Convex on top and almost flat below, the larva is a semicylinder bent into a hook. There is an entire absence of the hump belonging to the previous Dung-beetles; likewise of any terminal trowel. The plasterer’s art of repairing crevices being unknown here, there is no need for the cement-pot or the spreading-utensil. The creature’s skin is smooth and white, clouded in the hinder half by the dark contents of the intestines. Sparse hairs, some fairly long, others very short, stand up on the median and dorsal region of the segments. They apparently serve to help the grub move about its cell by the mere wriggling of its hinder part. The head is neither big nor small and is pale-yellow in colour; the mandibles are large and brown at the tip. But let us leave these details, which are of no great interest, and say at once that the creature’s prominent characteristic is supplied by its legs. The first two pairs are pretty long, especially for an animal leading a sedentary life in a narrow cabin. They are normally constructed; and it must be their strength that allows the grub to clamber about inside its pudding, converted into a sheath by eating. But the third pair presents a peculiarity of which I know no example elsewhere. The limbs forming this pair are rudimentary legs, crippled from birth, impotent, arrested in their development. They give one the impression of lifeless stumps. Their length is hardly a third of that of the others. More remarkable still, instead of pointing downwards like the normal legs, they shrivel upwards, turning towards the back, and remain indefinitely in that queer attitude, twisted and stiff. I cannot succeed in seeing the animal make the slightest use of them. Nevertheless they show the same joints as the others; but this is all on a greatly reduced scale, pale and inert. In short, a couple of words will distinguish the Geotrupes’ larva without any possibility of confusion: hind-legs atrophied. This feature is so plain, so striking, so extraordinary that the least observant among us cannot mistake it. A grub crippled by nature and so evidently crippled enforces itself on our attention. What do the books say about it? Nothing, so far as I know. The few which I have with me are silent on this point. Mulsant, it is true, described the larva of the Stercoraceous Geotrupes; but he makes no mention of its exceptional structure. In his anxiety to describe the minutest details of the organism, has he lost sight of this monstrosity? Labrum, palpi, antennæ, the number of joints, the hairs: all this is set down and scrutinized; and the lifeless legs reduced to stumps are passed over in silence. Are the experts then so busy with the Gnat that they cannot see the Camel? I give it up.