Here then is the mutilation on which the philosophers base their theory. And it is no rare accident: every year the cripples outnumber the others when the time comes for retiring to winter-quarters. In their final labours they seem no more embarrassed than those who have been spared by the buffeting of life. On both sides I find the same nimbleness of movement, the same dexterity in kneading the reserve of bread which will enable them to bear the first rigours of winter with equanimity in their underground homes. In scavenger’s work, the maimed rival the others.
And these cripples found families: they spend the cold season beneath the soil; they wake up in the spring, return to the surface and take part for a second time, sometimes [[102]]even for a third, in life’s great festival. Their descendants ought to profit by an improvement which has been renewed year by year, ever since Sacred Beetles came into the world, and which has certainly had time to become fixed and to convert itself into a settled habit. But they do nothing of the sort. Every Sacred Beetle that breaks his shell, with not one exception, is endowed with the regulation four tarsi.
Well, my theorists, what do you say to that? For the two front legs you offer a sort of explanation; and the four others give you a categorical denial. Have you not been taking your fancies for facts?
Then what is the cause of the Sacred Beetle’s original mutilation? I will frankly confess that I have no idea. Nevertheless those two maimed members are very strange, so strange indeed that they have enticed the masters, the greatest masters, into lamentable errors. Listen, first of all, to Latreille,[2] the prince of descriptive entomologists. In his article on the insects which ancient Egypt painted or carved upon her monuments,[3] he quotes the writings of Horapollo,[4] a unique document preserved for us in the papyri for the glorification of the sacred insect:
‘One would be tempted at first,’ he says, ‘to set down as fiction what Horapollo says of the number of this Beetle’s fingers: according to him, there are thirty. Nevertheless, this computation, judged by the way in [[103]]which he looks at the tarsus, is quite correct, for this part consists of five joints; and, if we take each of them for a finger, the legs being six in number and each ending in a five-jointed tarsus, the Sacred Beetles evidently had thirty fingers.’
Forgive me, illustrious master: the number of joints is but twenty, because the two fore-legs are without tarsi. You were carried away by the general rule. Losing sight of the singular exception, which you certainly knew, you said thirty, obsessed for a moment by that overwhelmingly positive rule. Yes, you knew the exception, so much so that the figure of the Scarab accompanying your article, a figure drawn from the insect and not from the Egyptian monuments, is irreproachably accurate: it has no tarsi on its front legs. The blunder is pardonable, because the exception is so unusual.
Mulsant,[5] in his volume on the French Lamellicorns, quotes Horapollo and his allowance of thirty fingers to the insect according to the number of days which the sun takes to traverse a sign of the Zodiac. He repeats Latreille’s explanation. He goes even farther. Here are his own words:
‘If we count each joint of the tarsi as a finger, we must admit that this insect was examined with great attention.’
Examined with great attention! By whom, pray? By Horapollo? Not a bit of it! By you, my master: yes, indeed yes! And yet the rule, in its very positiveness, is misleading you for a moment; it misleads you again and in a more serious fashion when, in your illustration [[104]]of the Sacred Beetle, you represent the insect with tarsi on its fore-legs, tarsi similar to those on the other legs. You, painstaking describer though you be, have in your turn been the victim of a momentary aberration. The rule is so general that it has made you lose sight of the singularity of the exception.
What did Horapollo himself see? Apparently what we see in our day. If Latreille’s explanation be right, as everything seems to indicate, if the Egyptian author began by counting the first thirty fingers according to the number of joints in the tarsi, it is because he made a mental enumeration on the basis of the general circumstances. He was guilty of a slip which was not so very reprehensible, seeing that, more than a thousand years later, masters like Latreille and Mulsant were guilty of the same slip. If we must blame something, let us blame the exceptional structure of the insect.