THE SACRED BEETLE: THE GRUB, THE METAMORPHOSIS, THE HATCHING-CHAMBER

The Life and Love of the Insect by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE SACRED BEETLE: THE GRUB, THE METAMORPHOSIS, THE HATCHING-CHAMBER

CHAPTER IV. THE SACRED BEETLE: THE GRUB, THE METAMORPHOSIS, THE HATCHING-CHAMBER

The hatching-chamber is an oval recess about one centimetre1 in diameter. The egg is fixed at the bottom of this recess. It is cylindrical in shape, rounded at both ends, yellowish-white in colour and having nearly the bulk of a grain of wheat, but shorter. The inner wall of the recess is plastered with a greenish-brown matter, shiny, half-fluid, a real cream destined to form the first mouthfuls of the grub. In order to produce this delicate fare, does the mother select the quintessence of the ordure? The appearance of the mess tells me differently and assures me that it is a broth elaborated in the maternal stomach. The Pigeon softens the corn in her crop and turns it into a sort of milk-diet which she afterwards disgorges for her brood. The Dung-beetle has the same fond ways: she half-digests selected viands and disgorges them as a fine pap, with which she hangs the walls of the nest wherein her egg is laid. In this manner, the grub, when hatched, finds an easily-digested food that soon strengthens its stomach and allows it to attack the underlying layers, which are less daintily prepared.

A progressive change of diet is here made manifest. On leaving the egg, the feeble little grub licks the fine [43]sop on the walls of its lodging. There is not much of it, but it is strengthening and possesses a high nourishing value. The pap of tender childhood is followed by the pottage of the weaned nursling.

The time has come for a sight stranger than any yet displayed to me by the mechanical daring of the insect. Anxious to observe the grub in the intimacy of its home, I open in the belly of the pear a little peep-hole half a centimetre square. The head of the recluse at once appears in the opening, to enquire what is happening. The breach is perceived. The head disappears. I can just see the white chine turning about in the narrow cabin; and, then and there, the window which I have contrived is closed with a soft, brown paste, which soon hardens.

The inside of the cabin, said I to myself, is no doubt a semi-fluid porridge. Turning upon itself, as is shown by the sudden slide of the back, the grub has collected an armful of this material and, completing the circuit, has stuck its load, by way of mortar, in the breach considered dangerous. I remove the closing plug. The grub acts as before, puts its head at the window, withdraws it, spins round upon itself like a fruit-stone slipping in its shell and forthwith produces a second plug as ample as the first. Forewarned of what was coming, this time I saw more clearly.

What a mistake was mine! I am not too greatly thunderstruck, however: in the exercise of its defensive skill, the animal often employs methods which our imagination would not dare to contemplate. It is not the head that is presented at the breach, after the preliminary twisting: it is the opposite extremity. The grub does not bring an armful of its alimentary dough, [44]gathered by scraping the walls: it excretes upon the aperture to be closed; a much more economical proceeding. Sparingly measured out, the rations must not be wasted: there is just enough to live upon. Besides, the cement is of better quality; it soon sets. Lastly, the urgent repairs are more quickly effected, if the intestines lend their kindly aid.

They do, in point of fact, and to an astonishing degree. Five, six times in succession and oftener, I remove the fixed plug; and, time after time, the mortar discharges a copious ejaculation from its apparently inexhaustible reservoir, which is ever at the mason’s service, without an interval for rest. The grub is already beginning to resemble the Sacred Beetle, whose stercoral prowess we know: it is a past master in the art of dunging. It possesses above any other animal in the world an intestinal deftness which anatomy will undertake to explain to us, partly, later on.

The plasterer and the mason have their trowels. In the same way, the grub, that zealous repairer of breaches made in its home, has a trowel of its own. The last segment is lopped off slantwise, and carries on its dorsal surface a sort of inclined plane, a broad disk surrounded by a fleshy pad. In the middle of the disk is a gash, forming the cementing-aperture. Behold the fair-sized trowel, flattened out and supplied with a rim to prevent the compressed matter from flowing away in useless waste.

