geneous and continuous coating of clay, which makes a piece of
solid pottery impervious to evaporation.

The earthen pot is exactly filled by its contents, without the
slightest interval along the line of junction. This detail tells us
the worker's method. The jar is moulded on the provisions. After the
food-pellet has been formed in the ordinary baker's fashion and the
egg laid in its hatching-chamber, the Bolbites takes some armfuls of
the clay near at hand, applies it to the foodstuff and presses it
down. When the work is finished and smoothed to perfection with
indefatigable patience, the tiny pot, built up piecemeal, looks as
though made with the wheel and rivals our own earthenware in
regularity.

The hatching-chamber, in which the egg lies, is, as usual, contrived
in the nipple at the end of the pear. How will the germ and the young
larva manage to breathe under that clay casing, which intercepts the
access of the air?

Have no fears: the pot-maker knows quite well how matters stand. She
takes good care not to close the top with the plastic earth which
supplied her with the walls. At some distance from the tip of the
nipple, the clay ceases to play its part and makes way for fibrous
particles, for tiny scraps of undigested fodder, which, arranged one
above the other with a certain order, form a sort of thatched roof
over the egg. The inward and outward passage of the air is assured
through this coarse screen.

One is set thinking in the presence of this layer of clay, which
protects the fresh provisions, and this vent-hole stopped with a truss
of straw, which admits the air freely, while defending the entrance.
There is the eternal question, if we do not rise above the
commonplace: how did the insect acquire so wise an art?

Not one fails in obeying those two laws, the safety of the egg and
ready ventilation; not one, not even the next on my list, whose talent
opens up a new horizon: I am now speaking of Lacordaire's Gromphas.
Let not this repellant name of Gromphas (the old sow) give us a wrong
notion of the insect. On the contrary, it is, like the last, an
elegant Dung-beetle, dark-bronze, thickset, square-shaped like our
Bison Onitis[15] and almost as large. It also practises the same
industry, at least as regards the general effect of the work.

[Footnote 15: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_: chap.
xvi.--_Translator's Note_.]

Its burrow branches into a small number of cylindrical cells, forming
t