As the divorce seems destined to be indefinitely prolonged, despite the calls to order which I repeat day after day for a week by restoring the female to her burrow, I end by changing the male. I replace him by another, no better—and no worse-looking than was the first. Henceforth matters resume their normal course and all is as well as can be. The shaft is deepened, the outside mound is raised, the provisions are stored away, the factory of preserved foodstuffs is in full swing. On the 2nd of June, the total number of pellets carried down amounts to 225. It is a splendid hoard. Shortly after, the father dies of old age. I find him near the mouth of the burrow, convulsively clutching his last pellet which he had not had time to carry down. The malady of age has surprised him in the midst of his labours, has struck him down on the harvest-field. The widow continues her domestic work. To the riches amassed by the deceased, she adds, by her own activity, in the course of the month, thirty more pellets, making in all, since the foundation of the household, 255. Then comes the great heat, which favours idleness and slumber. The mother does not show herself any longer. What does she do down below, in her cool cellar? Like the Copris mother apparently, she looks after her brood, going from cell to cell, sounding the cakes, investigating what is happening inside. It would be an act of barbarism to disturb her. We will wait till she comes out, accompanied by her offspring. Let us profit by this long interval of rest to set forth the little that I have gathered from my attempts at rearing the Minotaur in a glass tube on the regulation diet. The egg takes about four weeks to hatch. The first that I find, dating from the 17th of April, gives birth to a grub on the 15th of May. This slow process of hatching can be due only to an insufficiency of heat in the early spring: underground, at a depth of five feet, the temperature hardly varies. For that matter, we shall see the larva likewise taking its time and going through the whole summer before changing into the adult insect. It is so snug inside a sausage, in a cellar free from atmospheric variations, far from the hurly-burly of the outer world, where rejoicings are not unattended by danger; it is so sweet to do nothing, to indulge in digestive slumbers! Why hurry? The bustle of active life will come but too soon. The Minotaurs seem to hold that opinion: they prolong as far as may be the bliss of infancy.