So far as the rest of the insect race is concerned, the mother’s cares are generally most summary. In the majority of cases, all that is done is to lay the eggs in a favourable spot, where the larva, at its own risk and peril, can find bed and breakfast. With such rustic ideas upon the upbringing of the offspring, talents are superfluous. Lycurgus banished the arts from his republic on the ground that they were enervating. In like manner the higher inspirations of instinct have no home among insects reared in the Spartan fashion. The mother scorns the sweet task of the nurse; and the psychic prerogatives, which are the best of all, diminish and disappear, so true is it that, with animals as with ourselves, the family is a source of perfection.
While the Hymenopteron, so extremely thoughtful of her progeny, fills us with wonder, the others, which abandon theirs to the accidents of good luck or bad, must seem to us, by comparison, of little interest. These others form almost the whole of the entomological race; at least, among the fauna of our country-sides, there is, to my knowledge, only one other example of insects preparing board and lodging for their family, as do the gatherers of honey and the buriers of well-filled game-bags. [[vii]]
And, strange to say, these insects vying in maternal solicitude with the flower-despoiling tribe of Bees are none other than the Dung-beetles, the dealers in ordure, the scavengers of the cattle-fouled meadows. We must pass from the scented blossoms of our flower-beds to the Mule-dung of our high-roads to find a second instance of devoted mothers and lofty instincts. Nature abounds in these antitheses. What are our ugliness or beauty, our cleanliness or dirt to her? Out of filth, she creates the flower; from a little manure, she extracts the thrice-blessed grain of wheat.
Notwithstanding their disgusting occupation, the Dung-beetles are of a very respectable standing. Their size, which is generally imposing; their severe and immaculately glossy attire; their portly bodies, thickset and compact; the quaint ornamentation of brow or thorax: all combined make them cut an excellent figure in the collector’s boxes, especially when to our home species, oftenest of an ebon black, we add a few tropical varieties, a-glitter with gleams of gold and flashes of burnished copper.
They are the sedulous attendants of our herds, for which reason several of them are faintly redolent of benzoic acid, the aromatic of the Sheep-folds. Their pastoral habits have impressed the nomenclators, too often, alas, careless of euphony, who this time have changed their tune and headed their descriptions with such names as Melibœus, Tityrus, Amyntas, Corydon, Mopsus and Alexis. We find here the whole series of bucolic appellations made famous by the poets of antiquity. Virgil’s eclogues have lent their vocabulary for the Dung-beetles’ glorification. We should have to go back to the Butterflies with their dainty graces to find an equally [[viii]]poetic nomenclature. In their case the epic names of the Iliad ring out, borrowed from the camps of Greek and Trojan and perhaps too magnificently bellicose for those peaceable winged flowers whose habits in no wise recall the martial deeds of an Ajax or an Achilles. Much better-imagined is the bucolic title given to the Dung-beetles: it tells us the insect’s chief characteristic, its predilection for pasture-lands.
The dung-manipulators have as head of their line the Sacred Beetle or Scarab, whose strange behaviour had already attracted the attention of the fellah in the valley of the Nile, some thousand years before the Christian era. As he watered his patch of onions in the spring, the Egyptian peasant would see from time to time a fat black insect pass close by, hurriedly trundling a ball of Camel-dung backwards. He would watch the queer rolling thing in amazement, even as the Provençal peasant watches it to this day.
No one fails to be surprised when he first finds himself in the presence of the Scarab, who, with his head down and his long hind-legs in the air, pushes with might and main his huge pill, the source of so many awkward tumbles. Undoubtedly the simple fellah, on beholding this spectacle, wondered what that ball could be, what object the black creature could have in rolling it along with such vigour. The peasant of to-day asks himself the same question.
In the days of the Rameses and Thothmes, superstition had something to say in the matter; men saw in the rolling sphere an image of the world performing its daily revolution; and the Scarab received divine honours: in memory of his ancient glory, he continues the Sacred Beetle of the modern naturalists. [[ix]]
It is six or seven thousand years since the curious pill-maker first got himself talked about: are his habits thoroughly familiar to us yet? Do we know the exact use for which he intends his ball, do we know how he rears his family? Not at all. The most authoritative works perpetuate the grossest errors where he is concerned.
Ancient Egypt used to say that the Scarab rolls his ball from east to west, the direction in which the world turns. He next buries it underground for twenty-eight days, the period of a lunary revolution. This four weeks’ incubation quickens the pill-maker’s progeny. On the twenty-ninth day, which the insect knows to be that of the conjunction of the sun and moon and of the birth of the world, he goes back to his buried ball; he digs it up, opens it and throws it into the Nile. That completes the cycle. Immersion in the sacred waters causes a Scarab to emerge from the ball.