THE SACRED BEETLE: THE NYMPH; THE RELEASE

The Sacred Beetle, and Others 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 NYMPH; THE RELEASE

Chapter VII. THE SACRED BEETLE: THE NYMPH; THE RELEASE

The larva increases in bulk as it eats the walls 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 its inhabitant. Ensconced in its hermitage, supplied with board and lodging, the recluse waxes big and fat. What more is wanted? Certain hygienic duties have to be attended to, though it is no easy matter in a cramped little niche nearly all the room in which is occupied by the grub; the mortar incessantly elaborated by an excessively obliging intestine must be shot somewhere when there is no breach that needs repairing.

The larva is certainly not fastidious, but even so the bill of fare must not be too outrageous. The humblest of the humble does not return to what he or his kin have already digested. Matter from which the intestinal alembic has extracted the last available atom yields nothing more, unless we change both chemist and apparatus. What the Sheep, with her fourfold stomach, has left behind as worthless residue is an excellent thing for the grub, which also boasts a mighty paunch; but the larva’s own droppings, though no doubt pleasing in their turn to consumers of another class, are loathsome to the [97]grub itself. Then where shall the cumbrous refuse be stored, in a lodging of such niggardly dimensions?

I have described elsewhere the singular industry of the Cotton-bees,1 whose larvæ, in order not to foul their provision of honey, make from their digestive dregs an elegant casket, a masterpiece of inlaid work. With the only material at its disposal in its secluded retreat, with the filth that apparently ought to be an intolerable nuisance, the grub of the Sacred Beetle produces a work less artistic than the Cotton-bee’s but much more comfortable. Let us see how it is done.

Attacking its pear at the bottom of the neck, eating steadily downwards and leaving nothing intact in its area of operations except a flimsy wall necessary for its protection, the larva obtains a free space at the back, in which its droppings are deposited without dirtying the provisions. The hatching-chamber is the first to be filled up in this way; then gradually more and more of the segment which has been eaten into follows suit, always in the round part of the pear, which consequently by degrees recovers its original compactness at the top, while the bottom becomes less and less thick. Behind the grub is the ever-increasing mass of used material; in front of it is the layer, smaller day by day, of untouched food.

Complete development is attained in four or five weeks. By that time there is in the belly of the pear an eccentric circular cavity, with walls very thick towards the neck of the pear and very flimsy at the other end, the disparity being occasioned by the method of eating and of progressive filling up. The meal is over. Next comes the furnishing [98]of the cell, which must be padded snugly for the tender body of the nymph, and the strengthening of one of the hemispheres, the one whose walls have been scraped by the last bites to the utmost permissible limit.

For this most important work the larva has wisely reserved a plentiful stock of cement. The trowel therefore begins to be busy. This time, the object is not to repair damage; it is to double and treble the thickness of the wall in the weaker hemisphere and to cover the whole surface with stucco which, after being polished by the movements of the grub’s body, will be soft to the touch. As this cement acquires a consistency superior to that of the original materials, the grub is at last contained within a stout casket which defies all efforts to open it with one’s fingers and is almost capable of withstanding a blow from a stone.

The apartment is ready. The grub sheds its skin and becomes a nymph. There are very few inhabitants of the insect world that can compare for sober beauty with the delicate creature which, with wing-cases recumbent in front of it like a wide-pleated scarf and fore-legs folded under its head like those of the adult Beetle when counterfeiting death, calls to mind a mummy kept by its linen bandages in the approved hieratic attitude. Semitranslucent and honey-yellow, it looks as though it were carved from a block of amber. Imagine it hardened in this state, mineralized, rendered incorruptible: it would make a splendid topaz gem.

In this marvel of beauty, so severe and dignified in shape and colouring, one point above all captivates me and at last provides me with the solution of a far-reaching problem. Have the fore-legs a tarsus, yes or no? This is the great matter that makes me neglect the jewel for [99]the sake of a structural detail. Let us then return to a subject that used to excite me in my early days, for the answer has come at last, late, it is true, but certain and indisputable. The probabilities which were all that my first investigations could give me turn into certainties established by overwhelming evidence.

