The apartment is ready. The grub sheds its skin and becomes a nymph. There are very few inhabitants of the insect world that can compare for sober beauty with the delicate creature which, with wing-cases recumbent in front of it like a wide-pleated scarf and fore-legs folded under its head like those of the adult Beetle when counterfeiting death, calls to mind a mummy kept by its linen bandages in the approved hieratic attitude. Semitranslucent and honey-yellow, it looks as though it were carved from a block of amber. Imagine it hardened in this state, mineralized, rendered incorruptible: it would make a splendid topaz gem.
In this marvel of beauty, so severe and dignified in shape and colouring, one point above all captivates me and at last provides me with the solution of a far-reaching problem. Have the fore-legs a tarsus, yes or no? This is the great matter that makes me neglect the jewel for [[99]]the sake of a structural detail. Let us then return to a subject that used to excite me in my early days, for the answer has come at last, late, it is true, but certain and indisputable. The probabilities which were all that my first investigations could give me turn into certainties established by overwhelming evidence.
By a very strange exception, the full-grown Sacred Beetle and his congeners have no front tarsi: they lack on their fore-limbs the five-jointed finger which is the rule among the highest section of Beetles, the Pentamera. The remaining legs, on the other hand, follow the general law and possess a very well-shaped tarsus. Does this curious formation of the toothed fore-arms date from birth, or is it accidental?
At first sight, an accident seems not unlikely. The Sacred Beetle is a strenuous miner and a great pedestrian. Always in contact with the rough soil, whether in walking or digging, used moreover for constant leverage when the insect is rolling its pill backwards, the front limbs are exposed much more freely than the others to the danger of spraining and twisting their delicate finger, of putting it out of joint, of losing it entirely, from the first moment when the work begins.
Lest this explanation should appeal to any of my readers, I will hasten to undeceive him. The absence of the front fingers is not the result of an accident. Here before my eyes lies the unanswerable proof. I examine the nymph’s legs with the magnifying glass: those in front have not the least vestige of a tarsus; the toothed limb ends bluntly, without any trace of a terminal appendage. In the others, on the contrary, the tarsus is as distinct as can be, notwithstanding the shapeless, lumpy condition due to the swaddling-bands and humours of the [[100]]nymphal state. It suggests a finger swollen with chilblains.
If the evidence of the nymph were not sufficient, there would still be that of the perfect insect, which, casting its mummy-cloths and moving for the first time in its shell, wields fingerless fore-arms. The point is established for a certainty: the Sacred Beetle is born maimed; his mutilation dates from the beginning.
‘Very well,’ our popular theorists will reply, ‘the Sacred Beetle is mutilated from birth; but his remote ancestors were not. Formed according to the general rule, they were correct in structure down to this tiny digital detail. There were some who, in their rough work as navvies and carters, wore out that fragile, useless member which was always in the way; and, finding themselves all the better equipped for their work by this accidental amputation, they bequeathed it to their successors, to the great benefit of their race. The present insect profits by the improvement obtained by a long array of ancestors and, acting under the stimulus of the struggle for life, gives more and more durability to a favourable condition due to chance.’
O ingenious theorists, so triumphant on paper, so impotent in the face of facts, just listen to me for a moment! If the loss of the front fingers is a fortunate circumstance for the Sacred Beetle, who faithfully transmits the leg of olden time fortuitously maimed, why should it not be so with the other limbs, if they too chanced to lose their terminal appendage, a tiny, feeble filament, which is very nearly useless and which, owing to its fragility, is a cause of awkward encounters with the roughness of the soil?
The Sacred Beetle is not a climber; he is an ordinary pedestrian, supporting himself upon the point of an iron-shod stick, whereby I mean the stout spike or prickle with [[101]]which the tip of his leg is armed. He has no occasion to hold on by his claws to some hanging branch, as the Cockchafer does. It would therefore, meseems, be entirely to his advantage to rid himself of the four remaining digits, which jut out sideways, give no help in walking, and do not play any part in the making and the carting of the ball. Yes, that would mean progress, for the simple reason that the less hold you give 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 weather, in October, when the insect has worn itself out in digging, in trundling pills and in modelling pears, the maimed, disabled by their exertions, form the great majority. Both in my cages and out of doors, I see them in all stages of mutilation. Some have lost the finger on their four hind-limbs altogether; others retain a stump, a couple of joints, a single joint; those least damaged have a few members left intact.