For that matter, the danger does not last long. The egg yields up the grub in less than a week; and the larva attains its full development within a dozen days or so, if nothing untoward happens. This makes about twenty days in all for the critical period of the Onthophagus and the Oniticellus. What does it matter if the walls of the emptied thimble do dry after that! The nymph will be all the better off in a solid casket, which will easily crumble to bits later, when, with the first September rains, the insect effects its release. In appearance and habits the grub resembles that which the Sacred Beetle and the others have introduced to us. It possesses the same aptitude for defending the cell against the dangerous intrusion of the dry air; the same zeal, the same nimbleness in cementing the least breach with the putty of the intestines; the same knapsack hunching the middle of the back. The grub of the Oniticellus has the most remarkable hump of all. Would you care to have a quick and yet a faithful sketch of it? Draw a short, wrinkled sausage. About the middle of this sausage, on the side, graft an appendix. There you have the beast, in three almost equal parts. The lower portion is the abdomen; the upper, where you are at first inclined to look for the head, so clearly does it appear to be a continuation of the part below, is the hump, the inordinate, extravagant hump, bigger than caricaturist ever dared conceive in the wildest flights of his imagination. It occupies the place which by rights belongs to the chest and head. Then where are these? Thrust aside by the monstrous knapsack, they constitute a lateral appendage, a mere knob. The strange creature bends at right angles under the weight of its hump. When nature goes in for the grotesque, she leaves us behind. Is grotesque the right word? I have seen representations of Monkeys adorned with preposterous noses which Rabelais, for all his inspired vision of the huge, never conceived; and this though he invented the nose ‘like the beak of a limbeck, in every part thereof most variously diapered with the twinkling sparkles of crimson blisters budding forth, and purpled with pimples all enamelled with thick-set wheals of a sanguine colour, bordered with gules.’ [45] I know some who are all scrubby with shock-headed wigs and whiskers and imperials in which every hairy drollery seems to be epitomized; and yet there is not a doubt that noses ‘like the beak of a limbeck’ and bristly faces are highly admired in the simian clan. There is no boundary between the fashionable and the grotesque. It all depends upon the appraiser. If the grub with the outrageous hump were to show itself in public, it would doubtless represent the supreme expression of the beautiful in the eyes of the Oniticellus and the Onthophagus. Because it is a recluse, nobody sees it. Its charms would remain unknown but for the philosophical observer, who says to himself: