CHAPTER XII
THE BURYING-BEETLES: EXPERIMENTS
Let us come to the feats of reason which have earned for the Necrophorus the best part of his fame and, to begin with, submit the case related by Clairville, that of the too hard soil and the call for assistance, to the test of experiment.
With this object I pave the centre of the space beneath the cover, flush with the soil, with a brick, which I sprinkle with a thin layer of sand. This will be the soil that cannot be dug. All around it, for some distance and on the same level, lies the loose soil, which is easy to delve.
In order to approach the conditions of the anecdote, I must have a Mouse; with a Mole, a heavy mass, the removal would perhaps present too much difficulty. To obtain one, I place my friends and neighbours under requisition; they laugh at my whim but none the less proffer their traps. Yet, the moment a very common thing is needed, it becomes rare. Defying decency in his speech, after the manner of his ancestors' Latin, the Provençal says, but even more crudely than in my translation:
"If you look for dung, the Donkeys become constipated!"
At last I possess the Mouse of my dreams! She comes to me from that refuge, furnished with a truss of straw, in which official charity grants a day's hospitality to the pauper wandering over the face of the fertile earth, from that municipal hostel whence one inevitably issues covered with Lice. O Réaumur,1 who used to invite marchionesses to see your caterpillars change their skins, what would you have said of a future disciple conversant with such squalor as this? Perhaps it is well that we should not be ignorant of it, so that we may have compassion with that of the beast.
1 René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683-1757), the inventor of the Réaumur thermometer and author of Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des insectes (1734-1742).—Translator's Note.
The Mouse so greatly desired is mine. I place her upon the centre of the brick. The grave-diggers under the wire cover are now seven in number, including three females. All have gone to earth; some are inactive, close to the surface; the rest are busy in their crypts. The presence of the fresh corpse is soon perceived. About seven o'clock in the morning, three Necrophori come hurrying up, two males and a female. They slip under the Mouse, who moves in jerks, a sign of the efforts of the burying-party. An attempt is made to dig into the layer of sand which hides the brick, so that a bank of rubbish accumulates round the body.
For a couple of hours the jerks continue without results. I profit by the circumstance to learn the manner in which the work is performed. The bare brick allows me to see what the excavated soil would conceal from me. When it is necessary to move the body, the Beetle turns over; with his six claws he grips the hair of the dead animal, props himself upon his back and pushes, using his forehead and the tip of his abdomen as a lever. When he wants to dig, he resumes the normal position. So, turn and turn about, the sexton strives, now with his legs in the air, when it is a question of shifting the body or dragging it lower down; now with his feet on the ground, when it is necessary to enlarge the grave.