‘I have on my back a budding horn, the germ of a bit of ornamentation that can be very handsome, as witness the Bison Bubas, who turns it into a splendid prow-shaped protuberance; witness also various exotic relatives of mine, who lengthen their corselet into a magnificent spur. I possess the wherewithal to bring about a revolution among my kin. If I retained it, my bump, that charming innovation, would relegate my rivals to the second rank; I should be preferred above all others; I should become the founder of a family; and my descendants, completing and improving on my first attempt, would behold the extinction of those antiquated old things. Why should the lump on my back wither purposeless? Why should my endeavour, repeated year after year for centuries, never achieve the promised result?’
Listen to me, O ambitious one! The theorists, it is true, declare that every casual acquisition, however trifling, is handed down and increases if it be profitable; but don’t rely overmuch on that assertion. I do not doubt the advantages which you might gain from a little ornament. What I do very much doubt is the efficacity of time and environment as an evolutionary factor. You will be well-advised to believe that, born in the dim and [[186]]distant past with a transient callosity, you are continuing and will continue to be born with that rudimentary excrescence without any chance of fixing it, hardening it into a horn or obtaining an additional decoration for your wedding-garment.
Be we men or Dung-beetles, we are all created in the image of an unalterable prototype: the changing conditions of life alter us slightly on the surface but never in the framework of our being. The verdigris of the ages may encrust our medals, but it can give them neither a new image nor a new superscription. Nothing will give me the wings of a bird, desirable though these would be in the midst of our human squalor; nor will anything bestow upon your adult age the triumphal crest which your nymphal knob seemed to prognosticate.
The nymphs of both the Onthophagus and the Oniticellus attain their maturity in some twenty days. During August the adult form appears with the half-white, half-red costume which has become familiar to us from our earlier studies. The normal colouring is fixed pretty quickly. Nevertheless the insect is in no hurry to burst its shell: the difficulty would be too great. It waits for the first showers of September, which will come to its assistance by softening the casket. The liberating rain arrives; and behold, issuing from the earth to rush after food, the joyous small fry of the Onthophagi.
Among the domestic secrets which my cages reveal to me at this period, one above all attracts my attention. I possess at the same time, in separate establishments, the newcomers and the veterans, which last are as brisk and eager in their pursuit of the victuals as are their sons, now banqueting for the first time in the open. The cages are stocked with two generations. [[187]]
The same synchronizing of fathers and sons is observable among all the Dung-beetles that build their nests in the spring: Sacred Beetles, Copres and Geotrupes. The precaution which I have taken to watch the hatchings and to place the youngsters in a special compartment as and when they appeared confirms this remarkable simultaneity.
It is an entomological principle that the ancestor shall not see his descendants; he dies once the future of his family is assured. By a glorious privilege, the Sacred Beetle and his rivals are allowed to know their successors: fathers and sons meet at the same banquet, not in my cages, where the problems under consideration compel me to keep them separate, but in the open fields. Together they gambol in the sun, together they exploit the patch of dung encountered; and this life of revelry lasts as long as autumn continues to supply fine days.
The cold weather arrives. Sacred Beetles and Copres, Onthophagi and Gymnopleuri dig themselves a burrow, go down into it with provisions, shut themselves in and wait. In January, on a frosty day, I dig into the cages, which have no protection against the inclemencies of the season. I go to work discreetly, so as not to submit all my captives to the harsh test. Those whom I exhume each sit huddled in a shell, beside the remaining provisions. All that the lethargy produced by the cold allows them to do is to move their legs and antennæ a little when I expose them to the sun.
Hardly has the imprudent almond-tree burst into blossom in February, when some of the sleepers awake. Two of the earlier Onthophagi, O. lemur and O. fronticornis, are very common at this time, already crumbling the dung warmed by the sun on the high-road. Soon the festival [[188]]of spring begins; and all, large and small, newcomers and veterans, hasten to take part in it. The old ones, not all, but at least some of them, the best-preserved, fly off and get married a second time, an unparalleled privilege. They have two families, separated by an interval of a year. They can indeed have three, as is evidenced by the Broad-necked Scarab, who, kept in a cage for three years, gives me every year her collection of pears. Perhaps they even go beyond this. The Dung-beetle tribe has its patriarchs who are truly venerable. [[189]]