Various

“ A field-mouse, vanquished by fate in the struggle for existence, has lately "turned up his toes" in the most literal sense, and lies unburied, like Archytas, on the loose sand of a bare patch in a meadow. All carrion-eating creatures are [Pg 27] remarkable for their powerful sense of smell: and the sexton beetles, like the vultures and condors, are no exception to the rule. They sniff their prey from afar: for where the carcass is, there shall the carrion beetles be gathered together. All are eager to take their share of the feast, and still more to lay their eggs in the dead body. ”

“ Whatever happened, we must strain every nerve to reach Scotland in safety, and then to get married, in order that Harold might immediately surrender himself.
At York, I noticed with a thrill of terror that a man in plain clothes, with the obtrusively unobtrusive air of a detective, looked carefully though casually into every carriage. I felt sure he was a spy, because of his marked outer jauntiness of demeanour, which hardly masked an underlying hang-dog expression of scrutiny. ”

“ The beetles as a rule hunt by night only, and find their prey, as vultures do, by the sense of smell. When they first find it, the male hovers above it like an eagle, circling round and round, so as to point it out to his mate; the female flies straight to it, and buries herself without delay in the rich banquet.
But what becomes at last of the buried bodies? No. 3 will show you. The female beetle lays in each body about as many eggs as she thinks it will support. In a very short time the eggs hatch out, and the grubs begin to devour the abundant feast provided for them. ”

“ Suddenly he became aware of a big man in "khaki" towering above him. "Here, lad, give 'im to me!" and a pair of strong arms lifted the captain easily, as Willie recognised Big Bob's voice. A cheer went up from below as Lieutenant Mason and a dozen men with gleaming bayonets came dashing up the slope. The tribesmen, who were just coming over the ridge above, saw the little band, saw the fierce, determined look on their faces, the blood-for-blood battle-lust in their eyes. "Illah Allah," shouted the chief, "these are no coward-women after all!" ”

“ Thus, long before men learnt to bury their dead or to manure their fields, nature had invented both these processes, and registered them, so to speak, in the instincts and habits of a special class of insect sextons and sanitary inspectors. It is always so in life. There is hardly a human trade or a human activity which does not find its counterpart somewhere in animal or vegetable life: and it will be my object, in future numbers of these papers, to set before you in other directions some such natural anticipations or foreshadowings of man's inventions. ”

“ If you do find the body of a mouse or shrew lying unburied in England, it occurs almost always on a path or high-road. Now this fact is in itself significant; for the high-road is practically a man-made desert, so hardened and steam-rollered, so pounded and wheel-ridden, that no plant can grow on it; so exposed that small animals will only scurry across it for dear life in fear and trembling ”

“ The orange bands of our commonest English kind have been developed as attractions for their admiring mates; and the male beetles have also a musical instrument of their own in the shape of a peculiar rasp-like ring on the body, which they can rub against the wing-cases, and so produce a much-appreciated chirping. Such instrumental music is always employed, like the song of birds, as a charm to heighten the attractiveness of the suitor: and male burying beetles may be heard on the evenings of sunny days competing with one another in musical contests. ”

“ So the very early Egyptians, we may conjecture, began by thinking there must be something divine in the nature of an insect which worked so ceaselessly on behalf of its young, and rolled such big round balls behind it up such relatively large hillocks. Watching a little closer, as time went on, the Egyptian discovered, no doubt, that sacred beetles did not proceed directly from sacred beetles, like lambs from ewes, but grew, as it were, out of the dirt and corruption of the mysterious pellets. ”

“ I have sometimes known the real owner abandon a ball in despair, from the unevenness of the ground, and then seen a couple of outsiders come up and succeed in doing what the true owner had been unable to accomplish.
In No. 6 you see two such scarabs whose toil has at last been crowned by success, and who are delivering their balls with joy into the holes in the sand which form their residences. As far as I can make out, a pair of beetles, male and female, seem usually to share a hole in common, and to roll balls of food to it either alone or in concert. ”

“ But, scattered as they were over the whole hill-side, with only now and then a comrade's white sun-helmet coming in sight, it was too much to expect of any man with a loaded magazine and clear view of the enemy that he should go on up, alone for all he knew, with the bullets singing around him. ”

“ Southern and Oriental substitutes for a main drainage system. The balls consist of dung, dirt, and refuse, and the beetles collect them on the open, dry them hard in the sun, roll them to the mouths of their burrows, and then live on them till the ball has all been eaten. It is the funniest thing in the world to watch them. They tumble about in the loose sand and stumble over little eminences in the most comical fashion. ”

