CHAPTER IX
THE GEOTRUPES: THE PUBLIC HEALTH
To complete the cycle of the year in the full-grown form, to see one’s self surrounded by one’s sons at the spring festivals, to double and treble one’s family: that surely is a most exceptional privilege in the insect world. The Apids, 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 Carabids, richly cuirassed, succumb when the germs of a posterity are scattered beneath the stones.
So with the others, except among the gregarious insects, where the mother survives, either alone or accompanied by her attendants. It is a general law: the insect is born orphaned of both its parents. Now, by an unexpected turn of fate, the humble scavenger escapes the stern destiny that cuts down the proud. The Dung-beetle, sated with days, becomes a patriarch and really deserves to do so, in consideration of the services rendered.
There is a general hygiene that calls for the disappearance, in the shortest possible time, of every putrid thing. Paris has not yet solved the formidable problem of her refuse, which sooner or later will become a question of life or death for the monstrous city. One asks one’s self whether the centre of light be not doomed to be extinguished [[114]]one day in the reeking exhalations of a soil saturated with rottenness. What this agglomeration of millions of men cannot obtain, with all its treasures of wealth and talent, the smallest hamlet possesses without going to any expense or even troubling to think about it.
Nature, so lavish of her cares in respect of rural health, is indifferent to the welfare of cities, if not actively hostile to it. She has created for the fields two classes of scavengers, whom nothing wearies, whom nothing repels. One of these—consisting of Flies, Silphids, Dermestes, Necrophores—is charged with the dissection of corpses. They cut and hash, they elaborate the waste matter of death in their stomachs in order to restore it to life.
A mole ripped open by the plough-share soils the path with its entrails, which soon turn purple; a snake lies on the grass, crushed by the foot of a wayfarer who thought, the fool, that he was performing a good work; an unfledged bird, fallen from its nest, has flattened itself piteously at the foot of the tree that carried it; thousands of other similar remains, of every sort and kind, are scattered here and there, threatening danger through their effluvia, if nothing come to establish order. Have no fear: no sooner is a corpse signalled in any direction than the little undertakers come trotting along. They work away at it, empty it, consume it to the bone, or at least reduce it to the dryness of a mummy. In less than twenty-four hours, mole, snake, bird have disappeared and the requirements of health are satisfied.
The same zeal for their task prevails in the second class of scavengers. The village hardly knows those ammonia-scented refuges whither we repair, in the towns, to relieve our wretched needs. A little wall no higher than that, a hedge, a bush is all that the peasant asks [[115]]as a retreat at the moment when he would fain be alone. I need say no more to suggest the encounters to which such free and easy manners expose you! Enticed by the patches of lichen, the cushions of moss, the tufts of homewort and other pretty things that adorn old stones, you go up to a sort of wall that supports the ground of a vineyard. Ugh! At the foot of the daintily-decked shelter, what a spreading abomination! You flee: lichens, mosses and homewort tempt you no more. But come back on the morrow. The thing has disappeared, the place is clean: the Dung-beetles have been that way.
To preserve the eyes from offensive sights too oft repeated is, to those gallant fellows, the least of offices: a loftier mission is incumbent on them. Science tells us that the most dreadful scourges of mankind have their agents in tiny organisms, the microbes, near neighbours of must and mould, on the extreme confines of the vegetable kingdom. The terrible germs multiply by countless myriads in the intestinal discharges at times of epidemic. They contaminate the air and water, those primary necessities of life; they spread over our linen, our clothes, our food and thus diffuse contagion. We have to destroy by fire, to sterilize with corrosives or to bury underground such things as are soiled with them.