Let us dismiss the revolution of the moon, the conjunction of the sun and moon, the birth of the world and other astrological absurdities, but remember this: the twenty-eight days of incubation required by the ball underground, the twenty-eight days during which the Scarab is born to life. Let us also remember the indispensable intervention of water to bring the insect out of its burst shell. These are precise facts, falling within the domain of true science. Are they imaginary? Are they real? The question deserves investigation. Antiquity knew nothing of the wonders of the metamorphosis. To antiquity, a grub was a worm born of corruption. The poor creature had no future to lift it from its abject condition: as worm it appeared and as worm it had to disappear. It was not a mask under which a superior form of life was being elaborated; it was a definite entity, supremely contemptible and doomed soon to return to the rottenness that gave it birth. To the Egyptian author, therefore, the Scarab’s larva was unknown. And if, by chance, he had had before his eyes the shell of the insect inhabited by a fat, big-bellied worm, he would never have suspected in the foul and ugly animal the sober beauty of the future Scarab. According to the ideas of the time, ideas long maintained, the sacred insect had neither father nor mother: an error excusable in the midst of the simplicity of the ancients, for here the two sexes are outwardly indistinguishable. It was born of the ordure that formed its ball; and from its birth dated the appearance of the nymph, that amber gem displaying, in a perfectly recognizable form, the features of the full-grown insect. In the eyes of all antiquity, the Sacred Beetle begins to be born to life at the moment when he can be recognized, not before; else we should have the as yet unsuspected worm of affiliation. The twenty-eight days, therefore, during which, as Horapollo tells us, the offspring of the insect quickens, represent the nymphal phase. This period has been the object of special attention in my studies. It varies, but within narrow limits. The notes taken mention thirty-three days as the longest duration and twenty-one as the shortest. The average, supplied by a score of observations, is twenty-eight days. This identical number twenty-eight, this number of four weeks appears as such and oftener than the others. Horapollo spoke truly: the real insect takes life in the interval of a lunar month.