f the surroundings become too
exacting, the animal protests against the violence endured and
succumbs rather than change. If they go to work gently, the creature
subjected to them adapts itself as best it can, but invincibly refuses
to cease to be what it is. It must live in the form of the mould
whence it issued, or it must die: there is no other alternative.

Instinct, one of the higher characteristics, is no less rebellious to
the injunctions of environment than are the organs, which serve its
activity. Innumerable guilds divide the work of the entomological
world; and each member of one of these corporations is subject to
rules which not climate, nor latitude, nor the most serious
disturbances of diet are able to alter.

Look at the Dung-beetles of the pampas. At the other end of the world,
in their vast flooded pastures, so different from our scanty
greenswards, they follow, without notable variations, the same methods
as their colleagues in Provence. A profound change of surroundings in
no way effects the fundamental industry of the group.

Nor do the provisions available affect it. The staple food to-day is
matter of bovine origin. But the Ox is a newcomer in the land, an
importation of the Spanish conquest. What did the Megathopae, the
Bolbites, the Splendid Phanaeus eat and knead, before the arrival of
the present purveyor? The Llama, that denizen of the uplands, was not
able to feed the Dung-beetles confined to the plains. In days of old,
the foster-father was perhaps the monstrous Megatherium, a
dung-factory of incomparable prodigality.

And from the produce of the colossal beast, whereof naught remains but
a few rare skeletons, the modellers passed to the produce of the Sheep
and the Ox, without altering their ovoids or their gourds, even as our
Sacred Beetle, without ceasing to be faithful to her pear, accepts the
Cow's flat cake in the absence of the favourite morsel, the Sheep's
bannock.

In the south as in the north, at the antipodes as here, every Copris
fashions ovoids with the egg at the smaller end; every Sacred Beetle
models pears or gourds with a hatching-chamber in the neck; but the
materials employed vary greatly according to the season and locality
and can be furnished by the Megatherium, the Ox, the Horse, the Sheep
or by man and several others.

We must not allow this diversity to lead us to believe in changes of
instinct: that would be to strain at a Gnat and swallow a Camel. The
indu