A young shepherd

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 PEAR

CHAPTER II. THE SACRED BEETLE: THE PEAR

A young shepherd, who had been told in his spare time to watch the doings of the Sacred Beetle, came to me in high spirits, one Sunday, in the second half of June, to say that he thought the time had come to commence a search. He had detected the insect issuing from the ground, had dug at the spot where it made its appearance and had found, at no great depth, the queer thing which he was bringing me.

Queer it was and calculated to upset the little which I thought I knew. In shape, it was exactly like a tiny pear that had lost all the colour of its freshness and turned brown in rotting. What could this curious object be, this pretty plaything that seemed to come from a turner’s workshop? Was it made by human hands? Was it a model of the fruit of the pear-tree intended for some child’s collection? One would say so.

The children come round me; they look at the treasure-trove with longing eyes; they would like to add it to the contents of their toy-box. It is much prettier in shape than an agate marble, much more graceful than an ivory egg or a box-wood top. The material, it is true, seems none too nicely chosen; but it is firm to the touch and very artistically curved. In any case, the little pear discovered underground must not go to swell the collection of nursery treasures until we have found out more about it.

Can it really be the Scarab’s work? Is there an egg inside it, a grub? The shepherd assures me that there is. A similar pear, crushed by accident in the digging, contained, he says, a white egg, the size of a grain of wheat. I dare not believe it, so greatly does the object which he has brought me differ from the ball which I expected to see.

To open the puzzling “find” and ascertain its contents would perhaps be imprudent: such an act of violence might jeopardize the life of the germ enclosed, always provided that the Scarab’s egg be there, a matter of which the shepherd seems convinced. And then, I imagine, the pear-shape, opposed to every accepted idea, is probably accidental. Who knows if chance has anything like it in store for me in the future? It were wise to keep the thing as it is, to await events; above all, it were wise to go in search of information on the spot.

The shepherd was at his post by daybreak the next morning. I joined him on some slopes that had been lately cleared of their trees, where the hot summer sun, which strikes so powerfully on the neck, could not reach us for two or three hours. In the cool air of morning, with the flock browsing under the care of the sheep-dog, we went in search together.

Scarabæus’ burrow is soon found: it is recognizable by the recent mole-hill that surmounts it. My companion digs with a vigorous wrist. I have lent him my little pocket-trowel, the light, but workmanlike tool which, incorrigible earth-scraper that I am, I seldom omit to take with me when I go out. I lie down, the better to see the arrangement and furnishing of the hypogeum in process of excavation; and I am all eyes. The shepherd uses the trowel as a lever and, with his free hand, pushes back the rubbish.

Here we are! A cave opens out and, in the moist warmth of the yawning vault, I see a splendid pear lying full-length upon the ground. I shall certainly long remember this first revelation of the maternal work of the Scarab. My excitement could have been no greater were I an archæologist digging among the ancient relics of Egypt and lighting upon the sacred insect of the dead, carved in emerald, in some Pharaonic crypt. O blessed joys of truth suddenly shining forth, what others are there to compare with you! The shepherd was in the seventh heaven: he laughed in response to my smile and was happy in my gladness.

Luck does not repeat itself: “Non bis in idem,” says the old adage. And here have I twice had under my eyes this curious shape of the pear. Could it be the normal shape, not subject to exception? Must we abandon all thought of a sphere similar to those which the insect rolls on the ground? Let us continue and we shall see. A second hole is found. Like the previous one, it contains a pear. The two discoveries are as like as two peas; they might have issued from the same mould. And a valuable detail is this: in the second burrow, beside the pear and lovingly embracing it, is the mother Beetle, engaged, no doubt, in giving it the finishing touches before leaving the underground cave for good. All doubts are dispelled: I know the worker and I know the work.

The rest of the morning confirmed these premisses to the full: before an intolerable sun drove me from the slope explored, I possessed a dozen pears identical in shape and almost in dimensions. On various occasions, the mother was present in the workshop.

PLATE II

Burrow and pear-shaped ball of the Sacred Beetle.

Let me tell, to finish with this part of our subject, what the future held in store for me. During the whole of the dog-days, from the end of June until September, I renewed almost daily my visits to the spots frequented by the Scarab; and the burrows dug up with my trowel supplied me with an amount of evidence exceeding my fondest hopes. The insects brought up in the volery supplied me with further documents, though these, it is true, were rare and not to be compared with the riches of the open fields. All told, at least some hundred nests passed through my hands; and it was always the graceful shape of the pear, never, absolutely never, the round shape of the pill, never the ball of which the books tell us.

And now let us unfold the authentic story, calling to witness none save facts actually observed and reobserved. The Sacred Beetle’s nest is betrayed on the outside by a heap of shifted earth, by a little mole-hill formed of the superfluous rubbish which the mother, when closing up the abode, has been unable to replace, as a part of the excavation must be left empty. Under this heap is a shallow pit, about two-fifths of an inch deep, followed by a horizontal gallery, either straight or winding, which ends in a large hall, spacious enough to hold a man’s fist. This is the crypt in which the egg lies wrapped in food and subjected to the incubation of a burning sun, at a few inches underground; this is the roomy workshop in which the mother, enjoying full liberty of movement, has kneaded and shaped the future nursling’s bread into a pear.

This stercoral bread has its main axis lying in a horizontal position. Its shape and size remind one exactly of those little poires de Saint-Jean which, thanks to their bright colouring, their flavour and their early ripeness, delight the children’s tribe. The bulk varies within narrow limits. The largest dimensions are 45 millimetres in length by 30 millimetres in width;1 the smallest are 35 millimetres by 28.2

Without being as polished as stucco, the surface, which is absolutely regular, is carefully smoothed under a thin layer of red earth. At first, when of recent construction, soft as potter’s clay, the pyriform loaf soon, in the course of desiccation, acquires a stout crust that refuses to yield under the pressure of fingers. Wood itself is no harder. This bark is the defensive wrapper which isolates the recluse from this world and allows him to consume his victuals in profound peace. But, should desiccation reach the central mass, then the danger becomes extremely serious. We shall have occasion to return to the woes of the grub exposed to a diet of too-stale bread.

What dough does the Scarab’s bake-house use? Who are the purveyors? The mule and the horse? By no means. And yet I expected to find it so—and so would everybody—at seeing the insect draw so eagerly, for its own use, upon the plentiful garner of an ordinary lump of dung. For that is where it habitually manufactures the rolling ball which it goes and consumes in some underground retreat.

Whereas coarse bread, crammed with bits of hay, is good enough for the mother, she becomes more dainty where her family are concerned. She now wants fine pastry, rich in nourishment and easily digested; she now wants the ovine manna: not that which the sheep of a dry habit scatters in trails of black olives, but that which, elaborated in a less parched intestine, is kneaded into biscuits all of a piece. That is the material required, the dough exclusively used. It is no longer the poor and stringy produce of the horse, but an unctuous, plastic, homogeneous thing, soaked through and through with nourishing juices. Its plasticity, its delicacy are admirably adapted to the artistic work of the pear, while its alimentary qualities suit the weak stomach of the newborn progeny. Little though the bulk be, the grub will here find sufficient food.

This explains the smallness of the alimentary pears, a smallness that made me doubt the origin of my find, before I came upon the mother in the presence of the provisions. I was unable to see in those little pears the bill of fare of a future Sacred Beetle, himself so great a glutton and of so remarkable a size.

Where is the egg in that nutritive mass so novel in shape? One would be inclined to place it in the centre of the fat, round paunch. This central point is best-protected against accidents from the outside, best-endowed with an even temperature. Besides, the budding grub would here find a deep layer of food on every side of it and would not be exposed to the mistakes of the first few mouthfuls. Everything being alike on every side of it, it would not be called upon to choose; wherever it chanced to apply its novice tooth, it could continue without hesitation its first dainty repast.

All this seemed so very reasonable that I allowed myself to be led away by it. In the first pear which I explored, slender layer by slender layer, with the blade of a penknife, I looked for the egg in the centre of the paunch, feeling almost certain of finding it there. To my great surprise, it was not there. Instead of being hollow, the centre of the pear is full and consists of one continuous, homogeneous alimentary mass.

My deductions, which any observer in my place would certainly have shared, seemed very reasonable; the Scarab, however, is of another way of thinking. We have our logic, of which we are rather proud; the Dung-kneader has hers, which is better than ours in this contingency. She has her own foresight, her own discernment of things; and she places her egg elsewhere.

Fig. 1.—Section of the Sacred Beetle’s pill, showing the egg and the hatching-chamber.

But where? Why, in the narrow part of the pear, in the neck, right at the end. Let us cut this neck lengthwise, taking the necessary precautions, so as not to damage the contents. It is hollowed into a recess with polished and shiny walls. This is the tabernacle of the germ, the hatching-chamber. The egg, which is very large in proportion to the size of the layer, is a long white oval, about 10 millimetres in length by 5 millimetres in its greatest width.3 A slight empty space separates it on all sides from the chamber-walls. There is no contact with these walls, save at the rear end, which adheres to the top of the recess. Lying horizontally, following the normal position of the pear, the whole of it, excepting the point of attachment, rests upon an air-mattress, most elastic and warmest of beds. Let us observe also that the top of the nipple, instead of being smooth and compact like the rest of the pear, is formed of a felt of particles of scrapings, which allows the air sufficient access for the breathing-needs of the egg.

