But straightway grave doubts begin to assail us. If these mutilations were really accidental and the result of too strenuous work, they would be the exception, not the rule. Because a workman or several workmen have had a hand caught and crushed in a machine, it does not follow that all the rest will also lose their hands. If the Scarab sometimes, or even very frequently, loses his fore-fingers in pursuing his trade as a pill-roller, there must be some at least who, more fortunate or more skilful, have preserved their tarsi. Let us then consult the actual facts. I have observed in very large numbers the various species of Scarabs that inhabit France: Scarabæus sacer, who is common in Provence; S. semipunctatus, who keeps fairly close to the sea and frequents the sandy shores of Cette, Palavas and the [[40]]Golfe Juan; lastly, S. laticollis, who is much more widely distributed than either of the others and is found up the Rhone Valley at least as far as Lyons. In addition, I have studied an African species, S. cicatricosus, picked up near Constantine. Well, in all four species, the absence of tarsi on the front legs has been an invariable fact, with not a single exception, at any rate within the range of my observations. The Scarab therefore is maimed from the start; and it is a natural peculiarity in his case, not an accident.
Besides, there is another argument in support of this statement. If the lack of fore-fingers were an accidental mutilation, due to violent exertion, there are other insects, Dung-beetles too, who habitually undertake works of excavation even more arduous than the Scarab’s, and who ought therefore, a fortiori, to be deprived of their front tarsi, since these are useless and even irksome when the leg has to serve as a powerful digging-implement. The Geotrupes, for instance, who so well deserve their name, meaning Earth-piercers, sink wells in the hard soil of the roads, among stones cemented with clay: perpendicular wells so deep that, to inspect the cell at the bottom of them, we have to make use of a stout spade; and even then we do not always succeed. Now these unrivalled miners, who easily open up long tunnels in a substance whose surface the Sacred Beetle would hardly be able to disturb, have their front tarsi intact, as if cutting through rocks were work calling for delicate tools rather than strong ones. Everything then supports the belief that, if we could see the Scarab while still a novice in his native cell, we should find him to be mutilated in just the same way as the much-travelled veteran who has worn himself out with toil. [[41]]
This absence of fingers might serve as the foundation for an argument in favour of the theories now in fashion: the struggle for life and the evolution of the species. People might say:
‘The Scarabs began by having tarsi to all their legs, in conformity with the general laws of insect structure. In one way or another, some of them lost these troublesome appendages to their front legs, they being hurtful rather than useful. Finding themselves the better for this mutilation, which made their work easier, they gained the advantage over their less-favoured fellows; they founded a family by handing down their fingerless stumps to their descendants; and the fingered insect of antiquity ended by becoming the maimed insect of our times.’
I am ready to yield to this reasoning if you will first tell me why, with similar but much harder tasks to perform, the Geotrupes has retained his tarsi. Until then we will go on believing that the first Scarab who rolled his ball, perhaps on the shore of some lake in which the Palæotherium bathed, was as innocent of front tarsi as his descendant of to-day. [[42]]
[1] The weekly holiday in the French schools.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[2] This seems the place in which to remind the reader that the first two chapters of the present volume correspond with Chapters I. and II. of the first volume of the Souvenirs entomologiques in their original form. Chapters III. to VII. of the present volume are translations of Chapters I. to V. of the fifth volume of the Souvenirs, published many years later, at a time when Fabre had completed his study of the Sacred Beetle.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[3] Cf. Mulsant’s Coléoptères de France: Lamellicornes.—Author’s Note. [↑]