the toad
receive the preference, because of their bare skins, which enable me
better to follow the first attack and the work of the invaders. I ring
the changes with furred and feathered beasts. A few children of the
neighborhood, allured by pennies, are my regular purveyors. Throughout
the good season, they come running triumphantly to my door, with a snake
at the end of a stick, or a lizard in a cabbage leaf. They bring me the
rat caught in a trap, the chicken dead of the pip, the mole slain by
the gardener, the kitten killed by accident, the rabbit poisoned by some
weed. The business proceeds to the mutual satisfaction of sellers and
buyer. No such trade had ever been known before in the village nor ever
will be again.

April ends; and the pans rapidly fill. An ant, ever so small, is the
first arrival. I thought I should keep this intruder off by hanging my
apparatus high above the ground: she laughs at my precautions. A few
hours after the deposit of the morsel, fresh still and possessing no
appreciable smell, up comes the eager picker-up of trifles, scales the
stems of the tripod in processions and starts the work of dissection.
If the joint suits her, she even goes to live in the sand of the pan and
digs herself temporary platforms in order to work the rich find more at
her ease.

All through the season, from start to finish, she will always be the
promptest, always the first to discover the dead animal, always the last
to beat a retreat when nothing more remains than a heap of little bones
bleached by the sun. How does the vagabond, passing at a distance, know
that, up there, invisible, high on the gibbet, there is something worth
going for? The others, the real knackers, wait for the meat to go bad;
they are informed by the strength of the effluvia. The ant, gifted with
greater powers of scent, hurries up before there is any stench at all.
But, when the meat, now two days old and ripened by the sun, exhales its
flavor, soon the master ghouls appear upon the scene: Dermestes [bacon
beetles, small flesh-eating beetles] and Saprini [exceedingly small
flesh-eating beetles], Silphae [carrion beetles] and Necrophori [burying
beetles], flies and Staphylini [rove beetles], who attack the corpse,
consume it and reduce it almost to nothing. With the ant alone, who
each time carries off a mere atom, the sanitary operation would take too
long; with them, it is a quick business, especially as certain of them
understand th