[1] 1·28 × ·93 inch.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[2] Cf. inter alia the author’s Some Reflections upon Insect Psychology, in The Mason-Bees, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chap. vii.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
Chapter ix
THE SPANISH COPRIS: THE LAYING OF THE EGGS
If we show instinct doing for the egg what would be done on the advice of reason matured by study and experience, we achieve a result of no small philosophic importance; and an austere scientific conscience begins to trouble me with scruples. Not that I wish to give science a forbidding aspect: I am convinced that one can say the wisest things without employing a barbarous vocabulary. Clearness is the supreme courtesy of the wielder of the pen. I do my best to observe it. No, the scruple that stops me is of another kind.
I begin to wonder if I am not in this case the victim of an illusion. I say to myself:
‘Gymnopleuri and Sacred Beetles, when in the open air, are manufacturers of balls or pills. That is their trade, learnt we know not how, prescribed perhaps by their structure, in particular by their long legs, some of which are slightly curved. When they are making preparations for the egg, is it so wonderful that they continue underground their own ball-making speciality?’
If we leave out of the question the neck of the pear and the projecting tip of the ovoid, details much more difficult to explain, there remains the most important part so far [[128]]as bulk is concerned, the globular part, a repetition of the thing which the insect makes outside the burrow; there remains the pellet with which the Sacred Beetle plays in the sunshine, sometimes without making any other use of it, the ball which the Gymnopleurus rolls peacefully over the turf.