By a very strange exception, the full-grown Sacred Beetle and his congeners have no front tarsi: they lack on their fore-limbs the five-jointed finger which is the rule among the highest section of Beetles, the Pentamera. The remaining legs, on the other hand, follow the general law and possess a very well-shaped tarsus. Does this curious formation of the toothed fore-arms date from birth, or is it accidental?

At first sight, an accident seems not unlikely. The Sacred Beetle 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 pill backwards, the front limbs are exposed much more freely 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 first moment when the work begins.

Lest this explanation should appeal to any of my readers, I will hasten to undeceive him. The absence of the front fingers is not the result of an accident. Here before my eyes lies the unanswerable proof. 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 any trace of a terminal appendage. In the others, on the contrary, the tarsus is as distinct as can be, notwithstanding the shapeless, lumpy condition due to the swaddling-bands and humours of the [100]nymphal state. It suggests a finger swollen with chilblains.

If the evidence of the nymph were not sufficient, there would still be that of the perfect insect, which, casting its mummy-cloths and moving for the first time in its shell, wields fingerless fore-arms. The point is established for a certainty: the Sacred Beetle is born maimed; his mutilation dates from the beginning.

‘Very well,’ our popular theorists will reply, ‘the Sacred Beetle is mutilated from birth; but his remote ancestors were not. Formed according to the general rule, they were correct in structure down to this tiny digital detail. There were some who, in their rough work as navvies and carters, wore out that fragile, useless member which was always in the way; and, finding themselves all the better equipped for their work by this accidental amputation, they bequeathed it to their successors, to the great benefit of their race. The present insect profits by the improvement obtained by a long array of ancestors and, acting under the stimulus of the struggle for life, gives more and more durability to a favourable condition due to chance.’

O ingenious theorists, so triumphant on paper, so impotent in the face of facts, just listen to me for a moment! If the loss of the front fingers is a fortunate circumstance for the Sacred Beetle, who faithfully transmits the leg of olden time fortuitously maimed, why should it not be so with the other limbs, if they too chanced to lose their terminal appendage, a tiny, feeble filament, which is very nearly useless and which, owing to its fragility, is a cause of awkward encounters with the roughness of the soil?

The Sacred Beetle is not a climber; he is an ordinary pedestrian, supporting himself upon the point of an iron-shod stick, whereby I mean the stout spike or prickle with [101]which the tip of his leg is armed. He has no occasion to hold on by his claws to some hanging branch, as the Cockchafer does. It would therefore, meseems, be entirely to his advantage to rid himself of the four remaining digits, which jut out sideways, give no help in walking, and do not play any part in the making and the carting of the ball. Yes, that would mean progress, for the simple reason that the less hold you give 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 weather, in October, when the insect has worn itself out in digging, in trundling pills and in modelling pears, the maimed, disabled by their exertions, form the great majority. Both in my cages and out of doors, I see them in all stages of mutilation. Some have lost the finger on their four hind-limbs altogether; others retain a stump, a couple of joints, a single joint; those least damaged have a few members left intact.

Here then is the mutilation on which the philosophers base their theory. And it is no rare accident: every year the cripples outnumber the others when the time comes for retiring to winter-quarters. In their final labours they seem no more embarrassed than those who have been spared by the buffeting of life. On both sides I find the same nimbleness of movement, the same dexterity in kneading the reserve of bread which will enable them to bear the first rigours of winter with equanimity in their underground homes. In scavenger’s work, the maimed rival the others.

And these cripples found families: they spend the cold season beneath the soil; they wake up in the spring, return to the surface and take part for a second time, sometimes [102]even for a third, in life’s great festival. Their descendants ought to profit by an improvement which has been renewed year by year, ever since Sacred Beetles 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 regulation four tarsi.

Well, my theorists, what do you say to that? For the two front legs you offer a sort of explanation; and the four others give you a categorical denial. Have you not been taking your fancies for facts?

