THE SACRED BEETLE: THE PEAR

The young shepherd who had been told in his spare time to watch the doings of the Sacred Beetle came to me in high spirits, one Sunday in the latter part of June, to say that he thought the time had come to begin our investigations. He had detected the insect issuing from the ground, had dug at the spot where it made its appearance, and had found, at no great depth, the queer thing which he was bringing me.

Queer it was and calculated to upset the little that I thought I knew. In shape, it was exactly like a tiny pear that had lost all its fresh colour and turned brown in rotting. What could this curious object be, this pretty plaything that seemed to have come from a turner’s workshop? Was it made by human hands? Was it a model of the fruit of the pear-tree intended for some children’s museum? One would say so.

The little ones group themselves round me; they look at the treasure-trove with longing eyes; they would like to add it to the contents of their toy-box. It is much prettier in shape than an agate marble, much more graceful than an ivory egg or a boxwood top. The material, it is true, seems none too nicely chosen; but it is firm to the touch and very artistically curved. In any case, the little pear discovered underground must not go to swell [57]the nursery collection until we have found out more about it.

Can it really be the Sacred Beetle’s work? Is there an egg inside it, a grub? The shepherd assures me that there is. A similar pear, crushed by accident in the digging, contained, he says, a white egg, the size of a grain of wheat. I dare not believe it, so greatly does the object which he has brought me differ from the ball which I expected to see.

To open the mysterious prize and ascertain its contents would perhaps be imprudent: such an act of violence might jeopardize the life of the germ within, always provided that the Scarab’s egg be there, a matter of which the shepherd seems convinced. Besides, I say to myself, the pear-shape, so totally opposed to all our accepted ideas, is probably accidental. Who knows if luck will ever give me anything like it again? I should be wise to keep the thing just as it is and await events; above all, I should be wise to go and seek for information on the spot.

The shepherd was at his post by daybreak the next morning. I joined him on some slopes that had been lately cleared of their trees, where the hot summer sun, which strikes with such force on the back of one’s neck, could not reach us for two or three hours. In the cool morning air, with the Sheep browsing under Sultan’s care, the two of us scattered on our search.

A Sacred Beetle’s burrow is soon found: you can tell it by the fresh little mound of earth above it. With a vigorous turn of the wrist, my companion digs away with the little pocket-trowel which I have lent him. Incorrigible earth-scraper that I am, I seldom set forth without this light but serviceable tool. While he digs, I lie down, the better to see the arrangement and furniture of the cellar which we are unearthing, and I am all eyes. The shepherd uses the trowel as a lever and, with his other hand, holds back and pushes aside the soil.

Here we are! A cave opens out and, in the moist warmth of the yawning vault, I see a splendid pear lying full length upon the ground. No, I shall not soon forget this first revelation of the Scarab’s maternal masterpiece. My excitement could have been no greater had I been an archæologist digging among the ancient relics of Egypt and lighting upon the sacred insect of the dead, carved in emerald, in some Pharaonic crypt. O ineffable moment, when truth suddenly shines forth! What other joys can compare with that holy rapture! The shepherd was in the seventh heaven; he laughed in response to my smile and was happy in my gladness.

Luck does not repeat itself: ‘Non bis in idem,’ says the old adage. And here have I twice had under my eyes this curious pear-shape. Is it by any chance the normal shape, not subject to exception? Must we abandon the thought of a sphere similar to those which the insect rolls along the ground? Let us continue and we shall see.

A second hole is found. Like the previous one, it contains a pear. My two treasures are as like as two peas; they might have issued from the same mould. And here is a valuable confirmatory detail: in the second burrow, by the side of the pear and fondly embracing it, is the mother Beetle, engaged no doubt in giving it the finishing touches before leaving the underground cave for good. All doubts are dispelled: I know the worker and I know the work.[59]

The rest of the morning provided abundant corroboration of these premisses: before an intolerable sun drove me from the slope which I was exploring, I was in possession of a dozen pears identical in shape and almost in dimensions. On several occasions the mother was present in the workshop.

To conclude this part of our subject, let me tell what the future held in store for me. All through the dog-days, from the end of June until September, I paid almost daily visits to the spots frequented by the Sacred Beetle; and the burrows unearthed by my trowel furnished an amount of evidence exceeding my fondest hopes. The insects reared in captivity supplied me with more facts, though these, it is true, were very scanty in comparison with the rich crop from the open fields. All told, about a hundred nests, at the lowest computation, passed through my hands; and they were invariably the graceful pear-shape, never, absolutely never, the round shape of the pill, never the ball of which the books tell us.

