The sausages of food prepared by the parents were numerous, in spite of everything, but in a shocking state. Soaked by the rain, drenched to the very centre by continual infiltration, they fell into fragments if I moved them. Nevertheless, each contained, in the tattered chamber beneath it, an egg laid about the end of autumn; and this egg, spared by the ice-cold mud of winter, was so plump, so healthy and glossy, that an imminent hatching seemed evident. What shall I give the grubs when they come out? I dare not count on the remnants of the regulation sausages, reduced to bales of fibre by the rains. As well give the new-born larvæ an old rope’s-end. What is to be done? We will resort to a crazy artifice and serve a dish of our own invention, one absolutely unknown to the Geotrupes. The mess prepared for my larvæ is made of leaves decaying on the ground: hazel-, cherry-, mulberry-, elm-, quince-leaves and others. I steep them in water to soften them and then shred them like fine-cut tobacco. The egg is placed at the bottom of a test-tube; and I pack a column of my vegetable mince-meat on the top. For purposes of comparison, other eggs are similarly lodged, but with a thankless ration of the normal preserves soaked by the rains. Hatching occurs during the first week in March. I have before my eyes, when it leaves the egg, the larva which astonished me so greatly when I first realized, many years ago, that it was a cripple. In once more referring to this strange abnormality, I will confine myself to a few words on the subject of the head, which is remarkably bulky, swollen as it is by the motor muscles of the mandibular shears with broad, flat blades, notched at the tip and bearing a strong spur at the base. It is enough to see this dental armoury to recognize the new-born grub as one that will not object to tackling ligneous fibres. With such a mincing-machine, a bit of straw must be a luxury. I watch the grubs taking their first mouthfuls. I expected to see them hesitating, searching uneasily through these unaccustomed victuals, such as no Geotrupes, it seems to me, can ever have used. Nothing of the sort: this eater of dung-sausages accepts the dead-leaf-sausages off-hand and so enthusiastically that I am convinced at the first trial of the success of my queer experiment. The grub finds before it, to begin with, the main nerve of a leaf. It seizes it, turns it over and over with its palpi and fore-legs and then gently nibbles one end of it. The whole of it goes down. Other morsels follow, large or small indifferently. There is no picking and choosing: what the mandibles encounter they crunch. And this goes on indefinitely, always with an unimpaired appetite, so that the insect attains the perfect stage without a check. When the back is black as ebony and the belly an amethystine violet, I set my Geotrupes at liberty. I am filled with amazement by what he has taught me.