These involuntary intruders, finding themselves very comfortable in the heart of the mass, would themselves make good use of the contemplated pear, much to the detriment of the legitimate consumer. The ball must be purged of this starveling brood. The mother, therefore, destroys it, reduces it to atoms, scrutinizes it. Then, out of the collected remnants, the ball is remade, stripped of its earthy rind. It is dragged underground and becomes an immaculate pear, always excepting the surface touching the soil. Oftener still, the ball is thrust by the mother into the earth of the jar just as I took it from the burrow, with the wrinkled covering which it acquired in rolling across country during the journey from the place where it was found to the spot where the insect intended to use it. In that case, I find it at the bottom of my jar converted into a pear, itself wrinkled and encrusted with earth and sand over the whole of its surface, thus proving that the pear-shaped outline has not demanded a general recasting of the mass, inside as well as out, but has been obtained by simple pressure and by drawing out the neck. This is how, in the vast majority of cases, things happen in the normal state. Almost all the pears which I dig up in the fields are crusted, unpolished, some more, others less. If we put on one side the inevitable encrustations due to the carting across fields, these blemishes would seem to point to a prolonged rolling in the interior of the subterranean manor. The few which I find perfectly smooth, especially those wonderfully neat specimens furnished by my voleries, dispel this mistake entirely. They show us that, with materials collected near at hand and stored away unshaped, the pear is modelled wholly without rolling; they prove to us that, where the others are concerned, the earthy wrinkles of the rind are not the signs of a rolling manipulation at the bottom of the workshop, but simply the marks of a fairly long journey on the surface of the ground. To be present at the construction of the pear is no easy matter: the sombre artist obstinately refuses to do any work as soon as the light reaches her. She needs absolute darkness for her modelling; and I need light if I would see her at work. It is impossible to unite the two conditions. Let us try, nevertheless; let us seize by fragments the truth which hides itself in its fulness.