The insect goes back to the cut loaf and helps itself to a second slice, which, by the same manipulations as before, becomes an ovoid sheltering an egg. The surplus suffices for a third ovoid, pretty often even for a fourth. I have never seen this number exceeded when the mother had at her disposal only the materials which she had heaped up in the burrow. The laying is over. Here is the mother in her retreat, which is almost filled by the three or four cradles standing one against the other, with their poles jutting upwards. What will she do now? Go away, no doubt, to recruit her strength a little out of doors, after a prolonged fast. He who thinks this is mistaken. She remains. And yet she has eaten nothing since she came underground, taking good care not to touch the loaf, which, divided into equal portions, will be the food of the family. The Copris is touchingly scrupulous in the matter of the inheritance: she is a devoted mother, who braves hunger lest her offspring should starve. She braves it for a second reason: to mount guard around the cradles. From the end of June onwards, the burrows are hard to find, because the mole-hills disappear through the action of some storm, or the wind, or the feet of the passers-by. The few which I succeed in discovering always contain the mother dozing beside a group of pills, in each of which a grub, now nearing its complete development, feasts on the fat of the land. My dark apparatus, flower-pots filled with fresh sand, confirm what the fields have taught me. Buried with provisions in the first fortnight in May, the mothers do not reappear on the surface, under the glass lid. They keep hidden in the burrow after laying their eggs; they spend the sultry dog-days with their ovoids, watching them, no doubt, as the glass jars, rid of subterranean mysteries, tell us. They come up again at the time of the first autumnal rains, in September. But by then the new generation has attained its perfect form. The mother, therefore, enjoys underground that rare privilege for the insect, the delight of knowing her family; she hears her sons scratching at the shell to obtain their liberty; she is present at the bursting of the casket which she has fashioned so conscientiously; maybe she helps the exhausted weaklings, if the ground have not been cool enough to soften their cells. Mother and progeny leave the subsoil together and arrive together at the autumn banquets, when the sun is mild and the ovine manna plentiful along the paths. THE ONTHOPHAGI CHAPTER VI THE ONTHOPHAGI After the notabilities of the Dung-beetle tribe, there remain, in the very limited radius of my research, the small fry of the Onthophagi, of whom I could gather a dozen different species around my house. What will these little ones teach us?