The egg is an ivory globule, departing only slightly from the spherical form and measuring nearly three millimetres [10] in diameter. The hatching takes place twelve days later. The grub is white, bristling with short, sparse hairs. When laid bare and removed from its leaf-mould, it crawls upon its back, that is to say, it possesses the curious method of locomotion characteristic of its race. With its earliest wriggles it proclaims the art of walking on its back, with its legs in the air. Nothing is easier than to rear this grub. A thin box, which hinders evaporation and keeps the provisions fresh, receives the nursling together with a selection of fermented leaves, gathered from the heap of mould. This is enough: my charge thrives and undergoes its transformation in the following year, provided I take care to renew the victuals from time to time. No entomological rearing gives less trouble than that of the Cetonia-larva, with its robust appetite and its vigorous constitution. Its growth is rapid. At the beginning of August, four weeks after hatching, the grub has reached half its final size. The idea occurs to me to estimate its consumption of food by means of the stercoral granules which collect in the box from the time of its first mouthful. I find, 11,978 cubic millimetres; [11] that is to say, in one month the grub has digested a volume of matter equivalent to several thousand times its own initial bulk. The Cetonia-grub is a mill that is always grinding dead vegetable substances into meal; it is a crushing-machine of great efficiency, which night and day, almost all the year round, shreds and powders the matter which fermentation has already reduced to tatters. In the rotting heap the fibres and veins of the leaves would remain intact indefinitely. The grub takes possession of these refractory remnants; with its excellent shears it tears and minces them very small; it dissolves them, reducing them to a paste in the intestines, and adds them, henceforth capable of being used, to the riches of the soil. In the larval stage, the Cetonia is a most active manufacturer of leaf-mould. When the metamorphosis occurs and I review the results of my insect-rearing for the last time, I am shocked by the amount of eating which my gormandizers have done in the course of their lives; it can be measured by the bowlful. The Cetonia-larva is worth attention from another point of view. It is a corpulent grub, an inch long, with a convex back and a flat belly. The dorsal surface is wrinkled with thick folds, on which the sparse hairs stand erect like the bristles of a brush; the ventral surface is smooth, covered with a fine skin, through which the ample wallet of ordure shows as a brown patch. The legs are very well-shaped, but are small, feeble and out of proportion to the rest of the body.