s, so
remarkable for their domestic morality, are given over to the vermin of
poverty. Alas, of this discrepancy between the services rendered and
the harshness of life there are many other examples outside the world
of scavengers and undertakers!

The Burying-beetles display an exemplary domestic morality, but it does
not persist until the end. During the first fortnight of June, the
family being sufficiently provided for, the sextons strike work and my
cages are deserted, so far as the surface is concerned, in spite of new
arrivals of Mice and Sparrows. From time to time some grave-digger
leaves the subsoil and comes crawling languidly in the fresh air.

Another rather curious fact now attracts my attention. All, as soon as
they emerge from underground, are cripples, whose limbs have been
amputated at the joints, some higher up, some lower down. I see one
mutilated Beetle who has only one leg left entire. With this odd limb
and the stumps of the others lamentably tattered, scaly with vermin, he
rows himself, as it were, over the dusty surface. A comrade emerges,
one better off for legs, who finishes the cripple and cleans out his
abdomen. So my thirteen remaining Necrophori end their days,
half-devoured by their companions, or at least shorn of several limbs.
The pacific relations of the outset are succeeded by cannibalism.

History tells us that certain peoples, the Massagetae and others, used
to kill their aged folk in order to spare them the miseries of
senility. The fatal blow on the hoary skull was in their eyes an act of
filial piety. The Necrophori have their share of these ancient
barbarities. Full of days and henceforth useless, dragging out a weary
existence, they mutually exterminate one another. Why prolong the agony
of the impotent and the imbecile?

The Massagetae might invoke, as an excuse for their atrocious custom, a
dearth of provisions, which is an evil counsellor; not so the
Necrophori, for, thanks to my generosity, victuals are superabundant,
both beneath the soil and on the surface. Famine plays no part in this
slaughter. Here we have the aberration of exhaustion, the morbid fury
of a life on the point of extinction. As is generally the case, work
bestows a peaceable disposition on the grave-digger, while inaction
inspires him with perverted tastes. Having no longer anything to do, he
breaks his fellow's limbs, eats him up, heedless of being mutilated or
eaten up himself. This is the ultimate