What a mistake was mine! I am not too greatly thunderstruck, however: in the exercise of its defensive skill, the animal often employs methods which our imagination would not dare to contemplate. It is not the head that is presented at the breach, after the preliminary twisting: it is the opposite extremity. The grub does not bring an armful of its alimentary dough, gathered by scraping the walls: it excretes upon the aperture to be closed; a much more economical proceeding. Sparingly measured out, the rations must not be wasted: there is just enough to live upon. Besides, the cement is of better quality; it soon sets. Lastly, the urgent repairs are more quickly effected, if the intestines lend their kindly aid. They do, in point of fact, and to an astonishing degree. Five, six times in succession and oftener, I remove the fixed plug; and, time after time, the mortar discharges a copious ejaculation from its apparently inexhaustible reservoir, which is ever at the mason’s service, without an interval for rest. The grub is already beginning to resemble the Sacred Beetle, whose stercoral prowess we know: it is a past master in the art of dunging. It possesses above any other animal in the world an intestinal deftness which anatomy will undertake to explain to us, partly, later on. The plasterer and the mason have their trowels. In the same way, the grub, that zealous repairer of breaches made in its home, has a trowel of its own. The last segment is lopped off slantwise, and carries on its dorsal surface a sort of inclined plane, a broad disk surrounded by a fleshy pad. In the middle of the disk is a gash, forming the cementing-aperture. Behold the fair-sized trowel, flattened out and supplied with a rim to prevent the compressed matter from flowing away in useless waste. As soon as the plastic gush is laid down in a lump, the levelling and compressing instrument sets to work to introduce the cement well into the irregularities of the breach, to push it right through the thickness of the ruined portion, to give it consistency, to level it. After this stroke of the trowel, the grub turns round: it comes and bangs and pushes the work with its wide forehead and improves it with the tip of its mandibles. Wait a quarter of an hour and the repaired portion will be as firm as the rest of the shell, so quickly does the cement set. Outside, the repairs are betrayed by the rough prominence of the material forced outwards, which remains inaccessible to the trowel; but, inside, there is no trace of the breakage: the usual polish has been restored at the injured spot. A plasterer stopping a hole in a wall in our rooms could produce no better piece of work.