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CHAPTER V
THE SPANISH COPRIS
To show instinct performing on behalf of the egg what reason, ripened by study and experience, would advise is a result of no mean philosophic import; and I find myself seized with a scruple aroused by scientific austerity. Not that I wish to give science a forbidding aspect: I am convinced that one can say excellent things without employing a barbarous vocabulary. Clearness is the supreme politeness of whoso wields a pen. I do my best to observe it. And the scruple that stops me is of another kind.
I ask myself if I am not here the victim of an illusion. I say to myself:
“The Sacred Beetles and others are manufacturers of balls, of pills. That is their trade, learnt we know not how, prescribed perhaps by their structure, in particular by their long legs, some of which are slightly curved. When working for the egg, what wonder if they continue underground their special craft as ball-making artisans?”
Setting aside the neck of the pear and the jutting tip of the ovoid, details the interpretation of which presents quite other difficulties, there remains the most important mass as regards bulk, the globular mass, a repetition of that which the insect makes outside the burrow; there [[64]]remains the ball with which the Sacred Beetle plays in the sun, sometimes without making any other use of it.
Then what does the globulous form, which presents the most efficacious preventative against desiccation during the heat of summer, do here? Physically, this property of the sphere and of its near neighbour, the ovoid, is undeniable; but these shapes offer only a casual concord with the difficulty overcome. The animal built to roll balls across the fields also fashions balls underground. If the worm be all the better for finding tender foodstuffs under its mandibles to the very end, that is a capital thing for the worm, but it is no reason why we should extol the instinct of the mother.
To complete my conviction, I shall need a portly Dung-beetle who is a total stranger to the pill-making craft in matters of every-day life and who, nevertheless, when the moment of laying is at hand, makes a sudden change in her habits and shapes her harvest into a ball. Is there any such in my neighbourhood? Yes, there is; and she is one of the handsomest and largest, next to the Sacred Beetle. I speak of the Spanish Copris, who is so remarkable for her suddenly sloping corselet and for the extravagant horn surmounting her head.