Sacred Beetle

“ In my profound ignorance of the Sacred Beetle’s domestic life, I used to supply her with what I could pick up here and there, droppings of Horse or Mule; and the Beetle refused it for her children and declined to build a nest. To-day, taught by my experience in the fields, I go to the Sheep for my supplies and all is well in the cages. Does this mean that the insect never employs for its breeding-pears materials derived from the Horse, even if selected from the finest strata and carefully cleansed from objectionable matter? If the best cannot be obtained, is the middling refused? ”

“ At first sight, an accident seems not unlikely. The Sacred Beetle 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 pill backwards, the front limbs are exposed much more freely 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 first moment when the work begins. ”

“ How does the clumsy Sacred Beetle, who is so stiff in her movements, accomplish a work of this kind in complete darkness, at the bottom of a hole crammed with provisions and hardly leaving room to stir? When I consider the delicacy of the workmanship and then the rough tools of the worker—angular limbs capable of cutting into hard or even rocky soil—I think of an Elephant trying to make lace. ”

“ The revolting workshop of the insect that manipulates ordure will lead perhaps to loftier ideas than would the perfumer’s factory with its jasmine and patchouli.
I have accused the Sacred Beetle of being an insatiable gormandizer. It is time to prove what I said. In my cages, which are too small to allow of much pill-rolling, my boarders often scorn to accumulate provisions and confine themselves to eating where they are. It is a good opportunity for us: the meal taken in public will tell us better than the underground banquet what a Dung-beetle’s stomach can do. ”

“ They were invariably rough lumps of food, fashioned in haste, with no definite internal structure, merely so much provender with which the Beetle retires to spend a few days in undisturbed gluttony. The dung-rollers covet and steal them from one another with a keenness which they would certainly not display in robbing one another of new family charges. For Sacred Beetles to go stealing eggs would be an absurdity, each of them having quite enough to do in securing the future of her own. ”

“ Here is the conclusion, unexpected but very logical and I would even say obvious: the Sacred Beetle shapes his provisions into a ball because he is an ardent lover of the sun. The various Dung-beetles who work in broad daylight, the Gymnopleuri and Sisyphi of my district, conform to the same mechanical principle: they all know the advantages of a sphere, the best rolling-apparatus; they all practise the art of pill-making. The other Dung-beetles, who work in the dark, do nothing of the kind: their accumulations of food are shapeless. ”

“ These scrupulous cares, cares occupying every moment, have results which would strike the attention of the least-experienced observer. The egg-shaped vessels, or better the cradles of the nursery, are wonderful in their regular curves and in their neatness. We see none of those chinks with a blob of putty showing through, none of those cracks, of those peeling scales, in short none of those defects which, towards the end, nearly always disfigure the Sacred Beetle’s pears, handsome though they be at the start. ”

“ Oh, what an adorable thing is the first blossoming of the intellect; what a beautiful age is that when innocent curiosity awakens, enquiring into all things! So little Paul has his own vivarium, in which the Sacred Beetle makes pears for him; his own little garden, no larger than a pocket-handkerchief, where he grows beans, often digging them up to see if the tiny roots are growing longer ”

“ When the whole ball has passed through the machine, the hermit comes back to the daylight, tries his luck afresh, finds another patch of dung, fashions a new ball and starts eating again. This life of pleasure lasts for a month or two, from May to June; then, with the coming of the fierce heat beloved of the Cicadæ,10 the Sacred Beetles take up their summer quarters and bury themselves in the cool earth. They reappear with the first autumn rains, less numerous and less active than in spring, but now seemingly absorbed in the most important work of all, the future of the species. ”

“ And these cripples found families: they spend the cold season beneath the soil; they wake up in the spring, return to the surface and take part for a second time, sometimes [102] even for a third, in life’s great festival. Their descendants ought to profit by an improvement which has been renewed year by year, ever since Sacred Beetles 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 regulation four tarsi. ”

“ To complete the cycle of the year in the adult form, to see one’s self surrounded by one’s sons at the spring festival, to double and treble one’s family: that surely is a most exceptional privilege in the insect world. The Bees, 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 richly-armoured Ground-beetles succumb when the germs of a posterity are scattered beneath the stones. ”

“ To discover this is no easy undertaking, for which the point of a penknife will suffice. He who proposes to inspect the burrowing insect in its home must resort to exhausting excavations. We have not here the chamber of the Sacred Beetle, the Copris or other Beetles, which is uncovered without trouble with a mere pocket-trowel; we have a shaft whose floor can be reached only with a stout spade, manfully wielded for hours at a stretch. And, if the sun be at all hot, you return from your drudgery, feeling utterly worn out. ”

“ It is impossible for the insect to wear away its casket and escape. But let a shower come—that life-giving baptism which the seed of the plant and the family of the Beetle alike await within the cinders of the earth—let a little rain fall; and soon there will be a resurrection in the fields.
The earth becomes soaked. There you have 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 and pushes with its back ”

“ Before answering this evolutionary objection, I will wait for some one to show me a natural Scarab of Horapollo’s [54] 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. ”

