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Updated: June 9, 2025
The old Master and I have at last made that visit to the Scarabee which we had so long promised ourselves. When we knocked at his door he came and opened it, instead of saying, Come in.
Man is essentially an idolater, that is, in bondage to his imagination, for there is no more harm in the Greek word eidolon than in the Latin word imago. He wants a visible image to fix his thought, a scarabee or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are to our own time what these were to the ancient Egyptians.
He looked a mild surprise, but remained as quiet as one of his own beetles when you touch him and he makes believe he is dead. The blank silence became oppressive. Was the Scarabee crushed, as so many of his namesakes are crushed, under the heel of this trampling omniscient?
Call me a Scarabaeist if you will; if I can prove myself worthy of that name, my highest ambition will be more than satisfied. I think, by way of compromise and convenience, I shall call him the Scarabee. He has come to look wonderfully like those creatures, the beetles, I mean, -by being so much among them.
And now he was determined, if it cost him the effort of all his remaining days, to close another discussion and put forever to rest the anxious doubts about the larva of meloe. Your thirty-six dissections must have cost you a deal of time and labor, the Master said. What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor? answered the Scarabee. -It is my meat and drink to work over my beetles.
The hot sun, falling upon the boat, made its brown, wet sides sparkle like the brilliant wings of some gigantic scarabee; and, upon the patched, scorched deck, six or seven half-naked, sunburned children, boys and girls, played at the feet of a bundle of rags and brown flesh, which was a woman, a young woman, but prematurely old and wasted, who was nursing a little baby.
At last the Scarabee creaked out very slowly, "Did I understand you to ask the following question, to wit?" and so forth; for I was quite out of my depth, and only know that he repeated the Master's somewhat complex inquiry, word for word. That was exactly my question, said the Master, and I hope it is not uncivil to ask one which seems to me to be a puzzler.
The greatest Life ever lived was no smaller for being in a carpenter's shop, and largely spent among a few ignorant fishermen. The Scarabee had a valid apologia pro vita sua in spite of Dr. Holmes. Tolstoy on his farm, Milton without his sight, Bunyan in his prison, Pasteur in his laboratory, all did great things for the world.
But I think he has learned something else of his coleopterous friends. The beetles never smile. Their physiognomy is not adapted to the display of the emotions; the lateral movement of their jaws being effective for alimentary purposes, but very limited in its gamut of expression. It is with these unemotional beings that the Scarabee passes his life.
Had he not made preparations of the very coleoptera the Scarabee studied so exclusively, preparations which the illustrious Swammerdam would not have been ashamed of, and dissected a melolontha as exquisitely as Strauss Durckheim himself ever did it? The little dried-up specialist did not dilate into fighting dimensions as perhaps, again the Master may have thought he would.
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