And these cripples form a race; they spend the bad season underground; they wake up in the spring, return to the surface and take part, for a second, sometimes even for a third time, in life’s great festival. Their descendants ought to profit by an improvement which has been renewed year by year, ever since Scarabs came into the world, and which has certainly had time to become fixed and to convert itself into a settled habit. But they do nothing of the sort. Every Sacred Beetle that breaks his shell, with not one exception, is endowed with the four tarsi prescribed by rule. Well, theorists, what say you to that? For the two front legs, you offer a sort of an explanation; and the four others contradict you flatly. Have you not been taking fancy for truth? Then what is the cause of the original mutilation of the Scarab? I will confess plainly that I know nothing at all about it. Nevertheless, those two maimed members are very strange: so strange, in the endless order of insects, that they have exposed the masters, the greatest masters, to lamentable blunders. Let us listen first to Latreille, [12] the prince of descriptive entomologists. In his account of the insects which ancient Egypt painted or carved upon her monuments, [13] he quotes the writings of Horapollo, an unique document which has been preserved for us in the papyri for the glorification of the sacred insect: “One would feel tempted at first,” he says, “to set down as fiction what Horapollo says of the number of that Scarab’s fingers. According to him, there are thirty. Nevertheless, this computation, judged by the way in which he looks at the tarsus, is perfectly correct, for this part consists of five joints; and, if we take each of them for a finger, the legs being six in number and each ending in a five-jointed tarsus, the Sacred Beetles obviously have thirty fingers.” Forgive me, illustrious master: the total number of joints is but twenty, because the two front legs are devoid of tarsi. You have been carried away by the general law. Losing sight of the singular exception, which was certainly known to you, you said thirty, swayed for a moment by that overwhelmingly positive law. Yes, the exception was known to you, so much so that the figure of the Sacred Beetle accompanying your account, a figure drawn from the insect and not from the Egyptian monuments, is irreproachably accurate: it has no tarsi on its fore-legs. The blunder is excusable, in view of the strangeness of the exception.