A glorious beginning! An accidental find procures me, to begin with, the Splendid Phanaeus (_P. splendidulus_), who combines a coppery effulgence with the sparkling green of the emerald. One is quite astonished to see so rich a gem load its basket with ordure. It is the jewel on the dung-hill. The corselet of the male is grooved with a wide hollow and he sports a pair of sharp-edged pinions on his shoulders; on his forehead he plants a horn which vies with that of the Spanish Copris. While equally rich in metallic splendour, his mate has no fantastic embellishments, which are an exclusive prerogative of masculine dandyism among the Dung-beetles of La Plata as among our own. Now what can the gorgeous foreigner do? Precisely what the Lunary Copris[13] does with us. Settling, like the other, under a flat cake of Cow-dung, the South American Beetle kneads egg-shaped loaves underground. Not a thing is forgotten: the round belly with the largest volume and the smallest surface; the hard rind which acts as a preservative against premature desiccation; the terminal nipple where the egg is lodged in a hatching-chamber; and, at the end of the nipple, the felt stopper which admits the air needed by the germ. [Footnote: 13: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_: chap. xvi.--_Translator's Note_.] All these things I have seen here and I see over there, almost at the other end of the world. Life, ruled by inflexible logic, repeats itself in its works, for what is true in one latitude cannot be false in another. We go very far afield in search of a new spectacle to meditate upon; and we have an inexhaustible specimen before our eyes, between the walls of our enclosure. Settled under the sumptuous dish dropped by the Ox, the Phanaeus, one would think, ought to make the very best use of it and to stock her burrow with a number of ovoids, after the example of the Lunary Copris. She does nothing of the sort, preferring to roam from one find to the other and to take from each the wherewithal to model a single pellet, which is left to itself for the soil to incubate. She is not driven to practise economy even when she is working the produce of the Sheep far from the pastures of the Argentine. Can this be because the jewel of the pampas dispenses with the father's collaboration? I dare not follow up the argument, for the Spanish Copris would give me the lie, by showing me the mother occupied alone in settling the family and nevertheless stocking her one pit with a number of pellets. Each has her share of customs the secret of which escapes us. The two next, _Megathopa bicolor_ and _M. intermedia_, have certain points of resemblance with the Sacred Beetle, for whose ebon hue they substitute a blue black. The first besides brightens his corselet with magnificent copper reflections. With their long legs, their forehead with its radiating denticulations and their flattened wing-cases, they are fairly successful smaller editions of the famous pill-roller.