We have seen her indefatigably stopping the holes caused by my indiscretion; we have seen her, often enough, restoring for the grub’s greater safety the pill which I had opened with my penknife. Fitted by instinct for repairing and building, why should she not be fitted for demolishing? However, I will make no assertions, for I have been unable to see. The favourable conditions always escaped me: I came either too late or too early. And then let us not forget that the admission of light usually interrupts the work. In the darkness of the sand-filled pots, the liberation must take place in the same way. All that I am able to witness is the insect’s emergence above ground. Attracted by the smell of fresh provisions which I have served on the threshold of the burrow, the newly-released family emerge gradually, accompanied by the mother, wander round for a time under the pane of glass and then attack the pile. There are three or four of them, five at most. The sons are easily recognized by the greater length of their horns; but there is nothing to distinguish the daughters from the mother. For that matter, the same confusion prevails among themselves. An abrupt change of attitude has taken place; and the erstwhile devoted mother is now utterly indifferent to the welfare of her emancipated family. Henceforward each looks after his own home and his own interests. They no longer know one another. In the receptacles which are not moistened by artificial showers, things come to a miserable end. The dry shell, almost as hard as an apricot- or peach-stone, offers indomitable resistance. The insect’s legs manage to grate off barely so much as a pinch of dust. I hear the tools rasping against the unyielding wall; then silence follows and not a prisoner survives to tell the tale. The mother too perishes in that home which has remained dry when the season for dryness has passed. The Copris, like the Sacred Beetle, needs the rain to soften the granite shell. To return to the liberated ones. When the emergence is effected, the mother, we were saying, ceases to trouble about them. Her present indifference, however, must not make us forget the wonderful care which she has lavished for four months on end. Outside the Social Hymenoptera—Bees, Wasps, Ants and so on—who spoon-feed their young and bring them up according to scrupulously hygienic methods, where in the insect world shall we find another example of such maternal self-abnegation, of such wise and tender care for the offspring? I know of none. How did the Copris acquire this lofty quality, which I would readily call a moral quality, if morality and nescience had any point of contact? How did she learn to surpass in tenderness the Bee and the Ant, both so greatly renowned? I say surpass. The mother Bee, indeed, is simply a germ-factory, a prodigiously fertile factory, I admit. She lays eggs; and that is all. The family is brought up by others, real sisters of charity these, vowed to celibacy.