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In the bird, the egg-shell is a temporary defensive cell which at hatching-time is broken and abandoned and is henceforth useless. Made of horny matter or stercoral paste, the shell of the Clythra and the Cryptocephalus is, on the contrary, a permanent refuge, which the insect will never leave so long as it remains a larva.
Next come the dry excretions of the Snail and a few rare little land-shells. A similar jumble of more or less everything found near the nest forms, as we know, the barricade of the Manicate Cotton-bee, who is also an adept at using the Snail's stercoral droppings after these have been dried in the sun.
Réaumur has complacently described how the quilt moves forward from the tail to the head by wriggling along inclined planes, making so many dips in the undulating back. There is no need to return to this stercoral mechanism after the master has done with it.
There is nothing to prevent it from thickening the structure at will and adding as much material as it thinks proper to the inner scrapings from the shell. Invariably clad in a garment that is an exact fit, neither too loose nor too tight, the grub, when the cold weather comes, closes the mouth of its earthenware jar with a lid of the same mixed compound, a paste of earth and stercoral cement.
In Tome xv of the Commentaries of Leipzig there is an account of a man who always had his stercoral evacuations on Wednesdays, and who suffered no evil consequences from this abnormality. This state of affairs had existed from childhood, and, as the evacuations were abundant and connected, no morbific change or malformation seemed present.
If they have issued from the same stock, how have they acquired such dissimilar talents? Furthermore, have these talents developed by degrees? The Lily-beetle is prepared to tell us. Her grub, let us suppose, once conceived the notion, when tormented by the Tachina, of making the stercoral slit open above.
I would defy the greatest expert to tell me, simply from the insect's appearance and without learning the facts by experiment, the manner of industry to which Phanæus Milon, for instance, devotes himself. Remembering the Onites, who are very similar in shape and who manipulate stercoral matter, he would look upon the foreigner as another manipulator of dung.
Others, the Osmiae in particular, accept a compromise and begin to relieve the digestive tract when a suitable space has been made in the cell through the gradual disappearance of the victuals. Others again more hurried these find means of obeying the common law pretty early by engaging in stercoral manufactures. By a stroke of genius, they make the unpleasant obstruction into building-bricks.
The digestive apparatus is absolutely void and, because of its emptiness, appears only as a thin cord, sunk, lost amid the adipose sacs. The stercoral intestine has more substance; its outlines are better defined. The four gall-bladders are always perfectly distinct.
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