I myself once shared this error, placing as I did implicit confidence in the words of the learned authorities. My old hunting-expeditions on the Plateau des Angles led to no result; my attempts at home-rearing failed pitifully; and yet I was anxious to give my young readers some idea of the nest built by the Sacred Beetle. I therefore adopted the traditional theory of the round shape; and then, taking analogy for my guide, I made use of the little that I had learnt from other dung-rollers to attempt an approximate sketch of the Sacred Beetle’s work. It was an unlucky shot. Analogy no doubt is a valuable servant, but oh, how poor compared with direct observation! Deceived by this guide, so often untrustworthy amid the inexhaustible variety of life, I helped [60]to perpetuate the blunder; and so I hasten to apologize, begging the reader to dismiss from his mind the little that I have said heretofore on the probable nest-building methods of the Sacred Beetle.

And now let us unfold the authentic story, admitting as evidence only facts actually observed again and again. The Sacred Beetle’s nest is betrayed on the outside by a little heap of earth, by a tiny mound formed of the superfluous soil which the mother, when closing up the abode, has been unable to replace, part of the excavation having to be left empty. Under this mound is a shaft which is rarely more than four inches in depth, followed by a horizontal gallery, either straight or winding, which ends in a spacious hall, large enough to contain a man’s fist. This is the crypt in which the egg lies enveloped in food and subjected to the incubation of a hot sun baking the ground only a few inches above it; this is the roomy workshop in which the mother, unfettered in her movements, has kneaded and shaped the future nurseling’s food into a pear.

This stercoraceous bread has its main axis lying in a horizontal position. Its shape and size remind one exactly of those little Midsummer’s Day pears which, by virtue of their bright colouring, their flavour and their early ripening, are so popular with the children. There is a slight variation in the bulk of the pears found. The largest dimensions are 45 millimetres in length by 30 millimetres in width;1 the smallest are 35 millimetres by 28.2

Without being as polished as stucco, the surface, which is absolutely even, is carefully glazed with a thin layer [61]of red earth. At first soft as potter’s clay, the pyriform loaf soon dries and acquires a stout crust which refuses to yield to the pressure of the fingers. Wood itself is no harder. This rind is the defensive wrapper that isolates the recluse from the world and allows him to consume his victuals in profound peace. But, should the central mass become dried up, then the danger is extremely serious. We shall have occasion to refer to the unhappy lot of the grub condemned to a diet of too stale bread.

What dough does the Scarab’s bakehouse use? Who are the purveyors? The Horse and the Mule? By no means. Yet that was what I expected—and so would anybody—after seeing the insect make such energetic raids, for its own use, upon the overflowing store of an ordinary lump of dung. That is where it habitually manufactures the rolling ball which it goes and consumes in some underground retreat.

While coarse bread, full of bits of hay, is good enough for the mother, she becomes more particular where her children are concerned. She now wants the very daintiest pastry, rich in nourishment and easily digested; she wants the ovine manna: not that which the Sheep of a costive habit scatters in trails of black olives, but that which, elaborated in a less dry intestine, is fashioned into a single flat cake. This is the material required, the dough exclusively used. It is no longer the poor and stringy produce of the Horse, but an unctuous, plastic, homogeneous thing, soaked through and through with nutritive juices. Its plasticity and delicacy make it an admirable medium for an artistic piece of work like the Scarab’s pear, while its alimentary qualities suit the weak stomach of the new-born grub. There may not [62]be much of it, but the infant Beetle will find it sufficient for his needs.

This explains the smallness of these pears, a point which made me suspicious of the origin of my treasure until I found the mother present with the provisions. I was unable to see in those little pears the bill of fare of a future Sacred Beetle, who is so great a glutton and of so remarkable a size.

It probably also explains my failure in the old days with my cages. In my profound ignorance of the Sacred Beetle’s domestic life, I used to supply her with what I could pick up here and there, droppings of Horse or Mule; and the Beetle refused it for her children and declined to build a nest. To-day, taught by my experience in the fields, I go to the Sheep for my supplies and all is well in the cages. Does this mean that the insect never employs for its breeding-pears materials derived from the Horse, even if selected from the finest strata and carefully cleansed from objectionable matter? If the best cannot be obtained, is the middling refused? I prefer to be cautious and give no opinion. What I can declare is that I inspected over a hundred burrows with a view to writing this story, and that in every case, from first to last, the larva’s provisions had been obtained from the Sheep.

Where is the egg in that nutritive mass so novel in shape? One would be inclined to place it in the centre of the fat, round paunch. This central point is best protected against accidents from the outside, best off in the matter of temperature. Besides, the nascent grub would here find a deep layer of food on every side of it and would not be liable to make mistakes in the first mouthfuls. Everything being of the same kind all [63]round it, there would be no necessity for it to pick and choose; wherever it chanced to apply its prentice tooth, it could continue without hesitation its first dainty repast.

