This layer is thick enough and abundant enough to make the maggot into a robust grub. Then, strong food for the strong, barley bread with its husks, raw dung full of sharp bits of hay. The larva is superabundantly provisioned with it, and, having attained its growth, comes to the imprisoning outer layer. The capacity of the dwelling has increased with that of its inhabitant. The small original cavity with its excessively thick walls is now a large cell with sides only a few lines thick. The inner layers have turned into larva, nymph, or Scarabæus, as the case may be. In short, the ball is now a shell, hiding within its spacious interior the mysteries of metamorphosis. My observations go no further; my certificates of the birth and condition of the Scarabæus do not go beyond the egg; I have not actually seen the larva which, however, is known and described by various authors. Neither have I seen the perfect insect while yet enclosed in the cell, previous to exercising its functions as ball-roller and excavator, and that is exactly what I should most have desired to see. I should have liked to find the creature in its birthplace, recently transformed, new to all labour, so that I might have examined the worker’s hand before it set to its tasks, and for the following reason. Insects have each foot terminated by a kind of finger or tarsus, composed of a series of delicate portions which may be compared to the joints of our fingers. They end in a crooked nail. One claw to each foot is the rule, and this claw, at least in the case of the superior Coleoptera, especially the scavenger beetles, contains five joints. Now by a strange exception, the Scarabæus has no tarsi on its forefeet, while possessing well-shaped ones with five joints on the two other pairs. They are imperfect, maimed, wanting in their front limbs in that which represents, roughly indeed, our hand in an insect. A like anomaly is found in the Onitis and Bubas, also of the scavenger family. Entomology has long noted this curious fact without being able to give a satisfactory explanation. Is it a birth imperfection? Does the beetle come into the world without fingers on its front limbs, or does it lose them as soon as it enters on its toilsome labours?