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As he advanced in life, in fact, although he never forgot his rude natal countryside, he felt that new links were daily binding him more closely to those heaths and mountains on which his heart had been so often thrilled with the intense joy of discovery, and that it was indeed in this soil, to him so full of delight, amid its beautiful hymenoptera and scarabaei, that he would wish to be buried.
There was free choice for the visitors of this pattern-room in the matter of mummy-cases and cloths, as well as of necklets, scarabaei, statuettes, Uza-eyes, girdles, head-rests, triangles, split-rings, staves, and other symbolic objects, which were attached to the dead as sacred amulets, or bound up in the wrappings.
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."
The Egyptians also enamelled stone. One half at least of the scarabaei, cylinders, and amulets contained in our museums are of limestone or schist, covered with a coloured glaze.
Orchids, jade, majolica, wines, mezzotints, old silver, first editions, harps, copes, hookahs, cameos, enamels, black-letter folios, scarabaei such things are beautiful and fascinating in themselves. Railway-labels are not, I admit. For the most part, they are crudely coloured, crudely printed, without sense of margin or spacing; in fact, quite worthless as designs.
The beetles, she would explain, had been the connecting link between the two sciences, since beetles had led her to scarabaei, and scarabaei to the human husks with which they are to be found; but this statement, though amusing, was not strictly accurate, as she had in reality contracted the taste from her late husband, who had left her a large collection of Egyptian antiquities.
There was free choice for the visitors of this pattern-room in the matter of mummy-cases and cloths, as well as of necklets, scarabaei, statuettes, Uza-eyes, girdles, head-rests, triangles, split-rings, staves, and other symbolic objects, which were attached to the dead as sacred amulets, or bound up in the wrappings.
The intestine of the Scarabaei is prolonged to a prodigious length in order to "drain the excrement to the last atom in its manifold circuits. The sheep has finely divided the vegetable matter; the grub, that incomparable triturator, reduces it to the finest possible consistency; not a morsel is left in which the magnifying glass can reveal a fibre."
This is why he makes the bise laugh and sing and roar; why he imitates the organ-tones of the wind in the pines, and seeks to reproduce some of the innumerable rhythms of nature; the frenzy of the lizard, the wriggling of the stickle-back, the jumping gait of the frog, the shrill hum of the mosquito, the complaint of the cricket, the moving of the Scarabaei, and the flight of the Libellulae.
Hamilton Gray, in her work on the Sepulchres of Etruria, observes: "As scarabaei existed long before we had any account of idols, I do not doubt that they were originally the invention of some really devout mind; and they speak to us in strong language of the danger of making material symbols of immaterial things.
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