All this sounds so very rational that I allowed myself to be led away by it. In the first pear that I examined, layer by layer, shaving off slices with my penknife, I looked for the egg in the centre of the paunch, feeling almost certain of finding it there. To my great surprise, it was not there. Instead of being hollow, the centre of the pear is full and consists of one continuous uniform alimentary mass.

My deductions, which any observer in my place would certainly have shared, seemed very reasonable; the Scarab, however, is of another way of thinking. We have our logic, of which we are rather proud; the dung-kneader has hers, which is better than ours in this instance. She has her own foresight, takes her own precautions; and she places the egg elsewhere.

But where? Why, in the narrow part of the pear, in the neck, right at the end! Let us cut this neck lengthwise, taking the necessary precautions not to damage the contents. It is hollowed into a niche with polished and shiny walls. This niche is the tabernacle of the germ, the hatching-chamber. The egg, which is very large in proportion to the size of the mother, is an elongated oval, about ten millimetres in length with a diameter of five millimetres at the widest part.3 It is white and is separated on all sides from the walls of the chamber by a slight empty space, the only contact being at the rear end of the egg, which adheres to the top of the niche. Lying horizontally, in conformity with the normal [64]position of the pear, the whole of it, excepting the point of attachment, thus rests upon an air-mattress, warmest and most buoyant of beds.

Now we know all about it. Let us next try to understand the Scarab’s logic. Let us find out why she has to make that pear of hers, so unusual a shape in insect structures; let us seek to explain the suitability of the egg’s curious position. We are venturing on dangerous ground when we enquire into the how and wherefore of things. We easily lose our footing in that mysterious land where the moving soil gives way beneath us, swallowing the foolhardy in the quicksands of error. Must we abandon such excursions, because of the risk? Why should we?

What does our science, so sublime compared with the feebleness of our resources, so contemptible in the face of the boundless stretches of the unknown, what does it know of absolute reality? Nothing. The world interests us only because of the ideas which we form of it. Remove the idea and everything becomes a desert, chaos, nothingness. An omnium-gatherum of facts is not knowledge, but at most a cold catalogue which we must thaw and quicken at the fire of the mind; we must bring to it thought and the light of reason; we must interpret.

Let us adopt this course to explain the work of the Sacred Beetle. Perhaps we shall end by attributing our own logic to the insect. After all, it will be just as remarkable to see a wonderful agreement prevail between that which reason dictates to us and that which instinct dictates to the insect.

A grave danger threatens the Sacred Beetle in his grub state: the drying-up of the food. The crypt in which the larval life is spent has a layer of earth, some four inches thick, for a ceiling. Of what avail is this flimsy [65]screen against the torrid heat that beats down upon the soil, baking it like a brick to a far greater depth than that? At times the temperature of the grub’s abode mounts towards boiling-point; when I thrust my hand into it, I feel the hot air of a Turkish bath.

The provisions, therefore, even though they have to last but three or four weeks, are liable to dry up before that time and to become uneatable. When, instead of the soft bread of its first meal, the unhappy grub finds nothing to stay its stomach but a horrible crust, hard as a pebble and tooth-proof, it is bound to perish of hunger. And it does actually so perish. I have found numbers of these victims of the August sun which, after eating plentifully of the fresh food and digging themselves a cell in it, had succumbed, unable to continue biting into provisions that had become too hard. There remained a thick shell, a sort of closed oven, in which the poor thing lay baked and shrivelled up.

While the grub dies of hunger in a shell which has dried into stone, the full-grown insect that has completed its transformations dies there too, for it is incapable of bursting the prison and freeing itself. I shall come back later to the question of the final emergence and will say no more about it for the present. Let us confine our attention to the troubles of the grub.

The drying-up of the victuals is, I have said, fatal to it. This is proved by the larvæ found baked in their oven; it is also proved, in a more definite fashion, by the following experiment. In July, the period of active nidification, I place in wooden or cardboard boxes a dozen pears unearthed that morning from their native burrows. These boxes, carefully closed, are put away in the dark, in my study, where the same temperature prevails as outside. Well, [66]in none of them is the infant reared: sometimes the egg shrivels; sometimes the worm is hatched, but very soon dies. On the other hand, in tin boxes or glass receptacles, everything goes well: not one attempt at rearing fails.

Whence do these differences arise? Simply from this: in the high temperature of July, evaporation proceeds apace under the permeable wooden or cardboard screen; the food-pear dries up; and the unfortunate worm dies of hunger. In the impermeable tin boxes, in the carefully-sealed glass receptacles, there is no evaporation; the provisions retain their softness; and the grubs thrive as well as in their native burrow.

The insect employs two methods to ward off the danger of desiccation. In the first place, it compresses the outer layer with all the strength of its stout, flat fore-arms, turning it into a protective rind more homogeneous and more compact than the central mass. If I break one of these dried-up provision-boxes, the rind usually comes clean away, leaving the centre part bare. The whole suggests the shell and kernel of a nut. The pressure exercised by the mother when manipulating her pear has affected the surface layer to a depth of a few millimetres, and this has produced the rind; the influence of the pressure is not felt lower down, and the result is the big central kernel. In the hot summer months, the housewife puts her bread into a closed pan, to keep it fresh. This is what the insect does, in its fashion: by dint of compression, it covers the family bread with a pan.

The Sacred Beetle does not stop there: she becomes a geometrician capable of solving a delicate problem of minimum values. Other conditions being equal, evaporation obviously takes place in proportion to the extent of the evaporating surface. The alimentary mass must [67]therefore be given the smallest possible surface, in order to reduce the waste of moisture as much as possible; at the same time, this minimum surface must incorporate the maximum aggregate of nutritive materials, so that the grub may find sufficient nourishment. Now what is the form that encloses the greatest bulk within the smallest superficial area? Geometry answers, the sphere.

The Scarab, therefore, shapes the larva’s ration into a sphere (we will leave the neck of the pear out of the question for the moment); and this round form is not the result of blind mechanical conditions, imposing an inevitable shape upon the worker; it is not the violent effect of the rolling along the ground. We have already seen that, for the purpose of easier and swifter transit, the insect kneads into a perfect sphere the materials which it intends to consume at a distance, without moving that sphere from the spot on which it rests; in short, we have realized that the round form precedes the rolling.

In the same way, it will be seen presently that the pear destined for the grub is fashioned in the burrow. It undergoes no rolling-process, it is not even moved. The Sacred Beetle gives it the requisite outline exactly as a modelling artist might do, shaping his clay under the pressure of his thumb.

With the tools which it possesses, the insect could obtain other forms of a less delicate curve than its pear-shaped piece of work. It could, for instance, make a rough cylinder, the sausage customary among the Geotrupes; or, simplifying the work to the utmost, it could leave the lump without any definite form, just as it happened to find it. Things would proceed all the faster and would leave more time for playing in the sun. But no: the Sacred Beetle never chooses any shape but the sphere, [68]though it necessitates such scrupulous accuracy; she acts as though she knew the laws of evaporation and geometry from beginning to end.

It remains for us to examine the neck of the pear. What can be its object, its use? The reply forces itself upon us irresistibly. This neck contains the egg, in the hatching-chamber. Now every germ, whether of plant or animal, needs air, the primary stimulus of life. To admit that vivifying combustible, the shell of a bird’s egg is riddled with an endless number of pores. The pear of the Sacred Beetle may be compared with the egg of the Hen. Its shell is the rind, hardened by pressure, to avoid untimely desiccation; its nutritive mass, its meat, its yolk is the soft ball sheltered under the rind; its air-chamber is the terminal space, the cavity in the neck, where the air envelops the germ on every side. Where would that germ be better off, for breathing, than in its hatching-chamber projecting into the atmosphere and giving free play to the passage of gases through its thin and easily permeable wall?

In the centre of the mass, on the other hand, aeration is not so easy. The hardened rind does not possess pores like an egg-shell’s; and the central kernel is formed of compact matter. The air enters it nevertheless, for presently the grub will be able to live in it: the grub, a robust organism which does not need the same tender flutter of life as the sensitive germ.

Where the adolescent larva thrives, the egg would die of suffocation. Here is a proof of it. I take a small, wide-necked phial and fill it with Sheep-dung, the fare required in this case. I push in a bit of stick and obtain a shaft which shall represent the hatching-chamber. Down this shaft I place an egg carefully moved from its cell. I [69]close the orifice and cover up everything with a thickly-heaped layer of the same material. Here, in all excepting the shape, we have an artificial reproduction of the Sacred Beetle’s pellet; only, in this instance, the egg is in the centre of the mass, the place which over-hasty considerations made us but now believe the most suitable. Well, the point which we selected is fatal to life. The egg dies there. What has it lacked? Apparently, proper aeration.

Plenteously enveloped by the clammy mass, which is a bad conductor of heat, it is also deprived of the mild temperature needed for its hatching. In addition to air, every germ requires heat. In order to be as near as possible to the incubator, the germ in the bird’s egg is on the surface of the yolk and, thanks to its extreme mobility, always comes to the top, no matter what the position of the egg may be. Thus the most is made of the maternal heating-apparatus seated upon the brood.