Then what is the cause of the Sacred Beetle’s original mutilation? I will frankly confess that I have no idea. Nevertheless those two maimed members are very strange, so strange indeed that they have enticed the masters, the greatest masters, into lamentable errors. Listen, first of all, to Latreille,2 the prince of descriptive entomologists. In his article on the insects which ancient Egypt painted or carved upon her monuments,3 he quotes the writings of Horapollo,4 a unique document preserved for us in the papyri for the glorification of the sacred insect:

‘One would be tempted at first,’ he says, ‘to set down as fiction what Horapollo says of the number of this Beetle’s fingers: according to him, there are thirty. Nevertheless, this computation, judged by the way in which he looks at the tarsus, is quite 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 in a five-jointed tarsus, the Sacred Beetles evidently had thirty fingers.’

Forgive me, illustrious master: the number of joints is but twenty, because the two fore-legs are without tarsi. You were carried away by the general rule. Losing sight of the singular exception, which you certainly knew, you said thirty, obsessed for a moment by that overwhelmingly positive rule. Yes, you knew the exception, so much so that the figure of the Scarab accompanying your article, a figure drawn from the insect and not from the Egyptian monuments, is irreproachably accurate: it has no tarsi on its front legs. The blunder is pardonable, because the exception is so unusual.

Mulsant,5 in his volume on the French Lamellicorns, quotes Horapollo and his allowance of thirty fingers to the insect according to the number of days which the sun takes to traverse a sign of the Zodiac. He repeats Latreille’s explanation. He goes even farther. Here are his own words:

‘If we count each joint of the tarsi as a finger, we must admit that this insect was examined with great attention.’

Examined with great attention! By whom, pray? By Horapollo? Not a bit of it! By you, my master: yes, indeed yes! And yet the rule, in its very positiveness, is misleading you for a moment; it misleads you again and in a more serious fashion when, in your illustration of the Sacred Beetle, you represent the insect with tarsi on its fore-legs, tarsi similar to those on the other legs. You, painstaking describer though you be, have in your turn been the victim of a momentary aberration. The rule is so general that it has made you lose sight of the singularity 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 indicate, if the Egyptian author began by counting the first thirty fingers according to the number of joints in the tarsi, it is because he made a mental enumeration on the basis of the general circumstances. He was guilty of a slip which was not so very reprehensible, seeing that, more than a thousand years later, masters like Latreille and Mulsant were guilty of the same slip. If we must blame something, let us blame the exceptional structure of the insect.

‘But,’ I may be asked, ‘why should not Horapollo have seen the exact truth? Perhaps the Sacred Beetle of his day had tarsi which the insect no longer possesses. In that case, it has been transformed by the slow work of time.’

I am waiting for some one to show me a natural Scarab of Horapollo’s period before I reply to this objection on the part of the evolutionists. The tombs which so religiously guard the Cat, the Ibis and the Crocodile must also contain the sacred insect. All that I have by me is a few figures showing the Scarab 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 thing as a whole; but his graver and chisel have not troubled about such insignificant details as the tarsi.[105]

Poor as I am in documents of this kind, I doubt whether the work of sculptor or engraver will solve the problem. Even if an image with front tarsi were discovered somewhere or other, the question would be no further advanced. It would always be possible to plead a mistake, an oversight, a leaning towards symmetry. The doubt, so long as it prevails in certain minds, can be removed only by the sight of the ancient insect in the natural state. I will wait for it, though convinced beforehand that the Sacred Beetle of the Pharaohs differed in no way from our own.

