beautiful sight for one who is able to observe
and to meditate. Let us overcome our disgust; let us turn over the
unclean refuse with our foot. What a swarming there is beneath it,
what a tumult of busy workers! The Silphae, with wing-cases wide and
dark, as though in mourning, flee distraught, hiding in the cracks in
the soil; the Saprini,[4] of polished ebony which mirrors the
sunlight, jog hastily off, deserting their workshop; the Dermestes, of
whom one wears a fawn-coloured tippet flecked with white, seek to fly
away, but, tipsy with the putrid nectar, tumble over and reveal the
immaculate whiteness of their bellies, which forms a violent contrast
with the gloom of the rest of their attire.

[Footnote 4: The Saprinus is a very small carnivorous Beetle. Cf. _The
Life of the Fly_: chap. xvi.--_Translator's Note_.]

What were they doing there, all these feverish workers? They were
making a clearance of death on behalf of life. Transcendent
alchemists, they were transforming that horrible putrescence into a
living and inoffensive product. They were draining the dangerous
corpse to the point of rendering it as dry and sonorous as the remains
of an old slipper hardened on the refuse-heap by the frosts of winter
and the heats of summer. They were working their hardest to render the
carrion innocuous.

Others will soon put in their appearance, smaller creatures and more
patient, who will take over the relic and exploit it ligament by
ligament, bone by bone, hair by hair, until the whole has been
restored to the treasury of life. All honour to these purifiers! Let
us put back the Mole and go our way.

Some other victim of the agricultural labours of spring, a
Shrew-mouse, Field-mouse, Mole, Frog, Adder, or Lizard, will provide
us with the most vigorous and famous of these expurgators of the soil.
This is the Burying-beetle, the Necrophorus, so different from the
cadaveric mob in dress and habits. In honour of his exalted functions
he exhales an odour of musk; he bears a red tuft at the tip of his
antennae; his breast is covered with nankeen; and across his
wing-cases he wears a double, scalloped scarf of vermillion. An
elegant, almost sumptuous costume, very superior to that of the
others, but yet lugubrious, as befits your undertaker's man.

He is no anatomical dissector, cutting his subject open, carving its
flesh with the scalpel of his mandibles; he is literally a
grave-digger, a sexton. While the others--Silphae