We are now informed. Let us next try to understand the Scarab’s logic. Let us account for the necessity for the pear, that form so strange in entomological industry; let us seek to explain the convenience of the curious situation of the egg. It is dangerous, I know, to venture upon the how and wherefore of things. We easily sink in this mysterious domain where the moving soil gives way beneath the feet, swallowing the foolhardy in the quicksands of error. Must we abandon such excursions, because of the risk? Why should we?

What does our science, so sublime compared with the frailty of our means, so contemptible in the face of the boundless spaces of the unknown, what does our science know of absolute reality? Nothing. The world interests us only because of the ideas which we form of it. Remove the idea and everything becomes sterile, chaos, empty nothingness. An omnium-gatherum of facts is not knowledge, but at most a cold catalogue which we must thaw and quicken at the fire of the mind; we must introduce thought and the light of reason; we must interpret.

Let us adopt this course to explain the work of the Sacred Beetle. Perhaps we shall end by attributing our own logic to the insect. After all, it will be just as remarkable to see a wonderful agreement prevail between that which reason dictates to us and that which instinct dictates to the animal.

A grave danger threatens the Sacred Beetle in its grub state: the drying-up of the food. The crypt in which the larval life is spent has a layer of earth, some third of an inch thick, for a ceiling. Of what avail is this slender screen against the canicular heat that burns the soil, baking it like a brick to a far greater depth? The grub’s abode at such times acquires a scorching temperature; when I thrust my hand into it, I feel the moist heat of a Turkish bath.

The provisions, therefore, even though they have to last but three or four weeks, are exposed to the risk of drying up before that time and becoming uneatable. When, instead of the tender bread of the start, the unhappy worm finds no food for its teeth but a repulsive crust, hard as a pebble and unassailable, it is bound to perish of hunger. And it does, in fact, so perish. I have found numbers of these victims of the August sun who, after eating plentifully of the fresh victuals and digging themselves a cell, had succumbed, unable to continue biting into fare too hard for their teeth. There remained a thick shell, a sort of closed oven, in which the poor wight lay baked and shrivelled up.

While the worm dies of hunger in the shell turned to stone by desiccation, the full-grown insect that has finished its transformations dies there too, for it is incapable of bursting the enclosure and freeing itself. I shall return later to the final delivery and will linger no more on this point. Let us occupy ourselves solely with the woes of the worm.

The drying-up of the victuals is, we say, fatal to it. This is proved by the grubs found baked in their oven; it is also proved, in a more precise fashion, by the following experiment. In July, the period of active nidification, I place in wooden or cardboard boxes a dozen pears dug up, that morning, from the native spot. These boxes, carefully closed, are put away in the dark, in my study, where the same temperature reigns as outside. Well, in none of them is the infant reared: sometimes the egg shrivels; sometimes the worm is hatched, but very soon dies. On the other hand, in tin boxes or glass receptacles, things go very well: not one attempt at rearing fails.

Whence do these differences arise? Simply from this: in the high temperature of July, evaporation proceeds apace under the pervious wooden or cardboard screen; the alimentary pear dries up and the poor worm dies of hunger. In the impermeable tin boxes, in the carefully-sealed glass receptacles, evaporation does not take place, the provisions retain their softness and the grubs thrive as well as in their native burrow.

The insect employs two methods to ward off the danger of desiccation. In the first place, it compresses the outer layer with all the strength of its wide armlets, turning it into a protecting rind more homogeneous and more compact than the central mass. If I smash one of these well-dried boxes of preserves, the rind usually breaks off sharp and leaves the kernel in the middle bare. The whole suggests the shell and the almond of a filbert. The pressure exercised by the mother when manipulating her pear has influenced the surface layer to a depth of a few millimetres and from this results the rind; further down, the pressure has not spread, whence proceeds the central kernel. In the hot summer months, my housekeeper puts her bread into a closed pan, to keep it fresh. This is what the insect does, in its fashion: by dint of compression, it confines the bread of the family in a pan.

The Sacred Beetle goes further still: she becomes a geometrician capable of solving a fine problem of minimum values. All other conditions remaining equal, the evaporation is obviously in proportion to the extent of the evaporating surface. The alimentary mass must therefore be given the smallest possible surface, in order by so much to decrease the waste of moisture; nevertheless, this smallest surface must unite the largest aggregate of nutritive materials, so that the worm may find sufficient nourishment. Now which is the form that encloses the greatest bulk within the smallest superficial area? Geometry answers, the sphere.