We will stay a little longer with the old Egyptian author, though his wild allegorical jargon is usually incomprehensible. He is sometimes strikingly accurate in his ideas. Is this due to a chance coincidence? Or is it the result of serious observation? I should be glad to take the latter view, so perfect is the agreement between his statements and certain biological details of which our own science was ignorant until quite lately. Of the home life of the Sacred Beetle Horapollo knew much more than we do. He tells us this in particular:

‘The Scarabæus deposits this ball in the earth for the space of twenty-eight days (for in so many days the moon passes through the twelve signs of the Zodiac). By thus remaining under the moon the race of Scarabæi is endowed with life; and upon the twenty-ninth day, after having opened the ball, it casts it into water, for it is aware that upon that day the conjunction of the moon and sun takes place, as well as the generation of the world. From the ball thus opened, the animals, that is, the Scarabæi, issue forth.’6

[106]

Let us dismiss the revolution of the moon, the conjunction of the sun and moon, the generation 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 definite facts, falling within the domain of true science. Are they imaginary or real? The question deserves investigation.

The ancients were unacquainted with the wonders of the metamorphosis. To them a larva was a worm born of corruption. The wretched creature had no future to lift it from its abject state: as worm it appeared and as worm it must disappear. It was not a mask whereunder a higher form of life was being elaborated; it was a definite entity, supremely contemptible and doomed soon to return to the putrescence of which it was the offspring.

To the Egyptian author, then, the Scarab’s larva was unknown. And, if by chance he had had before his eyes the insect’s shell inhabited by a fat, pot-bellied grub, 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 that were long maintained, the sacred insect had neither father nor mother: an error excusable among the untutored ancients, for here the two sexes are outwardly indistinguishable. It was born of the ordure that formed its ball; and its birth dated from the appearance of the nymph, that amber jewel displaying, in a perfectly recognizable shape, the features of the adult insect.

In the eyes of antiquity the life of the Sacred Beetle began at the moment when he could be recognized, not [107]before; for otherwise we should have that as yet unsuspected connecting-link, the grub. The twenty-eight days, therefore, during which, as Horapollo tells us, the offspring of the insect quickens, represent the duration of the nymphal phase. This duration has been the object of special attention in my studies. It varies but never to any great extent. From my notes I find thirty-three days to be the longest period and twenty-one the shortest. The average, supplied by some twenty observations, is twenty-eight days. This very number twenty-eight, this number of days contained in four weeks, actually appears oftener than the others. Horapollo spoke truly: the real insect takes life in the space of a lunar month.

The four weeks passed, behold the Sacred Beetle in his final shape: the shape, yes, but not the colouring, which is very strange when the nymph casts its skin. The head, legs and thorax are dark-red, except the denticulations of the forehead and fore-arms, which are smoky-brown. The abdomen is an opaque white; the wing-cases are semitransparent white, very faintly tinged with yellow. This imposing raiment, blending the scarlet of the cardinal’s cassock with the white of the celebrant’s alb, a raiment that harmonizes with the insect’s hieratic character, is but temporary and turns darker by degrees, to make way for a uniform of ebon black. About a month is needed for the horny armour to acquire a firm consistency and a definite hue.

At last the Beetle is fully matured. Awakening within him is the delicious restlessness born of coming freedom. He, hitherto a son of the darkness, foresees the gladness of the light. Great is his longing to burst the shell so that he may emerge from his underground prison and come into the sun; but the difficulty of liberating himself is no small [108]one. Will he or will he not escape from the natal cradle, which has now become a hateful dungeon? It depends.

Generally in August the Sacred Beetle is ripe for release: in August, save for rare exceptions, the most torrid, dry and scorching month of the year. If therefore no shower come from time to time to give some slight relief to the panting earth, then the cell to be burst and the wall to be breached defy the strength and patience of the insect, which is helpless against all that hardness. Owing to prolonged desiccation, the soft original matter has become an insuperable rampart; it has turned into a sort of brick baked in the kiln of summer.

I have, of course, made experiments on the insect in these difficult circumstances. I gather pear-shaped shells containing the adult Beetle, who is on the point of emerging, in view of the lateness of the season. These shells are already dry and very hard; and I lay them in a box where they retain their dryness. Sooner or later I hear the sharp grating of a rasp inside each cell. It is the prisoner working to make himself an outlet by scraping the wall with the rake of his forehead and fore-feet. Two or three days elapse; and the process of deliverance seems to be no further advanced.

