Supplied with the tools which it possesses, the insect would be capable of obtaining other forms of a less dainty curve than its pear-shaped work. It could, for instance, make the coarse cylinder, the sausage in use among the Geotrupes; simplifying the work to the utmost, it could leave the morsel without any settled form, just as it happened to find it. Things would proceed all the faster and would leave more time for playing in the sun. But no: the Scarab adopts exclusively the sphere, so difficult in its precision; she acts as though she knew the laws of evaporation and geometry from A to Z. It remains for us to examine the neck of the pear. What can be its object, its use? The reply forces itself upon us irresistibly. This neck contains the egg, in the hatching-chamber. Now every germ, whether of plant or animal, needs air, the primary stimulus of life. To admit that vivifying combustible, the air, the shell of a bird’s egg is riddled with an endless number of pores. The pear of the Sacred Beetle may be compared with the egg of the hen. Its shell is the rind, hardened by pressure, with a view to avoiding untimely desiccation; its nutritive mass, its meat, its yolk is the soft ball sheltered under the rind; its air-chamber is the terminal space, the cavity in the neck, where the air envelopes the germ on every side. Where would that germ be better off, for breathing, than in its hatching-chamber projecting into the atmosphere and giving free play to the interchange of gases through its thin and easily penetrable wall and especially through the felt of scrapings that finishes the nipple? In the centre of the mass, on the other hand, aeration is not so easy. The hardened rind does not possess the eggshell’s pores; and the central kernel is formed of compact matter. The air enters it, nevertheless, for presently the worm will be able to live in it, the worm, a robust organism less difficult and nice than the first throbs of life. These conditions, air and warmth, are so fundamental that no Dung-beetle neglects them. The nutritive hoards vary in form, as we shall have occasion to perceive: in addition to the pear, such shapes as the cylinder, the ovoid, the pill and the thimble are adopted, according to the species of the manipulator; but, amid this diversity of outline, one feature of the first importance remains constant, which is the egg lodged in a hatching-chamber close to the surface, providing an excellent means for the easy access of air and warmth. And the most gifted in this delicate art is the Sacred Beetle with her pear.