“ A little inland, the beach gives way to dry sand-hills, blown about by the wind, and over-grown by patches of blue-green marram-grass and other sandy seaside weeds. If you lie down on one of these sand-hills, choosing a spot not quite so dirty as its neighbours, you will soon be amused by seeing a curious little comedy going on perpetually around you in every direction. ”

“ The funeral service consists in eating as much of the body as they desire for their own purposes: when they have satisfied their appetite, they begin to think of the interests of posterity. The mother beetle proceeds to lay her tale of eggs in the decently-buried body, for every animal knows by instinct the precise place in which to deposit its young and the precise food which happens to suit them. ”

“ The rustic sees dead shrews in the road, and none on the open ground: so he hastily concludes in his easy-going way that to cross a human path is sudden death to shrews, who are always supposed for other reasons to be witch-like and uncanny animals. If the road leads to a church, a fatal stroke is specially certain: for the shrews, like all witch-creatures, hate Christianity.
I need hardly say, however, that the burying beetles do not perform their strange funereal office out of pure benevolence, without hope of reward. ”

“ The co-operative society is hardly what one could call a happy family. Still, in spite of the fact insisted upon by the poet that "Nature is one with rapine—a harm no preacher can heal," it is none the less true that a certain rough balance, an accommodation or adjustment of part to part, occurs in every department of animal and vegetable life. When we come to think, it could hardly be otherwise. Things can only exist if they contain in themselves the conditions necessary to existence. ”

“ Is not the aim of the education, of the training, on board the Exmouth above all to produce sailors of the type of those who have made England what she is to-day—the Queen and the beneficent Ruler Of the Oceans and the foremost colonizing and civilizing Power on earth? ”

“ But there are other unconsidered creatures besides these, creatures which perform for us functions almost as useful and important as those of the earthworms; and I propose to devote a few pages here to one such group, the sanitary commissioners of the insect world, as I will venture to call them—the vast body of minor sextons and six-legged scavengers. Has it ever struck you that as you walk abroad through the rich green meadows and pastures of England, you almost never come across a dead and decaying animal? ”

“ Then the youth said: "If you will release the Princess from the spell your life shall be spared."
Then the Magician took a ring out of his pocket and said: "Take this ring and put it on the little finger of her left hand and she shall be well again."
Not a little rejoiced at the success of his journey, the youth hastened to the King and asked, just to satisfy himself of the truth of what he had been told: "Your Majesty, is it true that he who restores the Princess to health will be your son-in-law?"
"THE POOR PRINCESS BURST INTO FLAME."
"It is verily true!" ”

“ Nevertheless, the function is always performed by each plant or animal itself for its own purposes; it only incidentally serves to benefit the others. Thus the burying beetles and the scavenger beetles work first of all and ostensibly for their own food and the food of their offspring: it is merely as an incidental result, undesigned by themselves, that they assist in purifying the air and the soil for all other species. ”

“ There was not a man there whom you could have called a coward with impunity. Had they been all together—in line or column—they would have gone up the hill like a herd of buffaloes, with wild cheers and gleaming bayonets, and never given a thought to the dead and wounded. ”

“ In twenty minutes, after a swift though tranquil descent from the height of 4,000 mètres, we were again among our fellow-mortals, in the neighbourhood of Spa. Our trip had lasted nearly thirteen hours.
The population of the district had never seen a balloon so near, and our arrival roused the countryside. The people came running from every direction, yelling and gesticulating, and scarcely had the car touched earth when it was surrounded so closely by a crowd of peasants that it was impossible for Godard to make proper arrangements for landing. ”

“ For we now know that there is no disinfectant so good as the top layer of the soil, which is not really mere dead earth (as most people imagine) , but a mingled mass of ramifying life—a little foundation of clay and sand intermixed with endless minute organisms, both animal and vegetable—fungi, bacteria, mites, weevils, and all sorts of petty creatures, which eat up and destroy harmlessly all dead matter subjected to their influence. ”

“ When I was a young man, sir, many years younger than you are now, I was launched upon town without a friend or adviser, and with a purse which brought only too many false friends and false advisers to my side. I drank deeply of the wine of life—if there is a man living who has drunk more deeply he is not a man whom I envy. ”

“ As soon as we are married, he will give himself up at once to the police—if you wish it, before your eyes. But married we must be. Can't you manage it somehow?"
My pleading voice touched him. "Harold Tillington?" he murmured. "I know of his forebears. Lady Guinevere Tillington's son, is it not? Then you must be Younger of Gledcliffe." For Scotland is a village: everyone in it seems to have heard of every other.
"What does he mean?" I asked. "Younger of Gledcliffe?" I remembered now that the phrase had occurred in Mr. Ashurst's will, though I never understood it. ”

