one or two months, from June to July; then, with the coming of the fierce heat, which the grasshoppers love, the Scarabæi take up summer quarters and bury themselves in the cool earth. With the first rains they reappear, less numerous and less active than in spring, but apparently taken up by the all-important task of continuing their race. II THE ENCLOSURE If you seek among writers for information as to the habits of Scarabæus sacer in particular, and on the dung robbers in general, you find that science has not got beyond some of the beliefs current in the time of the Pharaohs. We are told that the ball which is dragged along contains an egg, and is a cradle where the larva will find board and lodging. The parents roll it over rough ground to make it round, and when shocks and shakes and tumbles all along the slopes have shaped it properly, they bury it and abandon it to mother earth. So rough a start in life always seemed to me unlikely. How could a beetle’s egg, so tender and fragile as it is, endure the rocking of its rolling cradle? There exists in the germ a spark of life which the slightest touch, the merest trifle, can extinguish, and is it likely that the parents should take it into their heads to lug it about over hill and dale for hours? Not they; maternal tenderness does not subject its progeny to the martyrdom of Regulus. However, something more than logical reasoning was required to sweep away received opinions. I therefore opened hundreds of balls rolled by the dung beetles and others out of holes dug under my eyes, and never, never did I find either a central niche or an egg in the pellets. They are invariably rough heaps of food, hastily shaped, with no particular structure inside them, merely provender with which the beetles shut themselves up to enjoy an orgy in peace for some days. They covet and steal them with an energy which they certainly would not show if it implied new family cares. It would be absurd for one Scarabæus to steal the eggs of another, each having enough to do in securing the future of its own. So on that point no more doubt can exist; the balls rolled by beetles never contain eggs.