I come to the assistance of a pair of them by myself opening a loophole with a knife. My idea is that this first breach will help the egress of the recluse by giving him a place to start upon, an exit that will only need widening. But not at all: these favoured ones make no more progress with their work than the others.

In less than a fortnight silence prevails in all the shells. The prisoners, worn out with vain endeavours, have perished. I break the caskets containing the deceased. A meagre pinch of dust, hardly as much as an average pea [109]in bulk, is all that those powerful implements, rasp, saw, harrow and rake, have succeeded in detaching from the invincible wall.

I take some other shells, of equal hardness, wrap them in a wet rag and put them in a flask. When the moisture has soaked through them, I rid them of their wrapper and keep them in the corked flask. This time events take a very different course. Softened to a nicety by the wet rag, the shells open, burst by the efforts 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 reveal a yawning breach. The experiment is a complete success. In every case the release of the Beetles is safely accomplished: a few drops of water have brought them the joys of the sun.

For the second time Horapollo was right. True, it is not the mother, as the ancient writer says, who throws her ball into the water: it is the clouds that provide the liberating douche, it is the rain that brings about the ultimate release. In the natural state things must happen as in my experiments. When the soil is burnt by the August sun, the shells, baked like bricks under their thin covering of earth, are for most of the time hard as stones. It is impossible for the insect to wear away its casket and escape. But let a shower come—that life-giving baptism which the seed of the plant and the family of the Beetle alike await within the cinders of the earth—let a little rain fall; and soon there will be a resurrection in the fields.

The earth becomes soaked. There you have 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 and pushes with its back; it is free. It is in fact in September, during the [110]first rains that herald autumn, that the Sacred Beetle leaves his native burrow and comes forth to enliven the pastoral sward, even as the former generation enlivened it in the spring. The clouds, hitherto so ungenerous, at last set him free.

When the earth is exceptionally cool, the bursting of the shell and the deliverance of its occupant can occur at an earlier period; but in ground scorched by the pitiless summer sun, as is usually the case in my district, the Beetle, however eager he may be to see the light, must needs wait for the first rain to soften his stubborn shell. A downpour is 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 birth of the sacred insect.

But let us drop the jargon of antiquity, with its fragments of truth; let us not overlook the first acts of the Scarab on leaving his shell; and let us be present at his prentice steps in open-air life. In August I break the casket in which I hear the helpless captive chafing. I place the insect, the only one of its species, in a cage together with some Gymnopleuri. There is plenty of fresh food provided. This is the moment, said I to myself, when we take refreshment after so long an abstinence. Well, I was wrong: the new recruit shows no interest in the victuals, notwithstanding my invitations, my summons to the tempting heap. What he wants above all is the joys of the light. He scales the metal trelliswork, sets himself in the sun, and there motionless takes his fill of its beams.

What passes through his dull-witted Dung-beetle brain during this first bath of radiant brightness? Probably nothing. His is the unconscious happiness of a flower blossoming in the sun.[111]

At last the insect goes to the victuals. A pellet is made in accordance with all the rules. There is no apprenticeship: at the first attempt, the spherical form is achieved as accurately as after long practice. A burrow is dug in which the bread just kneaded may be eaten in peace. Here again we find the novice thoroughly versed in his art. No length of experience will add anything to his talents.

His digging-tools are his fore-legs and forehead. To shoot the rubbish outside, he uses the barrow, exactly like any of his elders, that is to say, he covers his corselet with a load of earth; then, head downwards, he dives into the dust, afterwards coming forward and depositing his load a few inches from the entrance. With a leisurely step, like that of a navvy with a long job before him, he goes underground again to reload his barrow. This work upon the dining-room takes whole hours to finish.

At length the ball is stored away. The front-door is shut; and the thing is done. Bed and board secured, begone dull care! All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Lucky creature! Without ever seeing it practised by your kindred, whom you have not yet met, without ever learning it, you know your trade to perfection; and it will give you an ample share of food and tranquillity, both so hard to achieve in human life.

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