In the insect’s case, the incubator is the earth, which is warmed by the sun. Its germ likewise comes close to the heating-apparatus; it goes as near as it can to the universal incubator, in search of its spark of life; instead of remaining sunk in the middle of the inert mass, it takes up its position at the top of a projecting nipple, lapped on all sides by the warm emanations of the soil.

These conditions, air and warmth, are so fundamental that no Dung-beetle neglects them. The piles of food hoarded vary in form, as we shall have an opportunity of seeing: in addition to the pear, such shapes as the cylinder, the ovoid, the pill and the thimble are adopted, according to the genus of the manipulator; but, amid this diversity of outline, one primary feature remains unchanged, and that is the placing of the egg in a hatching-chamber close [70]to the surface which allows free access to air and heat. And the most gifted in this delicate art of knowing just where to place the egg is the Sacred Beetle with her pear.

I was saying just now that this foremost of dung-kneaders behaved with a logic that rivals our own. By this time, my statement has been completely established. Here is something better still. Let us submit the following problem to our leading scientific lights: a germ is accompanied by a mass of victuals liable soon to be rendered useless by desiccation. How should the alimentary mass be shaped? Where should the egg be laid so as to be easily influenced by air and heat?

The first question of the problem has already been answered. Knowing that evaporation varies in proportion to the extent of the evaporating surface, science declares that the victuals shall be arranged in the form of a ball, because the spherical shape is that which encloses the greatest amount of material within the smallest surface. As for the egg, since it requires a protecting sheath to keep it from any harmful contact, it shall be contained within a thin, cylindrical case; and this case shall be fixed upon the sphere.

Thus the requisite conditions are fulfilled: the provisions, packed into a ball, keep fresh; the egg, protected by its slender, cylindrical sheath, receives the influence of warmth and air without impediment. The strictly needful has been obtained; but it is very ugly. Utility has paid no attention to beauty.

An artist corrects the crude work of reason. He replaces the cylinder by a semi-ellipsoid, so much prettier in form; he joins this ellipsoid to the sphere by means of a graceful curved surface; and the whole becomes the [71]pear, the necked gourd. It is now a work of art, a thing of beauty.

The Sacred Beetle does exactly what æsthetic considerations dictate to ourselves. Can she, too, have a sense of beauty? Is she able to appreciate the elegance of her pear? True, she does not see it: she manipulates it in profound darkness. But she touches it. A poor touch hers, roughly clad in horn, yet not insensible, after all, to delicate contours.

It occurred to me to put children’s intelligence to the test with this problem in æsthetics suggested by the Sacred Beetle’s work. I wanted very immature minds, hardly opened, still slumbering in the misty clouds of early childhood, in short, approximating as nearly as possible to the vague intellect of the insect, if any such approximation is permissible. At the same time I wanted them to be clear-headed enough to understand me. I selected some untutored youngsters, of whom the oldest was six.

I submitted to this tribunal the work of the Sacred Beetle and a geometrical production of my own fingers, representing in the same dimensions the sphere surmounted by a short cylinder. Taking each of them aside, as though for confession, lest the opinion of one should influence the opinion of another, I sprang my two toys upon them and asked them which they thought the prettier. There were five of them; and they all voted for the Sacred Beetle’s pear.

I was struck by this unanimity. The rough little peasant-lad, who has scarcely yet learnt how to blow his nose, has already a certain sense of elegance of form. He can distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly. Can this be also true of the Sacred Beetle? No one who knew what he was talking about would venture to say yes; [72]no one either would venture to say no. It is a question that cannot be answered, since we cannot consult the one and only judge in this case. After all, the solution might very well be exceedingly simple. What does the flower know of its glorious corolla? What does the snowflake know of its exquisite hexagonal stars? Like the flower and the snowflake, the Sacred Beetle might well be ignorant of the beautiful, though it be her work.

There is beauty everywhere, on the express condition that there be an eye capable of recognizing it. Is this eye of the mind, this eye which appraises correctness of form, to some extent an attribute of the dumb creation? If the Toad’s ideal of beauty is unquestionably the She-toad, outside the irresistible attraction of the sexes is there really such a thing as beauty to an animal? Considered generally, what is beauty, actually? Beauty is order. What is order? Harmony in the whole design. What is harmony? Harmony is.… But enough. Answers would follow upon questions without ever touching the real principle of it all, the immovable foundation. What a lot of philosophizing over a lump of dung! It is high time to change the subject.