I would defy the greatest expert to tell me, simply from the insect's appearance and without learning the facts by experiment, the manner of industry to which _Phanaeus Milon_, for instance, devotes himself. Remembering the Onites, who are very similar in shape and who manipulate stercoral matter, he would look upon the foreigner as another manipulator of dung. He would be mistaken: the analysis of the meat-pie has told us so. The shape does not make the real Dung-beetle. I have in my collection a magnificent insect from Cayenne, known to the nomenclators as _Phanaeus festivus_, a brilliant Beetle in festive attire, charming, beautiful, glorious to behold. How well he deserves his name! His colouring is a metallic red, which flashes with the fire of rubies; and he sets off this splendid jewellery by studding his corselet with great spots of glowing black. What trade do you follow under your torrid sun, O gleaming carbuncle? Have you the bucolic tastes of your rival in finery, the Splendid Phanaeus? Can you be a knacker, a worker in putrid sausage-meat, like _Phanaeus Milon_? Vainly do I consider you and marvel at you: your equipment tells me nothing. No one who has not seen you at work is capable of naming your profession. I leave the matter to the conscientious masters, to the experts who are able to say: I do not know. They are scarce, in our days; but after all there are some, less eager than others in the unscrupulous struggle which creates upstarts. This excursion to the pampas leans to one conclusion of some importance. We find in another hemisphere, with reversed seasons, a different climate and dissimilar biological conditions, a series of true dung-workers whose habits and industry repeat, in their essential facts, the habits and industry of our own. Prolonged investigations, made at first hand and not, like mine, at second hand, would add greatly to the list of similar workers. And it is not only in the grassy plains of La Plata that the modellers of dung proceed according to the principles usual over here; we may say, without fear of being mistaken, that the magnificent Copres of Ethiopia and the big Sacred Beetles of Senegambia work exactly like our own.