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The larvæ of the various dung-beetles utilise their alimentary residues in rough-casting their houses, which by their dimensions lend themselves to this method of disposal, while evading the necessity of opening temporary windows by which the ordure can be expelled.
On this the rains fell and gave rise to moss, and the worms, aided by the dung-beetles, made soil by their castings. From the moon came a creeper, which hanging from the tree became mated with it through the action of the wind. From this union were born KALUBAN GAI and KALUBI ANGAI, the first human beings, male and female.
But the Ox is a newcomer in the land, an importation of the Spanish conquest. What did the Megathopæ, the Bolbites, the Splendid Phanæus 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.
There one finds and sees all manner of things: old magpies' nests, great bundles of twigs; jays, wrangling after filling their crops with the acorns of the neighbouring oaks; rabbits, whose little white upturned scuts go bobbing away through the rosemary bushes; dung-beetles, which are storing food for the winter and throwing up their rubbish on the threshold of their burrows.
It is a very curious piece of work and of a rare perfection, especially when we consider the artist's clumsy and massive build. No, once again, the tool does not make the workman, among Dung-beetles any more than among ourselves. To guide the modeller there is something better than a set of tools: there is what I have called the bump, the genius of the animal.
Bending over his reagents, he has sought to discover, according to the phrase of a philosopher, those secret retreats in which Nature is seated before her furnaces, in the depths of her laboratory; following up the metamorphoses of matter even to the wings of the Scarabaei, and observing how life, returning to her crucible the debris and ashes of the organism, combines the elements anew, and from the elements of the urine can derive, for example, by a simple displacement of molecules, "all this dazzling magic of colours of innumerable shades: the amethystine violet of Geotrupes, the emerald of the rose-beetle, the gilded green of the Cantharides, the metallic lustre of the gardener-beetles, and all the pomp of the Buprestes and the dung-beetles."
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.
The common dung-beetles at Caripi, which flew about in the evening like the Geotrupes, the familiar "shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hum" of our English lanes, were of colossal size and beautiful colours. A blow from this fellow, as he came heavily flying along, was never very pleasant. All the tribes of beetles which feed on vegetable substances, fresh or decayed, were very numerous.
I think at first it is a scorpion you have found on the patch of light-coloured sand, but it is only an immense black beetle, with a strong horny skin and a horn or trumpet-shaped excrescence on the front part of its head. He belongs to the scarabæus, or dung-beetles, and big fellows they are; this one would just about cover the palm of your hand.
And that, no doubt, is why it took me two sittings of four hours apiece to witness three assassinations. Formerly, instructed by the paralysing Wasps, I had myself tried to produce paralysis by injecting a drop of ammonia into the thorax of those insects, such as Weevils, Buprestes, and Dung-beetles, whose compact nervous system assists this physiological operation.
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