When placed on burning charcoal, this double-bellied gourd turns black, becomes covered with shiny warts that look like jet beads, emits a smell like that of grilled meat and leaves a residue of red clay. It is therefore formed of clay and sanies. Moreover, the paste is sprinkled with little scraps of dead flesh. At the smaller end is the egg, in a chamber with a very porous roof, to allow the air to enter. The little undertaker has something better to show than her double sausage. Like the Bison Onitis, the Sisyphus and the Lunary Copris, she enjoys the collaboration of the father. Each burrow contains several cradles, with the father and mother invariably present. What are the two inseparables doing? They are watching their brood and, by dint of assiduous repairs, keeping the little sausages, which are in constant danger of cracking or drying up, in good condition. The magic carpet which has allowed me to take this trip to the pampas supplies me with nothing else worth noting. Besides, the New World is poor in pill-rollers and cannot compare with Senegambia and the regions of the Upper Nile, that paradise of Copres and Sacred Beetles. Nevertheless we owe it one precious detail: the group which is commonly known by the name of Dung-beetles is divided into two corporations, one of which exploits dung, the other corpses. With very few exceptions, the latter has no representatives in our climes. I have mentioned the little Oval Onthophagus as a lover of carrion corruption; and my memory does not recall any other example of the kind. We have to go to the other world to find such tastes. Can it be that there was a schism among the primitive scavengers and that these, at first addicted to the same industry, afterwards divided the hygienic task, some burying the ordure of the intestines, the others the ordure of death? Can the comparative frequency of this or the other provender have brought about the formation of two trade-guilds? That is not admissible. Life is inseparable from death; wherever a corpse is, there also, scattered at random, are the digestive residues of the live animal; and the pill-roller is not fastidious as to the origin of this waste matter. Dearth therefore plays no part in the schism, if the true dung-worker has actually turned himself into an undertaker, or if the undertaker has turned himself into a true dung-worker. At no time have materials for the work been lacking in either case. Nothing, not the scarcity of provisions, nor the climate, nor the reversed seasons, would explain this strange divergence. We must perforce regard it as a matter of original specialities, of tastes not acquired but prescribed from the beginning. And what prescribed them was anything but the structure.