It is one of the commonest out-o’-door insects in Egypt. At the season for depositing its eggs it alights upon the bank of the river, where the soil is still moist, about the consistency of tough dough, or clay sufficiently trodden for brick-making. Upon this it lays its eggs, arranging them closely together. It then forms the spot on which it has laid them into a perfect sphere, by adding clay to the top of it, and cutting away the earth around and beneath it. The sphere being thus completed, it thrusts the extremities of its two inward curved hind legs into the opposite sides of it, and by pushing backwards gives to it a revolving motion; the inserted points of its hind legs forming the axis on which it revolves. In this way it pushes and rolls it back to the edge of the desert, often a long way off. Who could be so dull as not to see in this sphere, full of the seeds of life, a perfect symbol of this terrestrial globe, formed by creative wisdom and energy, and everywhere fraught with the quickening germs of endlessly manifold being? And so the beetle became the symbol of the Creator. But when the symbol of the Creator, with his burden, the symbol of the life-containing globe, had arrived at the edge of the desert, it there excavated a gallery a foot or two deep—a catacomb, a grave—into which it descended. What divine forethought in thus foreseeing the effects of the damp, and of the inundation! and these primæval observers had not extinguished thought on these subjects by labelling such acts as instincts, and then putting them away on a shelf of the mind. This work, also, of the insect did not escape them. It had, as it seemed, buried itself. It thus, at all events, sanctioned their mode of burial: though, perhaps, it had previously taught them where, and how, to bury—in the dry desert, in excavated galleries. It was in this way the young world learnt. What they thought was what they had seen. But there was another lesson, or rather series of lessons, which, through its wondrous transformations, this beetle taught the old Egyptians. To begin at the beginning: the first period of its existence it passed in a drear subterranean abode, with feeble senses, narrowly circumscribed powers, unloved and unloving, ungladdened by pleasant sights, only terrified by the unintelligible voices that at times reached it from the sun-lit world above; its best pleasure to eat dirt; its only employment to grow into fitness for future changes. Having dragged out the time apportioned to that first base condition, it was translated into the second. Nature’s hand swathed it into a chrysalis. Movement now ceased. Food could no longer be taken. The avenues of the senses were closed. The functions of life were put in abeyance. But life itself was not extinguished; it was only suspended while new transformations were being effected to qualify the insect for its perfected existence.