As soon as the plastic gush is laid down in a lump, the levelling and compressing instrument sets to work to introduce the cement well into the irregularities of the breach, to push it right through the thickness of the ruined portion, to give it consistency, to level it. After this [45]stroke of the trowel, the grub turns round: it comes and bangs and pushes the work with its wide forehead and improves it with the tip of its mandibles. Wait a quarter of an hour and the repaired portion will be as firm as the rest of the shell, so quickly does the cement set. Outside, the repairs are betrayed by the rough prominence of the material forced outwards, which remains inaccessible to the trowel; but, inside, there is no trace of the breakage: the usual polish has been restored at the injured spot. A plasterer stopping a hole in a wall in our rooms could produce no better piece of work.

Nor do the worm’s talents end here. With its cement, it becomes a mender of pots and pans. Let me explain. I have compared the outside of the pear, which, when pressed and dried, becomes a strong shell, with a jar containing fresh food. In the course of my excavations, sometimes made on difficult soil, I have happened occasionally to break this jar with an ill-directed blow of the trowel. I have collected the potsherds, pieced them together, after restoring the worm to its place, and kept the whole thing in one by wrapping it in a bit of old newspaper.

On reaching home, I have found the pear put out of shape, no doubt, and seamed with scars, but just as solid as ever. During the walk, the grub had restored its ruined dwelling to condition. Cement injected into the cracks joined the pieces together; inside, a thick plastering strengthened the inner wall, so much so that the repaired shell was quite as good as the untouched shell, but for the irregularity of the outside. In its artistically-mended stronghold, the worm found the peace essential to its existence.[46]

Let us now give a brief description of the grub, without stopping to enumerate the articulations of the palpi and antennæ, irksome details of no immediate interest. It is a fat worm and has a fine, white skin, with pale slate-coloured reflections proceeding from the digestive organs, which are visible transparently. Bent into a broken arch or hook, it is not unlike the grub of the Cockchafer, but has a much more ungainly figure, for, on its back, at the sudden bend of the hook, the third, fourth and fifth segments of the abdomen swell into an enormous protuberance, a tumour, a pouch so prominent that the skin seems on the point of bursting under the pressure of the contents. This is the animal’s most striking feature: the fact that it carries a wallet.

Fig. 3.—Grub of the Sacred Beetle.

The head is small in proportion to the size of the grub, slightly convex and bright red, studded with a few pale bristles. The legs are fairly long and sturdy, ending in a pointed tarsus. The grub does not use them as limbs of progression. Taken from its shell and placed upon the table, it struggles in clumsy contortions without succeeding in shifting its position; and the cripple betrays its anxiety by repeated eruptions of its mortar.

Let us also mention the terminal trowel, the last segment lopped into a slanting disk and rimmed with a fleshy pad. In the centre of this inclined plane is the open stercoral gash, which thus, by a very unusual inversion, [47]occupies the upper surface. An enormous hump and a trowel: that gives you the animal in two words.

Fig. 4.—Digestive apparatus of the Sacred Beetle.

We must not finish the history of the grub without saying a few words on its internal structure. Anatomy will show us the works wherein the cement employed in so original a manner is manufactured. The stomach or chylific ventricle is a long, thick cylinder, starting from the creature’s neck after a very short gullet. It measures about three times the length of the animal. In its last quarter, it carries a voluminous lateral pouch distended by the food. This is a subsidiary stomach in which the supplies are stored so as to yield their nutritive principles more thoroughly. The chylific ventricle is much too long to lie straight in the grub’s bowels and bends back upon itself, in front of its appendix, in the form of a large loop occupying the dorsal surface. It is to contain this loop and the lateral pouch that the back is swollen into a protuberance. The grub’s wallet is, therefore, a second paunch, an annexe, as it were, of the stomach, which is itself incapable of holding the voluminous digestive apparatus. Four very fine, very long tubulures, irregularly entwined, four Malpighian vessels mark the limits of the chylific ventricle.[48]

Next comes the intestine, narrow, cylindrical, rising forwards. The intestine is followed by the rectum, which pushes backwards. This latter, which is of exceptional size and fitted with powerful walls, is wrinkled across, bloated and distended by its contents. Here is the roomy warehouse in which the scoriæ of the digestion accumulate; here is the mighty ejaculator, always ready to provide cement.

The grub gets bigger as it eats the wall of its house from the inside. Little by little, the belly of the pear is scooped out into a cell whose capacity grows in proportion to the growth of the inhabitant. Ensconced in its hermitage, furnished with board and lodging, the recluse waxes stout and fat. What more does it want?

In four or five weeks, the complete development is obtained. The apartment is ready. The worm sheds its skin and becomes a chrysalis. There are very few in the entomological world to vie in sober beauty with the tender creature which, with its wing-cases laid in front of it like a wide-creased scarf and its fore-legs folded under its head, as when the full-grown Scarab counterfeits death, suggests the idea of a mummy maintained by its bandages in a sacerdotal pose. Semi-translucent and honey-yellow, it looks as though it were cut from a block of amber. Imagine it hardened in this state, mineralized, made incorruptible: it would be a splendid topaz jewel.

In this marvel, so severe and dignified in shape and colouring, one point above all captivates me and gives me at last the solution of a far-reaching problem. Are the front-legs furnished with a tarsus, yes or no? This is the great business that makes me forget the jewel for the sake of a structural detail. Let us then return to a subject that excited me in my early days; for the answer [49]has come at last, late, it is true, but certain and indisputable.

By a very strange exception, the full-grown Sacred Beetle and his congeners are without front tarsi; they lack on their fore-legs that five-jointed finger which is the rule among the highest division of Coleoptera, the Pentamera. The other limbs, on the contrary, follow the common law and possess a very well-shaped tarsus. Is the formation of the toothed armlets original or accidental?

At first sight, an accident seems probable enough. The Scarab is a strenuous miner and a great pedestrian. Always in contact with the rough soil, whether in walking or digging; used, moreover, for constant leverage when the insect is rolling its ball backwards, the fore-legs are much more exposed than the others to the danger of spraining and twisting their delicate finger, of putting it out of joint, of losing it entirely, from the very first moment when the work begins.

Lest this explanation should appeal to any of my readers, I will hasten to undeceive them. The absence of the front fingers is not the result of an accident. The proof of what I say lies here, under my eyes, without the possibility of a rejoinder. I examine the nymph’s legs with the magnifying-glass: those in front have not the least vestige of a tarsus; the toothed limb ends bluntly, without a trace of a terminal appendage. In the others, on the contrary, the tarsus is as distinct as possible, notwithstanding the shapeless, gnarled condition due to the swaddling-bands and the humours of the chrysalis state. It suggests a finger swollen with chilblains.

If the evidence of the nymph were not sufficient, there [50]would be that of the perfect insect which, casting its rejected mummy-clothes and moving for the first time in its shell, wields fingerless armlets. The fact, therefore, is established for certain: the Sacred Beetle is born maimed; his mutilation dates from his birth.

“Very well,” reply our fashionable theorists, “the Sacred Beetle is mutilated from the start; but his remote ancestors were not. They were formed according to the general rule, they were correct in structure down to this slight digital detail. There were some who, in the course of their rude task as diggers and rollers, wore out that delicate, cumbrous, useless member; and, finding themselves better equipped for their work by this accidental amputation, they bequeathed it to their successors, to the great benefit of the race. The present insect profits by the improvement obtained by a long array of ancestors, and, acting under the stimulus of vital competition, gives permanence to an advantageous condition due to chance.”

O ingenuous theorists, so triumphant on paper, so vain in the face of reality, listen to me for yet one moment more! If the loss of the front fingers be a fortunate thing for the Sacred Beetle, who faithfully hands down the leg of yore fortuitously maimed, why should it not be so with the other members, if they too happened to lose by chance their terminal appendage, a small, powerless filament, almost utterly unserviceable, and, owing to its delicacy, a cause of grievous conflicts with the roughness of the soil?

The Sacred Beetle is not a climber, but an ordinary pedestrian, supporting himself upon the point of an iron-shod stick, by which I mean the stout spine or prickle wherewith the tip of the leg is armed. He does not have to hold on by his claws to some hanging branch, as does [51]the Cockchafer. And it would therefore, meseems, be entirely to his advantage to rid himself of the four remaining fingers, projecting sideways, idle on the march, inactive in the construction and carriage of the ball. Yes, that would mean progress, for the simple reason that the less hold one gives to the enemy the better. It remains to be seen if chance ever produces this state of things.

