, Dermestes,
Cellar-beetles--gorge themselves with the exploited flesh, without, of
course, forgetting the interests of the family, he, a frugal eater,
hardly touches his find on his own account. He buries it entire, on
the spot, in a cellar where the thing, duly ripened, will form the
diet of his larvae. He buries it in order to establish his progeny.

This hoarder of dead bodies, with his stiff and almost heavy
movements, is astonishingly quick at storing away wreckage. In a shift
of a few hours, a comparatively enormous animal, a Mole, for instance,
disappears, engulfed by the earth. The others leave the dried, emptied
carcass to the air, the sport of the winds for months on end; he,
treating it as a whole, makes a clean job of things at once. No
visible trace of his work remains but a tiny hillock, a burial-mound,
a tumulus.

With his expeditious method, the Necrophorus is the first of the
little purifiers of the fields. He is also one of the most celebrated
of insects in respect of his psychical capacities. This undertaker is
endowed, they say, with intellectual faculties approaching to reason,
such as are not possessed by the most gifted of the Bees and Wasps,
the collectors of honey or game. He is honoured by the two following
anecdotes, which I quote from Lacordaire's[5] _Introduction a
l'entomologie_, the only general treatise at my disposal:

"Clairville," says the author, "reports that he saw a _Necrophorus
vespillo_, who, wishing to bury a dead Mouse and finding the soil on
which the body lay too hard, went to dig a hole at some distance, in
soil more easily displaced. This operation completed, he attempted to
bury the Mouse in the cavity, but, not succeeding, he flew away and
returned a few moments later, accompanied by four of his fellows, who
assisted him to move the Mouse and bury it."

[Footnote 5: Jean Theodore Lacordaire (1801-1870), author of _Genera
des coleopteres_ (1854-1876) and of the work quoted above
(1837-1839).--_Translator's Note_.]

In such actions, Lacordaire adds, we cannot refuse to admit the
intervention of reason.

"The following case," he continues, "recorded by Gleditsch,[6] has
also every indication of the intervention of reason. One of his
friends, wishing to desiccate a Frog, placed it on the top of a stick
thrust into the ground, in order to make sure that the Necrophori
should not come and carry it off. But this precaution was of no
effect; the insects, being unab