hen making for the
provisions. Manipulated in its turn, this pad is converted into a
hemispherical hollow, in which the egg is forthwith laid.

The work is completed by rolling out and joining the edges of the
little crater, which closes and becomes the hatching-chamber. Here,
especially, a delicate dexterity becomes essential. At the same time
that the nipple of the calabash is being shaped, the insect, when
packing the material, must leave the little channel which is to form
the ventilating-shaft, following the line of the axis. This narrow
conduit, which an ill-calculated pressure might stop up beyond hope of
remedy, seems to me extremely difficult to obtain. The most skilful of
our potters could not manage it without the aid of a needle, which he
would afterwards withdraw. The insect, a sort of jointed automaton,
makes its channel through the massive nipple of the gourd without so
much as a thought. If it did give it a thought, it would not succeed.

The calabash is made: there remains the decoration. This is the work
of patient after-touches which perfect the curves and leave on the
soft loam a series of stippled impressions similar to those which the
potter of prehistoric days distributed over his big-bellied jars with
the ball of his thumb.

That finishes the work. The insect will begin all over again under a
fresh carcase; for each burrow has one calabash and no more, even as
with the Sacred Beetle and her pears.

Here is another of these artists of the pampas. All black and as big
as the largest of our Onthophagi,[18] whom she greatly resembles in
general build, _Canthon bispinus_ is likewise an exploiter of dead
bodies, if not always on her own behalf, at least on that of her
offspring.

[Footnote 18: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_: chaps. xi. xvii.,
and xviii.--_Translator's Note_.]

She introduces very original innovations into the pill-maker's art.
Her work, strewn like the aforementioned with finger-prints, is the
pilgrim's gourd, the double-bellied gourd. Of the two stories, which
are joined together by a fairly plainly-marked groove, the upper is
the smaller and contains the egg in an incubating-chamber; the lower
and bulkier is the food-stack.

Imagine the Sisyphus' little pear with its hatching-chamber swollen
into a globule a trifle smaller than the sphere at the other end;
suppose the two protuberances to be divided by a sort of wide open
groove like that of a pulley; and we shall have s