The grub which has just been born in the sand pegs away with its legs and mandibles, strains and heaves with its rump, makes itself a passage and, from one day to the next, reaches the provisions piled up above it. In the glass tube in which I rear it I see it climbing, slipping into crevices, making a selection from the food about it and capriciously tasting on this side and on that. It coils and uncoils, it wriggles about, it sways to and fro. It is happy. So am I, to see it satisfied and glistening with health. I shall be able to watch its progress to the end. In a couple of months’ time, now ascending, now descending through its column of food and stopping at the best places, it is a handsome larva, well-shaped, neither fat nor spare, not unlike the Cetonia-grub in appearance. Its hind-legs have none of the shocking irregularity that used to surprise me so greatly when I was studying the family of the Geotrupes. The grub of the last-named has hind-legs weaker than the rest, twisted, unfit for walking and turned over on its back. It is born a cripple. The grub of the Minotaur, despite the close analogy between the two dung-workers, is exempt from this infirmity. Its third pair of legs is no less accurate in shape and arrangement than the two other pairs. Why is the Geotrupes knock-kneed at birth and his close kinsman perfect? This is one of those little secrets of which it is only fitting that we should know how to admit our ignorance. The larval stage ends in the last days of August. Under the grub’s digestive efforts, the food-column, while retaining its form and its dimensions, has been converted into a paste whose origin it would be impossible to recognize. There is not a crumb left in which the microscope can detect a fibre. The Sheep had already divided the vegetable matter very finely; the grub, an incomparable triturator, has taken the aforesaid matter and subdivided it yet further, grinding it after a fashion. In this way it extracts and uses the nutritive particles of which the Sheep’s fourfold stomach is unable to take advantage. To dig itself a cell in this unctuous mass ought, according to our logic, to suit the grub, desirous of a yielding mattress for the nymph to lie on. We are mistaken in our suppositions. The grub retreats to the lower end of its column, retires into the sand where the hatching took place and there makes itself a hard, rough cavity. This aberration, which takes no account of the future nymph, and its delicate skin, would be likely to surprise us if the homely dwelling were not subjected to improvement.