Some other victim of the agricultural labours of spring, a Shrew-mouse, Field-mouse, Mole, Frog, Adder, or Lizard, will provide us with the most vigorous and famous of these expurgators of the soil. This is the Burying-beetle, the Necrophorus, so different from the cadaveric mob in dress and habits. In honour of his exalted functions he exhales an odour of musk; he bears a red tuft at the tip of his antennae; his breast is covered with nankeen; and across his wing-cases he wears a double, scalloped scarf of vermillion. An elegant, almost sumptuous costume, very superior to that of the others, but yet lugubrious, as befits your undertaker's man. He is no anatomical dissector, cutting his subject open, carving its flesh with the scalpel of his mandibles; he is literally a grave-digger, a sexton. While the others--Silphae, Dermestes, Cellar-beetles--gorge themselves with the exploited flesh, without, of course, forgetting the interests of the family, he, a frugal eater, hardly touches his find on his own account. He buries it entire, on the spot, in a cellar where the thing, duly ripened, will form the diet of his larvae. He buries it in order to establish his progeny. This hoarder of dead bodies, with his stiff and almost heavy movements, is astonishingly quick at storing away wreckage. In a shift of a few hours, a comparatively enormous animal, a Mole, for instance, disappears, engulfed by the earth. The others leave the dried, emptied carcass to the air, the sport of the winds for months on end; he, treating it as a whole, makes a clean job of things at once. No visible trace of his work remains but a tiny hillock, a burial-mound, a tumulus. With his expeditious method, the Necrophorus is the first of the little purifiers of the fields. He is also one of the most celebrated of insects in respect of his psychical capacities. This undertaker is endowed, they say, with intellectual faculties approaching to reason, such as are not possessed by the most gifted of the Bees and Wasps, the collectors of honey or game. He is honoured by the two following anecdotes, which I quote from Lacordaire's[5] _Introduction a l'entomologie_, the only general treatise at my disposal: "Clairville," says the author, "reports that he saw a _Necrophorus vespillo_, who, wishing to bury a dead Mouse and finding the soil on which the body lay too hard, went to dig a hole at some distance, in soil more easily displaced. This operation completed, he attempted to bury the Mouse in the cavity, but, not succeeding, he flew away and returned a few moments later, accompanied by four of his fellows, who assisted him to move the Mouse and bury it." [Footnote 5: Jean Theodore Lacordaire (1801-1870), author of _Genera des coleopteres_ (1854-1876) and of the work quoted above (1837-1839).--_Translator's Note_.] In such actions, Lacordaire adds, we cannot refuse to admit the intervention of reason.