r for his own use or for that of
his offspring. What he wants is the sanies of corpses. He is to be
found under the carcasses of birds, Dogs or Cats, in the company of
the undertakers-in-ordinary. The gourd which I will presently describe
was lying in the earth under the remains of an Owl.

Let him who will explain this conjunction of the appetites of the
Necrophorus[17] with the talents of the Sacred Beetle. As for me,
baffled by tastes which no one would suspect from the mere appearance
of the insect, I give it up.

[Footnote 17: Or Burying-beetle. Cf. Chapters XI. and XII. of the
present volume.--_Translator's Note_.]

I know in my neighbourhood one Dung-beetle and one alone who also
works among carrion. This is _Onthophagus ovatus_, LIN., a constant
frequenter of dead Moles and Rabbits. But the dwarf undertaker does
not on that account scorn stercoraceous fare: he feasts upon it like
the other Onthophagi. Perhaps there is a twofold diet here: the bun
for the adult; the highly-spiced, far-gone meat for the grub.

Similar facts are encountered elsewhere, with differing tastes. The
Hunting Wasp takes her fill of honey drawn from the nectaries of the
flowers, but feeds her little ones on game. Game first and then sugar,
for the same stomach! How that digestive pouch must change during
development! And yet no more than our own, which scorns in later life
the food that delighted it when young.

Let us now examine the work of _Phanaeus Milon_ more thoroughly. The
calabashes reached me in a state of complete desiccation. They are
very nearly as hard as stone; their colour inclines to a pale
chocolate. Neither inside nor out does the lens discover the slightest
ligneous particle pointing to a vegetable residue. The strange
Dung-beetle does not, therefore, use cakes of Cow-dung or anything
like them; he handles products of another class, which at first are
rather difficult to specify.

Held to the ear and shaken, the object rattles slightly, as would the
shell of a dry fruit with a stone lying free inside it. Does it
contain the grub, shrivelled by desiccation? Does it contain the dead
insect? I thought so, but I was wrong. It contains something much more
instructive than that.

I carefully rip up the gourd with the point of a knife. Within a
homogenous wall, whose thickness is over three-quarters of an inch in
the largest of my three specimens, is encased a spherical kernel,
which fills the cavity exactly, but witho