know of the outside world? Let us repeat, as much
as a bit of an intestine can know. And this senseless creature fills us
with amazement! I regret that the clever logician, instead of
conceiving a statue smelling a rose, did not imagine it gifted with
some instinct. How quickly he would have recognized that, quite apart
from sense-impressions, the animal, including man, possesses certain
psychological resources, certain inspirations that are innate and not
acquired!

CHAPTER 5. THE BURYING-BEETLES: THE BURIAL.

Beside the footpath in April lies the Mole, disembowelled by the
peasant's spade; at the foot of the hedge the pitiless urchin has
stoned to death the Lizard, who was about to don his green,
pearl-embellished costume. The passer-by has thought it a meritorious
deed to crush beneath his heel the chance-met Adder; and a gust of wind
has thrown a tiny unfeathered bird from its nest. What will become of
these little bodies and of so many other pitiful remnants of life? They
will not long offend our sense of sight and smell. The sanitary
officers of the fields are legion.

An eager freebooter, ready for any task, the Ant is the first to come
hastening and begin, particle by particle, to dissect the corpse. Soon
the odour of the corpse attracts the Fly, the genitrix of the odious
maggot. At the same time, the flattened Silpha, the glistening,
slow-trotting Horn-beetle, the Dermestes, powdered with snow upon the
abdomen, and the slender Staphylinus, all, whence coming no one knows,
hurry hither in squads, with never-wearied zeal, investigating, probing
and draining the infection.

What a spectacle, in the spring, beneath a dead Mole! The horror of
this laboratory is a beautiful sight for one who is able to observe and
to meditate. Let us overcome our disgust; let us turn over the unclean
refuse with our foot. What a swarming there is beneath it, what a
tumult of busy workers! The Silphae, with wing-cases wide and dark, as
though in mourning, fly distraught, hiding in the cracks in the soil;
the Saprini, of polished ebony which mirrors the sunlight, jog hastily
off, deserting their workshop; the Dermestes, of whom one wears a
fawn-coloured tippet, spotted with white, seek to fly away, but, tipsy
with their putrid nectar, tumble over and reveal the immaculate
whiteness of their bellies, which forms a violent contrast with the
gloom of the rest of their attire.

What were they doing there, all these feverish work