It does and very often. At the end of the fine season, in October, when the insect has worn itself out in digging, in carrying balls and in modelling pears, the maimed, the victims of work, form the great majority. I see them, both in my voleries and outside, displaying every degree of amputation. Some have lost the finger on their four hind-legs altogether; others retain a stump, a couple of joints, a single joint; those which are least damaged have a few members left intact.

This is certainly the mutilation pleaded by the theorists. And it is no accident, occurring at long intervals: every year, the cripples outnumber the others at the time when the winter-season is at hand. In their final labours, they seem no more embarrassed than those who have been spared by the trials of life. On both sides, I find the same quickness of movement, the same dexterity in kneading the ammunition-bread which will enable them to bear the first rigours of winter philosophically underground. In the scavenger’s work, the maimed vie with the others.

And these cripples form a race; they spend the bad season underground; they wake up in the spring, return to the surface and take part, for a second, sometimes even for a third time, in life’s great festival. Their descendants ought to profit by an improvement which [52]has been renewed year by year, ever since Scarabs came into the world, and which has certainly had time to become fixed and to convert itself into a settled habit. But they do nothing of the sort. Every Sacred Beetle that breaks his shell, with not one exception, is endowed with the four tarsi prescribed by rule.

Well, theorists, what say you to that? For the two front legs, you offer a sort of an explanation; and the four others contradict you flatly. Have you not been taking fancy for truth?

Then what is the cause of the original mutilation of the Scarab? I will confess plainly that I know nothing at all about it. Nevertheless, those two maimed members are very strange: so strange, in the endless order of insects, that they have exposed the masters, the greatest masters, to lamentable blunders. Let us listen first to Latreille,2 the prince of descriptive entomologists. In his account of the insects which ancient Egypt painted or carved upon her monuments,3 he quotes the writings of Horapollo, an unique document which has been preserved for us in the papyri for the glorification of the sacred insect:

“One would feel tempted at first,” he says, “to set down as fiction what Horapollo says of the number of that Scarab’s fingers. According to him, there are thirty. Nevertheless, this computation, judged by the way in which he looks at the tarsus, is perfectly correct, for this part consists of five joints; and, if we take each of them for a finger, the legs being six in number and each ending [53]in a five-jointed tarsus, the Sacred Beetles obviously have thirty fingers.”

Forgive me, illustrious master: the total number of joints is but twenty, because the two front legs are devoid of tarsi. You have been carried away by the general law. Losing sight of the singular exception, which was certainly known to you, you said thirty, swayed for a moment by that overwhelmingly positive law. Yes, the exception was known to you, so much so that the figure of the Sacred Beetle accompanying your account, a figure drawn from the insect and not from the Egyptian monuments, is irreproachably accurate: it has no tarsi on its fore-legs. The blunder is excusable, in view of the strangeness of the exception.

What did Horapollo himself see? Apparently what we see in our day. If Latreille’s explanation be right, as everything seems to denote, if the Egyptian author began by counting thirty fingers according to the number of joints in the tarsi, it is because his enumeration was based in his mind upon the facts of the general situation. He was guilty of a mistake which was not very reprehensible, seeing that, some thousand years later, masters like Latreille and Mulsant were guilty of it in their turn. The only culprit in all this business is the exceptional structure of the insect.

“But,” I may be asked, “why should not Horapollo have seen the exact truth? Perhaps the Scarab of his century had tarsi which the insect does not possess to-day. In that case, it has been altered by the patient work of time.”

Before answering this evolutionary objection, I will wait for some one to show me a natural Scarab of Horapollo’s [54]date. The hypogea which so religiously guard the cat, the ibis and the crocodile must also contain the sacred insect. All that I have at my disposal is a few figures representing the Sacred Beetle as we find him engraved on the monuments or carved in fine stone as an amulet for the mummies. The ancient artist is remarkably faithful in the execution of the whole; but his graver, his chisel have not troubled about details so insignificant as those of the tarsi.

Ill-supplied though I be with documents of this kind, I greatly doubt whether carving or engraving will solve the problem. Even if an image with front tarsi were discovered somewhere or other, the question would be no further advanced. One could always plead a mistake, carelessness, a leaning towards symmetry. The doubt, as long as it prevails in certain minds, can only be removed by the ancient insect in a natural state. I will wait for it, convinced beforehand that the Pharaonic Scarab differed in no way from our own.

