The Life and Love of the Insect

by Jean-Henri Fabre

If the evidence of the nymph were not sufficient, there [[50]]would be that of the perfect insect which, casting its rejected mummy-clothes and moving for the first time in its shell, wields fingerless armlets. The fact, therefore, is established for certain: the Sacred Beetle is born maimed; his mutilation dates from his birth.

“Very well,” reply our fashionable theorists, “the Sacred Beetle is mutilated from the start; but his remote ancestors were not. They were formed according to the general rule, they were correct in structure down to this slight digital detail. There were some who, in the course of their rude task as diggers and rollers, wore out that delicate, cumbrous, useless member; and, finding themselves better equipped for their work by this accidental amputation, they bequeathed it to their successors, to the great benefit of the race. The present insect profits by the improvement obtained by a long array of ancestors, and, acting under the stimulus of vital competition, gives permanence to an advantageous condition due to chance.”

O ingenuous theorists, so triumphant on paper, so vain in the face of reality, listen to me for yet one moment more! If the loss of the front fingers be a fortunate thing for the Sacred Beetle, who faithfully hands down the leg of yore fortuitously maimed, why should it not be so with the other members, if they too happened to lose by chance their terminal appendage, a small, powerless filament, almost utterly unserviceable, and, owing to its delicacy, a cause of grievous conflicts with the roughness of the soil?

The Sacred Beetle is not a climber, but an ordinary pedestrian, supporting himself upon the point of an iron-shod stick, by which I mean the stout spine or prickle wherewith the tip of the leg is armed. He does not have to hold on by his claws to some hanging branch, as does [[51]]the Cockchafer. And it would therefore, meseems, be entirely to his advantage to rid himself of the four remaining fingers, projecting sideways, idle on the march, inactive in the construction and carriage of the ball. Yes, that would mean progress, for the simple reason that the less hold one gives to the enemy the better. It remains to be seen if chance ever produces this state of things.

It does and very often. At the end of the fine season, in October, when the insect has worn itself out in digging, in carrying balls and in modelling pears, the maimed, the victims of work, form the great majority. I see them, both in my voleries and outside, displaying every degree of amputation. Some have lost the finger on their four hind-legs altogether; others retain a stump, a couple of joints, a single joint; those which are least damaged have a few members left intact.

This is certainly the mutilation pleaded by the theorists. And it is no accident, occurring at long intervals: every year, the cripples outnumber the others at the time when the winter-season is at hand. In their final labours, they seem no more embarrassed than those who have been spared by the trials of life. On both sides, I find the same quickness of movement, the same dexterity in kneading the ammunition-bread which will enable them to bear the first rigours of winter philosophically underground. In the scavenger’s work, the maimed vie with the others.

And these cripples form a race; they spend the bad season underground; they wake up in the spring, return to the surface and take part, for a second, sometimes even for a third time, in life’s great festival. Their descendants ought to profit by an improvement which [[52]]has been renewed year by year, ever since Scarabs 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 four tarsi prescribed by rule.

Well, theorists, what say you to that? For the two front legs, you offer a sort of an explanation; and the four others contradict you flatly. Have you not been taking fancy for truth?

Then what is the cause of the original mutilation of the Scarab? I will confess plainly that I know nothing at all about it. Nevertheless, those two maimed members are very strange: so strange, in the endless order of insects, that they have exposed the masters, the greatest masters, to lamentable blunders. Let us listen first to Latreille,[2] the prince of descriptive entomologists. In his account of the insects which ancient Egypt painted or carved upon her monuments,[3] he quotes the writings of Horapollo, an unique document which has been preserved for us in the papyri for the glorification of the sacred insect:

“One would feel tempted at first,” he says, “to set down as fiction what Horapollo says of the number of that Scarab’s fingers. According to him, there are thirty. Nevertheless, this computation, judged by the way in which he looks at the tarsus, is perfectly correct, for this part consists of five joints; and, if we take each of them for a finger, the legs being six in number and each ending [[53]]in a five-jointed tarsus, the Sacred Beetles obviously have thirty fingers.”