This fleeting organ, which disappears without leaving even an excrescence, this temporary horn at a spot destined in the end to be unmailed, gives rise to a few reflections. The Dung-beetles, those placid creatures, generally favour a warlike harness: they love outlandish weapons, halberds, spears, grappling-irons, scimitars. Let us hurriedly recall the horn of the Spanish Copris. No Rhinoceros in the Indian jungles boasts one to compare with it upon his nose. Broad at the base, pointed at the tip, curved like a bow, when the head is lifted the horn bends back till it touches the keel of the obliquely truncated corselet. It might be a harpoon intended for ripping up some monster. Remember also the Minotaur, [46] who looks as though he were going to spit his foe with his sheaf of three couched lances, and the Lunary Copris, horned on the forehead, armed with a pike on each shoulder and wearing a corselet notched with little crescents that remind us of the short curved knife of the pork-butcher. The Onthophagi have a most varied arsenal. One, O. taurus, wears the Bull’s crescent-shaped horns; a second, O. vacca, prefers a wide, short blade, with its point sheathed in a notch in the corselet; a third, O. furcatus, wields a trident; yet another, O. nuchicornis, owns a dagger with a winged handle; and again O. cænobita sports a cavalryman’s sword. The worst-equipped crown their foreheads with a transversal crest, with a pair of cornicles. What is the good of this panoply? Are we to look upon it as a set of tools, pickaxes, mattocks, pitchforks, spades, levers, which the insect might ply in digging? By no means. The only industrial implements are the forehead and the legs, especially the fore-legs. I have never discovered a Dung-beetle of any sort making use of her weapons either to excavate her burrow or to mix her provisions. Besides, as a rule, the direction of the things alone would prevent their employment as utensils. For a digging-job performed forwards, what would you have a Spanish Copris do with her pickaxe, which points backwards? The powerful horn does not face the obstacle attacked; it turns its back upon it. The Minotaur’s trident, though arranged in a suitable direction, likewise remains unemployed. When deprived of this armour with a clip of my scissors, the Beetle loses none of his mining-talents; he goes underground quite as easily as his unmutilated fellow. And here is an even more conclusive argument: the mothers, to whose lot the labour of nest-building falls; the mothers, those conspicuous workers, are deprived of these horny growths or possess them only on a greatly reduced scale. They simplify the armour, or reject it entirely, because it is more of an impediment than an assistance to their work.