The loaves kneaded with my paper-knife are readily accepted. We will take advantage of this fact to make a few experiments. Instead of the big, substantial cake, I fashion a pill which is a replica in shape and size of the three or four which the mother is guarding after confiding the egg to them. My imitation is a fairly good one. If [[145]]I were to mix up the two products, the natural and the artificial, I might easily fail to distinguish between them afterwards. The counterfeit pill is placed in the jar, beside the other. The disturbed insect at once hides in a corner, under a little sand. I leave it in peace for a couple of days. Then how great is my surprise to find the mother on the top of my pill, digging a cup into it! In the afternoon the egg is laid and the cup closed. I can only tell my pill from those of the Copris by the place which it occupies. I had put it at the extreme right of the group, and at the extreme right I find it, duly operated on by the insect. How could the Beetle know that this ovoid, so like the others in every respect, was untenanted? How did she allow herself unhesitatingly to scoop the top into a crater when, judging by appearances, there might be an egg just underneath? She takes good care not to do any fresh excavating on the finished pills. What guide leads her to the artificial one, which is extremely deceptive in appearance, and bids her dig into that?
I do it again and yet again. The result is the same: the mother does not confuse her work with mine and takes advantage of the presence of my pill to install an egg in it. On only one occasion, when her appetite seems suddenly to have come back, did I see her feeding on my loaf. But her discrimination between the tenanted and the untenanted was just as clearly marked here as in the previous instance. Instead of attacking, in her hunger, the pills with eggs, by what miracle of divination does she turn, in spite of their exact outward similarity, to the pill which contains nothing?
Can my handiwork be defective? Did the wooden blade not press hard enough to impart the proper consistency? Is there something wrong with the dough as the [[146]]result of insufficient kneading? These are delicate questions, of which I, who am no expert in this kind of confectionery, am not competent to judge. Let us have recourse to a master of the pastry-cook’s art. I borrow from the Sacred Beetle the pill which he is beginning to roll in the vivarium. I choose a small one, of the size affected by the Copris. True, it is round; but the Copris’ pills also are pretty often round, even after receiving the egg.
Well, the Sacred Beetle’s loaf, that loaf of irreproachable quality, kneaded by the king of bread-makers, meets with the same fate as mine. At one time it is provided with an egg, at another it is eaten, while no accident ever happens by inadvertence to the exactly similar pills kneaded by the Copris.
That the insect, finding itself in this mixed assembly, should rip open what is still inanimate matter and respect what is already a cradle, that it should discriminate between the lawful and the unlawful, in circumstances such as these, seems to me incapable of explanation, if there be no guide but senses resembling our own. It is useless to say that it is a case of sight: the Beetle works in absolute darkness. Even if she worked in the light, that would not lessen the difficulty. The shape and appearance of the pill are alike in both instances; the clearest sight would be at fault once the pills were mixed up.
It is impossible to suggest that smell has anything to do with it: the substance of the pill does not vary; it is always the produce of the Sheep. Impossible likewise to say that she is exercising the sense of touch. What delicacy of touch can there be under a coat of horn? Besides, the most exquisite sensitiveness would be required. Even if we admit that the insect’s feet, particularly the tarsi, or the palpi, or the antennæ, or anything you please, possess [[147]]a certain faculty for distinguishing between hard and soft, rough and smooth, round and angular, still our experiment with the Sacred Beetle’s sphere warns us to look where we are going. There surely we had the exact equivalent of the Copris’ sphere—made of the same materials, kneaded to the same consistency, given the same outline—and yet the Copris makes no mistake.
To drag the sense of taste into the problem would be absurd. There remains that of hearing. Later on, I might not deny the possibility that this has something to do with it. When the larva is hatched, the mother, ever attentive, might conceivably hear it nibbling the wall of the cell, but for the present the chamber contains merely an egg; and an egg is always silent.
Then what other means does the mother possess, I will not say of thwarting my machinations—the problem is on a loftier plane and animals are not endowed with special aptitudes in order to dodge an experimenter’s wiles—what other means does she possess of obviating the difficulties attendant upon her normal labours? Do not lose sight of this: she begins by shaping a sphere; and the globular mass often does not differ from the pills that have received the egg, in respect of either form or size.
Nowhere is there peace, not even below ground. When, in a moment of panic, the too-timid mother falls off her sphere and forsakes it to seek refuge elsewhere, how can she afterwards find her ball again and distinguish it from the others, without running the risk of crushing an egg when she is pressing in the top of a pill to make the necessary crater? She needs a safe guide here. What is that guide? I do not know.
I have said it many a time and I say it again: insects possess sense-faculties of exquisite delicacy attuned to [[148]]their special trade, faculties of which we can form no conception because we have nothing similar within ourselves. A man blind from birth can have no notion of colour. We are as men blind from birth in the face of the unfathomable mysteries that surround us; and myriads of questions arise to which no answer can ever be given. [[149]]