He now becomes a pork-butcher. With his toothed knife, he carves, he saws some tiny shreds from the rotten animal; he tears off, cuts away what he deems best suited to the grub’s entertainment. He collects all these fragments and mixes them with choice loam in the spots where the sanies abounds. The whole, cunningly kneaded and softened, becomes a ball obtained on the spot, without any rolling process, in the same way as the globe of the other pill-manufacturers. Let us add that this ball, a ration calculated by the needs of the grub, is very nearly constant in size, whatever the thickness of the final calabash. The sausage-meat is now ready. It is set in place in the wide-open clay bowl. Loosely packed, without compression, the food will remain free, will not stick to its wrapper. Next, the potter’s work is renewed. The insect presses the thick lips of the clayey cup, rolls them out and applies them to the forcemeat preparation, which is eventually contained by a thin partition at the top and by a thick layer every elsewhere. A large circular pad is left on the top partition, which is slender in view of the weakness of the grub that is to perforate it later, when making for the provisions. Manipulated in its turn, this pad is converted into a hemispherical hollow, in which the egg is forthwith laid. The work is finished by rolling out and joining the edges of the little crater, which closes and becomes the hatching-chamber. Here, especially, a delicate dexterity becomes essential. At the time that the nipple of the calabash is being shaped, the insect, while packing the material, must leave the little channel which is to form the ventilating-shaft, following the line of the axis. This narrow conduit, which an ill-calculated pressure might stop up beyond hope of remedy, seems to me extremely difficult to obtain. The most skilful of our potters could not manage it without the aid of a needle, which he would afterwards withdraw. The insect, a sort of jointed automaton, obtains its channel through the massive nipple of the gourd without so much as a thought. If it did give it a thought, it would not succeed. The calabash is made: there remains the decoration. This is the work of patient after-touches which perfect the curves and leave on the soft loam a series of stippled impressions similar to those which the potter of prehistoric days distributed with the end of his thumb over his big-bellied jars. That ends the work. The insect will begin all over again under a fresh carcass; for each burrow has one calabash and no more, even as with the Sacred Beetle and her pears. THE GEOTRUPES CHAPTER IX THE GEOTRUPES: THE PUBLIC HEALTH