d been foreigners talking in an unknown tongue. I do not think it was
a mere fancy of mine that he bears a kind of resemblance to the tribe of
insects he gives his life to studying. His shiny black coat; his rounded
back, convex with years of stooping over his minute work; his angular
movements, made natural to him by his habitual style of manipulation; the
aridity of his organism, with which his voice is in perfect keeping;--all
these marks of his special sedentary occupation are so nearly what might
be expected, and indeed so much, in accordance with the more general fact
that a man's aspect is subdued to the look of what he works in, that I do
not feel disposed to accuse myself of exaggeration in my account of the
Scarabee's appearance. But I think he has learned something else of his
coleopterous friends. The beetles never smile. Their physiognomy is not
adapted to the display of the emotions; the lateral movement of their
jaws being effective for alimentary purposes, but very limited in its
gamut of expression. It is with these unemotional beings that the
Scarabee passes his life. He has but one object, and that is perfectly
serious, to his mind, in fact, of absorbing interest and importance. In
one aspect of the matter he is quite right, for if the Creator has taken
the trouble to make one of His creatures in just such a way and not
otherwise, from the beginning of its existence on our planet in ages of
unknown remoteness to the present time, the man who first explains His
idea to us is charged with a revelation. It is by no means impossible
that there may be angels in the celestial hierarchy to whom it would be
new and interesting. I have often thought that spirits of a higher order
than man might be willing to learn something from a human mind like that
of Newton, and I see no reason why an angelic being might not be glad to
hear a lecture from Mr. Huxley, or Mr. Tyndall, or one of our friends at
Cambridge.

I have been sinuous as the Links of Forth seen from Stirling Castle, or
as that other river which threads the Berkshire valley and runs, a
perennial stream, through my memory,--from which I please myself with
thinking that I have learned to wind without fretting against the shore,
or forgetting cohere I am flowing,--sinuous, I say, but not jerky,--no,
not jerky nor hard to follow for a reader of the right sort, in the prime
of life and full possession of his or her faculties.

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