Let us not take leave of the old Egyptian author just yet, in spite of his usually incomprehensible jargon, with its senseless allegories. He sometimes has views that are strikingly correct. Is it a chance coincidence? Or is it the result of serious observation? I should be gladly inclined to adopt the latter opinion, so perfect is the agreement between his statements and certain biological details of which our own science was ignorant until quite lately. Where the intimate life of the Scarab is concerned, Horapollo is much better-informed than ourselves.

In particular, he writes as follows:

“The Scarab buries her ball in the ground, where she remains hidden for twenty-eight days, a space of time [55]equal to that of a revolution of the moon, during which period the offspring of the Scarab quickens. On the twenty-ninth day, which the insect knows to be that of the conjunction of the sun and moon and of the birth of the world, it opens the ball and throws it into the water. From this ball issue animals that are Scarabs.”

Let us dismiss the revolution of the moon, the conjunction of the sun and moon, the birth of the world and other astrological absurdities, but remember this: the twenty-eight days of incubation required by the ball underground, the twenty-eight days during which the Scarab is born to life. Let us also remember the indispensable intervention of water to bring the insect out of its burst shell. These are precise facts, falling within the domain of true science. Are they imaginary? Are they real? The question deserves investigation.

Antiquity knew nothing of the wonders of the metamorphosis. To antiquity, a grub was a worm born of corruption. The poor creature had no future to lift it from its abject condition: as worm it appeared and as worm it had to disappear. It was not a mask under which a superior form of life was being elaborated; it was a definite entity, supremely contemptible and doomed soon to return to the rottenness that gave it birth.

To the Egyptian author, therefore, the Scarab’s larva was unknown. And if, by chance, he had had before his eyes the shell of the insect inhabited by a fat, big-bellied worm, he would never have suspected in the foul and ugly animal the sober beauty of the future Scarab. According to the ideas of the time, ideas long maintained, the sacred insect had neither father nor mother: an error excusable in the midst of the simplicity of the [56]ancients, for here the two sexes are outwardly indistinguishable. It was born of the ordure that formed its ball; and from its birth dated the appearance of the nymph, that amber gem displaying, in a perfectly recognizable form, the features of the full-grown insect.

In the eyes of all antiquity, the Sacred Beetle begins to be born to life at the moment when he can be recognized, not before; else we should have the as yet unsuspected worm of affiliation. The twenty-eight days, therefore, during which, as Horapollo tells us, the offspring of the insect quickens, represent the nymphal phase. This period has been the object of special attention in my studies. It varies, but within narrow limits. The notes taken mention thirty-three days as the longest duration and twenty-one as the shortest. The average, supplied by a score of observations, is twenty-eight days. This identical number twenty-eight, this number of four weeks appears as such and oftener than the others. Horapollo spoke truly: the real insect takes life in the interval of a lunar month.

The four weeks past, behold the Scarab in his final shape: the shape, yes, but not the colouring, which is very strange when the chrysalis casts its skin. The head, legs and thorax are a dark red, except the denticulations, which are a smoky brown. The abdomen is an opaque white; the wing-cases are a transparent white, very faintly tinged with yellow. This majestic dress, combining the red of the cardinal’s cassock with the white of the priest’s alb, is but temporary and turns darker by degrees, to make way for a uniform of ebon black. About a month is necessary for the horny armour to acquire a firm consistency and a definite hue.

At last, the Scarab is fully matured. Awaking within [57]him is the delicious restlessness of an approaching liberty. He, hitherto the son of the darkness, foresees the gladness of the light. His longing is great to burst the shell, to emerge from below ground and come into the sun; but the difficulty of liberating himself is far from small. Will he escape from the natal cradle, now become an odious prison? Or will he not escape? It depends.

It is generally in August that the Sacred Beetle is ripe for the delivery: in August, save for rare exceptions, the most torrid, dry and scorching month of the year. Should there not then come, from time to time, a shower that to some slight extent assuages the panting earth, then the cell to be burst and the wall to be broken through defy the strength and patience of the insect, which is powerless against all that hardness. By dint of a prolonged desiccation, the soft original matter has become an insuperable rampart; it has turned into a sort of brick baked in the oven of the dog-days.