“ Chapter viii THE BROAD-NECKED SCARAB; THE GYMNOPLEURI
What we have learnt from the Sacred Beetle must not lead us into rash generalizations and make us attribute it in every slightest detail to the other Dung-beetles of the same family. Similarity of structure does not entail parity of instincts. A common basis no doubt exists, resulting from identity of equipment; but many variations of the essential theme are possible and are dictated by inherent aptitudes of which the insect’s organization gives us no inkling. ”

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SCARABAEUS, n. The sacred beetle of the ancient Egyptians, allied to our familiar "tumble-bug." It was supposed to symbolize immortality, the fact that God knew why giving it its peculiar sanctity. Its habit of incubating its eggs in a ball of ordure may also have commended it to the favor of the priesthood, and may some day assure it an equal reverence among ourselves. True, the American beetle is an inferior beetle, but the American priest is an inferior priest. ”

“ The Sacred Beetle’s nest is betrayed on the outside by a little heap of earth, by a tiny mound formed of the superfluous soil which the mother, when closing up the abode, has been unable to replace, part of the excavation having to be left empty. ”

“ The rough little peasant-lad, who has scarcely yet learnt how to blow his nose, has already a certain sense of elegance of form. He can distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly. Can this be also true of the Sacred Beetle? ”

“ The same blood does not flow in the veins of the two pill-rollers.
Of a quieter disposition and less wasteful of his gleanings, the Beetle with the broad corselet attacks discreetly the heap of manna provided by the Sheep; he picks from the best part some armfuls of material which he makes into a ball; he attends to his business without troubling the [114] others or being troubled by them. For the rest, his methods are the same as those of the Sacred Beetle. The sphere, which is always an easier object to convey, is fashioned on the spot before being set in motion. ”

“ When the earth is exceptionally cool, the bursting of the shell and the deliverance of its occupant can occur at an earlier period; but in ground scorched by the pitiless summer sun, as is usually the case in my district, the Beetle, however eager he may be to see the light, must needs wait for the first rain to soften his stubborn shell. A downpour is 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 birth of the sacred insect. ”

“ If we ransack the books for information about the habits of the dung-rollers in general and the Sacred Beetle in particular, we find that modern science still clings to some of the beliefs which were current in the days of the Pharaohs. We are told that the ball which is bumped across the fields contains an egg, that it is a cradle in which the future larva is to find both board and lodging. The parents roll it over hilly country to make it nice and round ”

“ One observes them on all the roads about New York and on Long Island, but we have never yet seen them in this county. If they exist here at all, they must be very rare. The sacred beetle of the Egyptians is said to have been rather larger than our insect of the same kind. ”

“ With the tools which it possesses, the insect could obtain other forms of a less delicate curve than its pear-shaped piece of work. It could, for instance, make a rough cylinder, the sausage customary among the Geotrupes; or, simplifying the work to the utmost, it could leave the lump without any definite 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 Sacred Beetle never chooses any shape but the sphere, [68] though it necessitates such scrupulous accuracy ”

“ The atrophied limbs of the grub, therefore, become the adult’s powerful pressing-machine; [227] the impotent stumps change into strong stamping-tools.
Who will tell us the origin of these anomalies now thrice observed among the dung-workers? The Sacred Beetle, who is sound in every limb during his infancy, loses his fore-fingers when the adult form appears; the Onthophagus, who sports a horn on his thorax in his nymphal stage, drops it and does without the ornament in the end; the Geotrupes, at first a limping grub, turns his useless stumps into the best of his levers. ”

“ Life in the vivarium supplies us with some other facts which are not undeserving of the commentator’s attention. We have said that, when fresh provisions are supplied, the Sacred Beetles who are roaming about come running up eagerly to the smoking fare. ”

“ These details remind us of certain facts noted, not without surprise, by a host of observers on the sunny beaches at Cette, Palavas, the Golfe Juan and the North African coast, down to the lonely Sahara. Here the [52] Sacred Beetle and his kinsmen—the Half-spotted Scarab, the Pock-marked Scarab and others—swarm, becoming more vigorous and more active in proportion as the climate grows hotter. They abound; and yet very often not one shows himself; the entomologist’s practised eye fails to discover a single specimen. ”

“ At one time it is provided with an egg, at another it is eaten, while no accident ever happens by inadvertence to the exactly similar pills kneaded by the Copris.
That the insect, finding itself in this mixed assembly, should rip open what is still inanimate matter and respect what is already a cradle, that it should discriminate between the lawful and the unlawful, in circumstances such as these, seems to me incapable of explanation, if there be no guide but senses resembling our own. It is useless to say that it is a case of sight: the Beetle works in absolute darkness. ”

“ In our own days, a slight revival of the antique superstition has once more taken place, and some ladies of my acquaintance wear specimens of the old sacred beetles as charms in brooches or suspended on their watch-chains. ”

“ I say to myself that the Beetle is too persevering to give up work until her egg is housed and that she will therefore dig herself a new burrow, dragging her ball with her as she goes; she will pass through the upper layer of earth, which is not sufficiently thick ”

“ Now, it is a well-authenticated fact, that these hieroglyphics in time became sacred, and, if the beetle was found among them, it for this, if for no other reason, would have been looked upon with the same veneration.
Good men, too, to preserve the lives of animals oftentimes wantonly taken, introduce them into fables and poetry, and connect pleasing tales with them. ”