminable vicissitudes, flurried falls, grotesque tumbles, till it reaches the place chosen to receive the treasure and to become the banqueting-hall. On arriving, the owner sets about digging out the refectory, while the sponger pretends to go innocently to sleep on the top of the bolus. The excavation becomes visibly wider and deeper; and soon the first dung-beetle dives bodily into it. This is the moment for which the cunning auxiliary was waiting. He nimbly scrambles down from the blissful eminence and, pushing it with all the energy that a bad conscience gives, strives to gain the offing. But the other, who is rather distrustful, interrupts his laborious excavations, looks overboard, sees the sacrilegious rape and leaps out of the hole. Caught in the act, the shameless and dishonest partner makes untold efforts to play upon the other's credulity, turns round and round the inestimable orb and, embracing it and propping himself against it, with fraudulent heroic exertions pretends to be frantically supporting it on a non-existent slope. The two expostulate with each other in silence, gesticulate wildly with their mandibles and tarsi and then, with one accord, bring back the ball to the burrow.
It is pronounced sufficiently spacious and comfortable. They introduce the treasure, they close the entrance to the corridor; and now, in the propitious darkness and the warm damp, where the magnificent stercoral globe alone holds sway, the two reconciled messmates sit down face to face. Then, far from the light and the cares of day and in the great silence of the hypogeous shade, solemnly commences the most fabulous banquet whereof abdominal imagination ever evoked the absolute beatitudes.
For two whole months, they remain cloistered; and, with their paunches proportionately hollowing out the inexhaustible sphere, definite archetypes and sovereign symbols of the pleasures of the table and the gaiety of the belly, they eat without stopping, without interrupting themselves for a second, day or night. And, while they gorge, steadily, with a movement perceptible and constant as that of a clock, at the rate of three millimetres a minute, an endless, unbroken ribbon unwinds and stretches itself behind them, fixing the memory and recording the hours, days and weeks of the prodigious feast.
4
After the Dung-beetle, that dolt of the company, let us greet, also in the order of the Coleoptera, the model household of the Minotaurus typhæus, which is pretty well-known and extremely gentle, in spite of its dreadful name. The female digs a huge burrow which is often more than a yard and a half deep and which consists of spiral staircases, landings, passages and numerous chambers.
The male loads the earth on the three-pronged fork that surmounts his head and carries it to the entrance of the conjugal dwelling. Next, he goes into the fields in search of the harmless droppings left by the sheep, takes them down to the first storey of the crypt and reduces them to flour with his trident, while the mother, right at the bottom, collects the flour and kneads it into huge cylindrical loaves, which will presently be food for the little ones. For three months, until the provisions are deemed sufficient, the unfortunate husband, without taking nourishment of any kind, exhausts himself in this gigantic work. At last, his task accomplished, feeling his end at hand, so as not to encumber the house with his wretched remains, he spends his last strength in leaving the burrow, drags himself laboriously along and, lonely and resigned, knowing that he is henceforth good for nothing, goes and dies far away among the stones.
Here, on another side, are some rather strange caterpillars, the Processionaries, which are not rare; and, as it happens, a single string of them, five or six yards long, has just climbed down from my umbrella-pines and is at this moment unfolding itself in the walks of my garden, carpeting the ground traversed with transparent silk, according to the custom of the race. To say nothing of the meteorological apparatus of unparalleled delicacy which they carry on their backs, these caterpillars, as everybody knows, have this remarkable quality, that they travel only in a troop, one after the other, like Breughel's blind men or those of the parable, each of them obstinately, indissolubly following its leader; so much so that, our author having one morning disposed the file on the edge of a large stone vase, thus closing the circuit, for seven whole days, during an atrocious week, amidst cold, hunger and unspeakable weariness, the unhappy troop on its tragic round, without rest, respite or mercy, pursued the pitiless circle until death overtook it.
5
But I see that our heroes are infinitely too numerous and that we must not linger over our descriptions. We may at most, in enumerating the more important and familiar, bestow on each of them a hurried epithet, in the manner of old Homer. Shall I mention, for instance, the Leucospis, a parasite of the Mason-bee, who, to slay his brothers and sisters in their cradle, arms himself with a horn helmet and a barbed breastplate, which he doffs immediately after the extermination, the safeguard of a hideous right of primogeniture? Shall I tell of the marvellous anatomical knowledge of the Tachytes, of the Cerceris, of the Ammophila, of the Languedocian Sphex, who, according as they wish to paralyze or to kill their prey or their adversary, know exactly, without ever blundering, which nerve-centre to strike with their sting or their mandibles? Shall I speak of the art of the Eumenes, who transforms her stronghold into a complete museum adorned with shells and grains of translucent quartz; of the magnificent metamorphosis of the Pachytilus cinarescens; of the musical instrument owned by the Cricket, whose bow numbers one hundred and fifty triangular prisms that set in motion simultaneously the four dulcimers of the elytron? Shall I sing the fairy-like birth of the nymphs of the Anthophagus, a transparent monster, with a bull's snout, that seems carved out of a block of crystal? Would you behold the Flesh-fly, the common Blue-bottle, daughter of the maggot, as she issues from the earth? Listen to our author:
'She disjoints her head into two movable halves, which, each distended with its great red eye, by turns separate and reunite. In the intervening space a large glassy hernia rises and disappears, disappears and rises. When the two halves move asunder, with one eye forced back to the right and the other to the left, it is as though the insect were splitting its brain-pan in order to expel the contents. Then the hernia rises, blunt at the end and swollen into a great knob. Next, the forehead closes and the hernia retreats, leaving visible only a kind of shapeless muzzle. In short, a frontal pouch, with deep pulsations momentarily renewed, becomes the instrument of deliverance, the pestle wherewith the newly-hatched Dipteron bruises the sand and causes it to crumble. Gradually, the legs push the rubbish back and the insect advances so much towards the surface.'
6
And monster after monster passes, such as the imagination of Bosch or Callot never conceived! The larva of the Rose-chafer, which, though it have legs under its belly, always travels on its back; the Blue-winged Locust, unluckier still than the Flesh-fly and possessing nothing wherewith to perforate the soil, to escape from the tomb and reach the light but a cervical bladder, a viscous blister; and the Empusa, who, with her curved abdomen, her great projecting eyes, her legs with knee-pieces armed with cleavers, her halberd, her abnormally tall mitre would certainly be the most devilish goblin that ever walked the earth, if, beside her, the Praying Mantis were not so frightful that her mere aspect deprives her victims of their power of movement when she assumes, in front of them, what the entomologists have termed 'the spectral attitude.'
One cannot mention, even casually, the numberless industries—nearly all of absorbing interest—exercised among the rocks, under the ground, in the walls, on the