I need hardly say that I have not failed to experiment with the insect in these difficult circumstances. Pear-shaped shells are gathered containing the full-grown Scarab, who is on the point of issuing, in view of the lateness of the season. These shells, already dry and very hard, are laid in a box where they retain their aridity. A little earlier in one case, a little later in the other, I hear the sharp grating of a rasp inside each shell. It is the prisoner working to make himself an outlet by scraping the wall with the rake of his shield and fore-feet. Two or three days elapse and the delivery seems to make no progress.

I come to the assistance of a pair of them by myself opening a loop-hole with the point of a knife. According to my idea, this first breach will help the egress of the [58]recluse by offering him a place to start upon, an exit that only needs widening. But not at all: these favoured ones advance no quicker with their work than the rest.

In less than a fortnight, silence prevails in all the shells. The prisoners, worn out with ineffectual efforts, have perished. I break the caskets containing the deceased. A meagre pinch of dust, representing hardly an average pea in bulk, is all that the sturdy implements—rasp, saw, harrow and rake—have succeeded in sundering from the invincible wall.

Other shells, of a similar hardness, are wrapped in a wet rag and enclosed in a flask. When the moisture has soaked through them, I relieve them of their wrapper and keep them in the corked flask. This time, events take a very different turn. Softened to a nicety by the wet rag, the shells burst, ripped open by the shove of the prisoner, who props himself boldly on his legs, using his back as a lever; or else, scraped away at one point, they crumble to pieces and yawn with a wide breach. The success is complete. In each case, the delivery is effected without impediment; a few drops of water have brought them the joys of the sun.

For the second time, Horapollo was right. Certainly, it is not the mother, as the old author says, who throws her ball into the water: it is the clouds that provide the liberating ablution, the rain that facilitates the ultimate release. In the natural state, things must happen as in my experiments. In August, in a burnt soil, under a thin screen of earth, the shells, baked like bricks, are for most of the time as hard as pebbles. It is impossible for the insect to wear out its casket and escape from it. But, should a shower come upon the scene—that life-giving baptism which the seed of the plant and the [59]family of the Scarab alike await within the ashes of the soil—should a little rain fall, soon the fields will present the appearance of a resurrection.

The earth is soaked. This is the wet rag of my experiment. At its touch, the shell recovers the softness of its early days, the casket becomes yielding; the insect makes play with its legs, pushes with its back; it is free. It is, in fact, in the month of September, during the first rains which herald the coming autumn, that the Scarab leaves the native burrow and comes to enliven the pastoral sward, even as the former generation enlivened it in the spring. The clouds, hitherto so chary, have come at last to set him free.

Under conditions of exceptional coolness of the earth, the bursting of the shell and the emerging of its occupant can occur at an earlier period; but, in ground scorched by the fierce sun of summer, as is usually the case in these parts, the Scarab, however eager he may be to see the light, must needs wait for the first rains to soften his stubborn shell. A downpour means to him a question of life and death. Horapollo, that echo of the Egyptian magi, saw true when he made water play its part in the insect’s birth.

But let us drop the jargon of antiquity and its shreds of truth; let us not neglect the first acts of the Sacred Beetle on leaving his shell; let us be present at his prentice steps in the open-air life. In August, I break the casket in which I hear the helpless prisoner fretting. The insect, the only one of its species, is placed in a volery. Provisions are fresh and plentiful. This is the moment, I say to myself, when we take refreshment after so long an abstinence. Well, I am wrong: the new recruit sets no store by the victuals, notwithstanding [60]my invitations, my appeals to the appetizing heap. What he wants above all is the joys of light. He climbs the metal trellis, sets himself in the sun and there, motionless, takes his fill of its beams.

What passes through his dull-witted scavenger’s brain during this first bath of radiant light? Probably nothing. He enjoys the unconscious happiness of a flower blooming in the sun.

At last, the insect goes to the victuals. A ball is constructed according to all the rules. There is no apprenticeship, no first attempt: the spherical form is obtained as regularly as though after long practice. A burrow is dug wherein to eat in peace the lately-kneaded bread. Here we find the novice thoroughly versed in his art. No experience, however prolonged, will add anything to his talents.

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