Nor do the worm’s talents end here. With its cement, it becomes a mender of pots and pans. Let me explain. I have compared the outside of the pear, which, when pressed and dried, becomes a strong shell, with a jar containing fresh food. In the course of my excavations, sometimes made on difficult soil, I have happened occasionally to break this jar with an ill-directed blow of the trowel. I have collected the potsherds, pieced them together, after restoring the worm to its place, and kept the whole thing in one by wrapping it in a bit of old newspaper. On reaching home, I have found the pear put out of shape, no doubt, and seamed with scars, but just as solid as ever. During the walk, the grub had restored its ruined dwelling to condition. Cement injected into the cracks joined the pieces together; inside, a thick plastering strengthened the inner wall, so much so that the repaired shell was quite as good as the untouched shell, but for the irregularity of the outside. In its artistically-mended stronghold, the worm found the peace essential to its existence. Let us now give a brief description of the grub, without stopping to enumerate the articulations of the palpi and antennæ, irksome details of no immediate interest. It is a fat worm and has a fine, white skin, with pale slate-coloured reflections proceeding from the digestive organs, which are visible transparently. Bent into a broken arch or hook, it is not unlike the grub of the Cockchafer, but has a much more ungainly figure, for, on its back, at the sudden bend of the hook, the third, fourth and fifth segments of the abdomen swell into an enormous protuberance, a tumour, a pouch so prominent that the skin seems on the point of bursting under the pressure of the contents. This is the animal’s most striking feature: the fact that it carries a wallet. The head is small in proportion to the size of the grub, slightly convex and bright red, studded with a few pale bristles. The legs are fairly long and sturdy, ending in a pointed tarsus. The grub does not use them as limbs of progression. Taken from its shell and placed upon the table, it struggles in clumsy contortions without succeeding in shifting its position; and the cripple betrays its anxiety by repeated eruptions of its mortar. Let us also mention the terminal trowel, the last segment lopped into a slanting disk and rimmed with a fleshy pad. In the centre of this inclined plane is the open stercoral gash, which thus, by a very unusual inversion, occupies the upper surface. An enormous hump and a trowel: that gives you the animal in two words.