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Updated: June 1, 2025
I call for a classification in which the insect's aptitudes, its diet, its industry and its habits shall take precedence of the shape of a joint in its antennae. It will come; but when? If from generalities we descend to details, we shall see that the very species may, in many instances, be determined from the nature of its victuals.
The oval niches, the cells that open on those corridors, are also profitably employed. The Anthophora restores their entrance, which has been destroyed by the insect's recent emergence; she smooths their walls with a fresh coat of whitewash, after which the lodging is fit to receive the heap of honey and the egg.
The lip of the anther catches upon the back, swings outward on its hinge, and deposits its sticky pollen all over the insect's back, returning to its original position after his departure.
But Nature produces her effects at random, and seems only to increase the beautiful illusion by that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind of the passing insect's wing.
Dead insects lay on all sides while Jim, smoking pistol in hand, was staring as though fascinated into the eyes of one of the surviving beetles. I ran forward and brought my bar down on the insect's head, but as I did so I was grasped from behind. "Jim, help!" I cried as I was swung into the air. The insect whirled me around and then threw me to the floor.
The comparison between the mighty bodies of the universe and the insect's humble pellet was not distasteful to the thinkers on the banks of the Nile. For them supreme splendour found its effigy in extreme abjection. Were they very wrong? No, for the pill-roller's work propounds a grave problem to whoso is capable of reflection.
Whether in the front or at the back of the spiral slope, the insect's work ends in a facade of coarse mosaic, formed of small, angular bits of gravel, firmly cemented with a gum the nature of which has to be ascertained. It is an amber-coloured material, semi-transparent, brittle, soluble in spirits of wine and burning with a sooty flame and a strong smell of resin.
The stake is henceforth planted perpendicularly, but the body hanging on it does not reach the base: a condition enough to ensure that there will never be any digging at this point. I make use of a Mouse, who, by reason of her light weight, will lend herself better to the insect's manoeuvres. The dead animal is fixed by the hind-legs to the top of the apparatus with a raffia strap.
In this way, again, materials will be prepared which will one day be worked up by the hand of a master and consign hasty and unfounded theories to oblivion. Reaumur, as a rule, confines himself to stating facts as he sees them in the normal course of events and does not try to probe deeper into the insect's ingenuity by means of artificially produced conditions.
The insect's abdomen is hollowed, at the top, into a furrow that runs up to the base of the thorax; the end, which is broader and rounded, has a narrow slit, which seems to divide this region into two. The whole thing suggests a pulley with a fine groove. When at rest, the inoculating-needle or ovipositor remains packed in the slit and the furrow.
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