This method of the porous plug is recognized as being so efficacious that it is in general use among the pill-makers of the remotest regions. The Splendid Phanæus and Bolbites onitoides, both from Buenos Aires,[6] employ it as zealously as the Dung-beetles of Provence. [[181]]
One of the dwellers in the pampas uses another process, prescribed by the material which she manipulates. This is Phanæus Milon, a ceramic artist and meat-packer. With very fine clay she fashions a gourd in the middle of which she places a round meat-pie made from the sanies of a corpse. The grub for which these victuals are intended hatches in an upper story, separated from the larder by a clay partition.
How will this grub breathe, first in its cell upstairs and then in the lower room, when it has perforated the floor and reached the cold pasty? The house is a piece of pottery, an earthenware jar whose wall sometimes measures a finger’s-breadth in thickness. Air cannot possibly pass through such a casing. The mother, who knew this, made arrangements accordingly. Along the gourd’s neck she contrived a narrow passage through which a flow of air is possible. Without resorting to obstruction by means of varnish or anything else, we see quite plainly that this minute tunnel is a ventilating-shaft.
Exposed on her fruit to the danger from the gum, the Weevil excels the meat-packer of the pampas in her delicate precautions. Over the spot where the egg lies, she raises an obelisk, the equivalent of the gourd’s neck in the work of the Phanæus; to give the germ air, she leaves the axis of the nipple hollow, as does the potter. In either case, the new-born grub has a tough [[182]]job to begin with: in the one it chisels the fruit-stone; in the other it pierces the earthenware partition. And now both have reached their goal: the first its kernel, the second its meat-pie. Behind them they have left a round port-hole which continues the tunnel made by the mother. Thus communication between the inside of the establishment and the outer atmosphere is assured.
The comparison cannot be carried farther, so greatly does the ingenuity of the Rhynchites, in danger of being stifled by the gum, surpass that of the other Beetle, who is perfectly safe in his clay pot. The Weevil has to reckon with the terrible exudations which threaten to submerge and stifle her larva. The mother, therefore, in the first place, builds up the defensive cone, the ventilating-shaft, to a height which the gummy flood will not reach; then, around this rampart of fruit-pulp, she makes a wide moat which keeps at a distance the wall sweating the dangerous substance. If the eruption is too violent, the viscous fluid will collect in the crater without imperilling the breathing-hole.
If the Rhynchites and her competitors in means of defence against the dangers of asphyxia have taught themselves their trade by degrees, by passing from an unsuccessful to another, more satisfactory method; if they are really the creatures of their achievements, do not let us hesitate, though we deal a blow to our self-conceit: let us recognize [[183]]them as engineers capable of teaching a lesson to our own graduates; let us acclaim the microcephalous Weevil as a powerful thinker, a wonderful inventor.
You dare not go to that length; you prefer to appeal to the hazards of chance. But what a wretched resource is chance when we are considering such rational contrivances! As well throw the letters of the alphabet up in the air and expect them to form a given line of a poem as they fall!
Instead of bamboozling our minds with such tortuous conceptions, how much simpler, and above all how much more truthful, to say:
‘Matter is governed by a sovereign order.’
This is what the Sloe-weevil, in her humble way, tells us. [[184]]