passage. With the hooks of their
spikes they dig, scratch and tear. Instinct has flashes of inspiration.
What the animal did not know how to do at the start it learns without
apprenticeship when the time comes to practice this or that industry.
The maggot ripe for burial perforates a membranous obstacle which the
grub intent upon its broth would not even have attempted to attack with
either its pepsin or its grapnels.

Why does the worm quit the carcass, that capital shelter? Why does it go
and take up its abode in the ground? As the leading disinfector of dead
things, it works at the most important matter, the suppression of the
infection; but it leaves a plentiful residuum, which does not yield
to the reagents of its analytical chemistry. These remains have to
disappear in their turn. After the fly, anatomists come hastening, who
take up the dry relic, nibble skin, tendons and ligaments and scrape the
bones clean.

The greatest expert in this work is the Dermestes beetle, an
enthusiastic gnawer of animal remains. Sooner or later, he will come
to the joint already exploited by the fly. Now what would happen if the
pupae were there? The answer is obvious. The Dermestes, who loves hard
food, would dig his teeth into the horny little kegs and demolish them
at a bite. Even though he did not touch the contents, a live thing which
he probably dislikes, he would at least test the flavor of that lifeless
substance, the container. The future Fly would be lost, because her
casing would be pierced. Even so, in the storerooms of our silk mills,
a certain Dermestes (Dermestes vulpinus, FABR.) digs into the cocoons to
attack the horny covering of the chrysalis.

The maggot foresees the danger and makes itself scarce before the other
arrives. In what sort of memory does it house so much wisdom, indigent,
headless creature that it is, for it is only by extension that we can
give the name of head to the animal's pointed fore part? How did it
learn that, to safeguard the pupa, it must desert the carcass and that,
to safeguard the fly, it must not bury itself too far down?

To emerge from underground after the perfect insect is hatched, the
bluebottle's device consists in disjointing her head into two movable
halves, which, each distended with its great red eye, by turns separate
and reunite. In the intervening space, a large, glassy hernia rises and
disappears, disappears and rises. When the two move asunder, with one
eye forced bac