“ If he succeeds, he puts himself in front of the ball as it falls, catches it with his hind legs, and begins once more laboriously to push it backward up hill again, towards the mouth of his hole. But as the pellets roll quickly, and the beetles are by no means rapid runners, he seldom succeeds in recovering his own property, unless the ball happens to catch for a moment on some projecting little hillock of sand, or be checked on its downward course by a weed, a stick, or a dead shell or starfish. ”

“ The English dung-beetle burrows in the soft sandstone, and throws up neat little heaps of clean sand at the mouth of its hole, like miniature molehills. Still, our English scavenger beetles—known to science as Geotrupes—are not nearly so clever or so interesting as the southern type, for the female in our sort merely grubs a straight tunnel in the ground, and lays her egg in a loose mass of dung, which she drags to the bottom in a shapeless condition. ”

“ A number of odd-looking beetles, with long hind legs and very quaint heads, are occupied with ceaseless industry in rolling a lot of dark, round balls almost as big as themselves along the slopes of the sand-hills. In many places, the whole ground is alive with the tugging and pushing little beasts: indeed, when you come to look close you will find that every half acre of sand on the Venetian shore or the lower edge of the Egyptian desert is a perfect city of these busy wee creatures. ”

“ Thus the part that is played in the East by vultures and jackals, or by the wild dogs of Constantinople, is far more effectually and unobtrusively played in our fields and meadows by the many kinds of burying beetles and other insect scavengers. If we remember how great a nuisance a single dead rat becomes in a house, we can faintly picture to ourselves the debt we owe to these excellent and unnoticed little sanitary commissioners. ”

“ Honor applied restoratives, and after a long time Mrs. Latimer came back to consciousness. Her glance sought for Jim; Honor motioned him over.
"My own darling boy, why did you come back so late? How thin and white you are! We must feed him well, must we not, Honor?"
"SHE PUT HER ARMS ROUND HIS NECK."
She stroked his face as he bent over her, and under her loving trust and entire unconsciousness of the true facts of the case Jim suddenly broke down, and, like a penitent child, buried his face in a fold of her dressing-gown. ”

“ The insect just alighting from his flight, in the upper part of the illustration, is the burying beetle par excellence among our British kinds; he rejoices (we are always supposed to rejoice foolishly in our personal designations) in the dignified title of Necrophorus vespillo. In stature he measures about an inch long, and he is a handsome beast, with two bright orange bands on his hard wing-covers. The illustration shows these wing-covers raised, as is the habit of beetles when they fly, while the thin but powerful wings beneath them are expanded as true pinions. ”

“ If dead bodies and the refuse of food were left about everywhere freely on the open, germs of disease and putrefaction would fly about much more commonly than even at present. But a large number of scavenger animals, scavenger birds, and scavenger insects—hyenas, vultures, burying beetles, and so forth—act as public servants to prevent this calamity. Again, the earth needs the bodies and the refuse as fertilizers: and many of the scavengers carry down such materials into the first layer of the soil, where they become of enormous use in promoting the freer growth of vegetation. ”

“ No house could be dismal which had a pretty girl inside it and such a show of roses in front.
Apart from a very complete staff of servants there were only four of us in the household. These were Miss Witherton, who was at that time four-and-twenty and as pretty—well, as pretty as Mrs. Colmore is now—myself, Frank Colmore, aged thirty, Mrs. Stevens, the housekeeper, a dry, silent woman, and Mr. Richards, a tall, military-looking man, who acted as steward to the Bollamore estates. We four always had our meals together, but Sir John had his usually alone in the library. ”

“ But they are obliged to push the balls backward with their long hind legs: and as this precludes the possibility of the scarab seeing where it is going, each beetle pauses every now and again and turns round, like a man sculling in a boat alone, to look what is ahead of him. Sometimes in doing so he loses his ball, a misfortune which has just happened to the beetle on the right in No. 5. The precious pellet goes bounding off down hill as fast as gravitation will take it. ”

“ On the other hand, the scarabs, I fear I must admit, are terrible thieves; and if one scarab has lost his own ball, and sees some companion's pellet come rolling down hill towards him, he will often give up the pursuit of his lost property, and quietly and barefacedly appropriate his neighbour's. I have seen great fights take place at times over a disputed ball; though sometimes the combatants agree amicably to roll it along in common, and probably share it when they have reached their hole. ”

“ Big Bob shouted to Little Willie, who was staggering along under the weight of his rifle half-a-dozen yards to Bob's left, as a bullet went whistling in between them. As the big man spoke his foot caught in a trailing creeper, and he measured his length on the ground, his rifle going off as he fell.
Immediately a young recruit on the right, hearing the report, and longing to have a shot at the enemy, brought his rifle up to the "ready," took careful aim, and fired. Nothing is so contagious as contagion. ”