Nevertheless, it is a fact that the majority have no other rule of conduct than to follow the trend of their instincts, and to obey "their unbridled desires." No one better than Fabre has expounded the blind operation of these little natural forces, the brutality of their manners, their cannibalism, and what we might call their amorality, were it possible to employ our human formulae outside our own human world. With the gardener-beetles, if one is crippled, none of the same race halts or lingers; none attempts to come to his aid. Sometimes the passers-by hasten to the invalid to devour him." In the republic of the wasps "the grubs recognized as incurable are pitilessly torn from their place and dragged out of the nest. Woe to the sick! they are helpless and at once expelled." When the winter comes all the larvae are massacred, and the whole vespine city ends in a horrible tragedy. But life is a whole, and all conduct is good whose actions realize an object and are adapted to an end. If there is a "spirit" of the hive, the insect also has its morality and the wasp's nest its "law," and the conduct of its inmates, horrible though it may seem to Fabre, is doubtless only a submission to certain exigencies of that universal law which makes nature a "savage foster-mother who knows nothing of pity." These cruelties particularly show us that one of the functions of the insect in nature is to preside over the disappearance and also the ultimate metamorphoses of the least "remnants of life." Each has its providential hygienic function. The Necrophori, "the first of the tiny scavengers of the fields," bury corpses in order to establish their progeny in them; in the space of a few hours an enormous body, a mole, a water-rat, or an adder, will completely disappear, buried under the earth. The Onthophagi purify the soil, "dividing all filth into tiny crumbs, ridding the earth of its defilements." A very small beetle, the Trox, has the imprescriptible mission of purging the earth of the rabbits' fur rejected by the fox. (10/5.) Here structure explains the function. The intestine of the grub of the rose-beetle "is a veritable triturating mill, which transforms vegetable matter into mould; in a month it will digest a volume of matter equal to several thousand times the initial volume of the grub." The intestine of the Scarabaei is prolonged to a prodigious length in order to "drain the excrement to the last atom in its manifold circuits. The sheep has finely divided the vegetable matter; the grub, that incomparable triturator, reduces it to the finest possible consistency; not a morsel is left in which the magnifying glass can reveal a fibre."