The Scarab, therefore, shapes the worm’s allowance into a sphere (we will pass over the neck of the pear for the moment); and this round form is not the result of blind mechanical conditions, imposing an inevitable shape upon the workman; it is not the forcible effect of a rolling along the ground. We have already seen that, with the object of easier and swifter transit, the insect kneads the plunder which it intends to consume at a distance into an exact ball, without moving it from the spot at which it lies; in a word, we have observed that the round form precedes the rolling.

In the same way, it will be shown presently that the pear destined for the worm is fashioned down in the burrow. It undergoes no process of rolling, it is not even moved. The Scarab gives it the requisite outline exactly as a modelling artist would do, shaping his clay under the pressure of the thumb.

Supplied with the tools which it possesses, the insect would be capable of obtaining other forms of a less dainty curve than its pear-shaped work. It could, for instance, make the coarse cylinder, the sausage in use among the Geotrupes; simplifying the work to the utmost, it could leave the morsel without any settled form, just as it happened to find it. Things would proceed all the faster and would leave more time for playing in the sun. But no: the Scarab adopts exclusively the sphere, so difficult in its precision; she acts as though she knew the laws of evaporation and geometry from A to Z.

It remains for us to examine the neck of the pear. What can be its object, its use? The reply forces itself upon us irresistibly. This neck contains the egg, in the hatching-chamber. Now every germ, whether of plant or animal, needs air, the primary stimulus of life. To admit that vivifying combustible, the air, the shell of a bird’s egg is riddled with an endless number of pores. The pear of the Sacred Beetle may be compared with the egg of the hen. Its shell is the rind, hardened by pressure, with a view to avoiding untimely desiccation; its nutritive mass, its meat, its yolk is the soft ball sheltered under the rind; its air-chamber is the terminal space, the cavity in the neck, where the air envelopes the germ on every side. Where would that germ be better off, for breathing, than in its hatching-chamber projecting into the atmosphere and giving free play to the interchange of gases through its thin and easily penetrable wall and especially through the felt of scrapings that finishes the nipple?

In the centre of the mass, on the other hand, aeration is not so easy. The hardened rind does not possess the eggshell’s pores; and the central kernel is formed of compact matter. The air enters it, nevertheless, for presently the worm will be able to live in it, the worm, a robust organism less difficult and nice than the first throbs of life.

These conditions, air and warmth, are so fundamental that no Dung-beetle neglects them. The nutritive hoards vary in form, as we shall have occasion to perceive: in addition to the pear, such shapes as the cylinder, the ovoid, the pill and the thimble are adopted, according to the species of the manipulator; but, amid this diversity of outline, one feature of the first importance remains constant, which is the egg lodged in a hatching-chamber close to the surface, providing an excellent means for the easy access of air and warmth. And the most gifted in this delicate art is the Sacred Beetle with her pear.

I was urging just now that this first of Dung-kneaders behaved with a logic that rivals our own. At the point to which we have come, the proof of my statement is established. Nay, better still. Let us submit the following problem to our leading scientific lights: a germ is accompanied by a mass of victuals liable soon to be rendered useless by desiccation. How should the alimentary mass be shaped? Where should the egg be laid so as to be easily influenced by air and warmth?

The first question of the problem has already been answered. Knowing that evaporation is in proportion to the extent of the evaporating surface, science declares that the victuals shall be arranged in a ball, because the spherical form is that which encloses the greatest amount of material within the smallest surface. As for the egg, since it requires a protecting sheath to avoid any harmful contact, it shall be contained within a thin, cylindrical case; and this case shall be implanted on the sphere.

Thus the requisite conditions are fulfilled: the provisions, gathered into a ball, keep fresh; the egg, protected by its slender, cylindrical sheath, receives the influence of air and warmth without impediment. The strictly needful has been obtained; but it is very ugly. The practical has not troubled about the beautiful.

An artist corrects the brute work of reason. He replaces the cylinder by a semi-ellipsoid, of a much prettier form; he joins this ellipsoid to the sphere by means of a graceful curved surface; and the whole becomes the pear, the necked gourd. It is now a work of art, a thing of beauty.

The Scarab does exactly what the laws of æsthetics dictate to ourselves. Can she, too, have a sense of beauty? Is she able to appreciate the elegance of her pear? Certainly, she does not see it: she manipulates it in profound darkness. But she touches it. A poor touch hers, rudely clad in horn, yet not insensible, after all, to nicely-drawn outlines!

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