Such care bestowed upon a strange grub deserves attention. I must go on. I slip into the jar a second pill, similar to the foregoing, ruptured at the top, with an opening larger than on the first occasion, one about a sixteenth of an inch square. The greater the difficulty, the more praiseworthy will the restoration be.
It is, indeed, difficult to close. The grub, a fat baby, is wildly gesticulating and excreting through the window. Leaning over the hole, its new mother seems to console it. She is like a nurse bending over the cradle. Meanwhile her helpful legs are working with a will, scratching around the yawning aperture to obtain the wherewithal to stop it. But the materials, half-dried this time, are hard and unyielding. They are slow in coming; and the quantity is too small for so big a hole. No matter: what with the grub continuing to shoot forth its putty and the other mixing it with her own scrapings, to give it consistency, and afterwards spreading it, the opening closes up.
The thankless task has taken a whole afternoon. It is a good lesson for me. I shall be more careful in future. I shall choose softer pills and, instead of opening them by removing the materials, I shall simply lift the wall by shreds until the grub is laid bare. The mother will only have to flatten down those shreds and solder them together.
I act accordingly with a third pill, which is very neatly repaired in a short time. Not a trace remains of the ravages caused by my penknife. I continue in the same way with a fourth, a fifth and so on, at intervals long enough to give the mother a rest. I stop when the receptacle is full, looking like a pot of plums. The contents amount to twelve pieces, of which ten have come from the outside, all ten violated by my [[160]]penknife and all restored to good condition by the foster-mother.
There are some interesting sidelights to this curious experiment, which I could have continued if the capacity of the jar had permitted. The Copris’ zeal, which was not lessened after the restoring of so many ruins, and her diligence, which was the same at the end as in the beginning, tell me that I had not exhausted the maternal solicitude. Let us leave it at that; it is amply sufficient.
Observe first the arrangement of the pills. Three are enough to occupy the floor-space of the enclosure. The others are therefore gradually superposed in layers, making in the end a four-story structure. The whole forms an irregular pile, an absolute labyrinth with very narrow, winding lanes, through which the insect glides with some difficulty. When her household is in order, the mother stays below, under the pile, touching the sand. It is at this moment that a new broken cell is introduced, right at the top of the pile, on the third or fourth floor. Let us put back the screen, wait a few minutes and then go back to the jar.
The mother is there, hoisted on the torn pill and doing her utmost to close it. How was she informed on the ground-floor of what was happening in the attic? How did she know that a larva up there was calling for her assistance? The babe in distress screams and the nurse comes running up. The grub says nothing; it makes no sound. Its desperate gesticulations are not accompanied by any noise. And the watcher hears this mute appeal. She notices the silence, she sees the invisible. I am bewildered, every one would be bewildered by the mystery of these perceptions which are so foreign to our nature [[161]]and which ‘topsy turvy the understanding,’ as Montaigne would say. Let us pass on.
I have described elsewhere[7] the brutality with which the Bee, that most gifted of insects, treats the eggs of her fellows. Osmiæ, Chalicodomæ and others perpetrate atrocities at times. In a moment of vengeance or of that inexplicable aberration which occurs after the laying is finished, a sister’s egg, savagely torn from the cell with the pincers of the mandibles, is flung into the dust-bin. The thing is pitilessly crushed, is ripped open, is even eaten. How different from the good-natured Copris!
Shall we attribute altruism among families to the Dung-beetle? Shall we do her the signal honour of allowing that she administers relief to foundlings? That would be madness. The mother who so diligently assists the children of others thinks, beyond a doubt, that she is working for her own. The victim of my experiment had two pills that belonged to her; my intervention gave her ten more. And, in the jar filled with prunes to the top, her assiduous care draws no distinction between the real household and the casual family. Her intellect therefore is incapable of the most elementary conception of quantity; she cannot even distinguish between the singular and the plural, the few and the many.
Can it be because of the darkness? No, for my frequent visits give the Copris an opportunity, when the opaque screen is lifted, of looking around her and discovering the strange accumulation, that is if light be really the guide which she lacks. Besides, has she not another means of information? In the natural burrow, the pills, three or at most four in number, all lie on the ground, forming one [[162]]row only. With my additions they pile up into four stories.