e materials for the work been lacking in
either case.

Nothing, not the scarcity of provisions, nor the climate, nor the
reversed seasons, would explain this strange divergence. We must
perforce regard it as a matter of original specialities, of tastes not
acquired but prescribed from the beginning. And what prescribed them
was anything but the structure.

I would defy the greatest expert to tell me, simply from the insect's
appearance and without learning the facts by experiment, the manner of
industry to which _Phanaeus Milon_, for instance, devotes himself.
Remembering the Onites, who are very similar in shape and who
manipulate stercoral matter, he would look upon the foreigner as
another manipulator of dung. He would be mistaken: the analysis of the
meat-pie has told us so.

The shape does not make the real Dung-beetle. I have in my collection
a magnificent insect from Cayenne, known to the nomenclators as
_Phanaeus festivus_, a brilliant Beetle in festive attire, charming,
beautiful, glorious to behold. How well he deserves his name! His
colouring is a metallic red, which flashes with the fire of rubies;
and he sets off this splendid jewellery by studding his corselet with
great spots of glowing black.

What trade do you follow under your torrid sun, O gleaming carbuncle?
Have you the bucolic tastes of your rival in finery, the Splendid
Phanaeus? Can you be a knacker, a worker in putrid sausage-meat, like
_Phanaeus Milon_? Vainly do I consider you and marvel at you: your
equipment tells me nothing. No one who has not seen you at work is
capable of naming your profession. I leave the matter to the
conscientious masters, to the experts who are able to say: I do not
know. They are scarce, in our days; but after all there are some, less
eager than others in the unscrupulous struggle which creates upstarts.

This excursion to the pampas leans to one conclusion of some
importance. We find in another hemisphere, with reversed seasons, a
different climate and dissimilar biological conditions, a series of
true dung-workers whose habits and industry repeat, in their essential
facts, the habits and industry of our own. Prolonged investigations,
made at first hand and not, like mine, at second hand, would add
greatly to the list of similar workers.

And it is not only in the grassy plains of La Plata that the modellers
of dung proceed according to the principles usual over here; we may
say, without fear of being mista