Let us recapitulate these habits before passing on to the contents of the burrow. The father works just as hard as the mother at extracting and modelling the lump that is to constitute a larva’s dowry; he shares in the carting, even though he plays a secondary part; he keeps watch over the loaf when the mother is absent looking for a spot at which to dig the burrow; he helps in the work of excavation; he carries outside the rubbish from the cavity; and lastly, to crown these good qualities, he is to a large extent faithful to his spouse. The Scarabæus displays some of these characteristics. He readily helps in manipulating the pill; when it has to be carted, he takes his place in a team of two, one pulling and one pushing. But let me repeat that the motive of this mutual service is selfishness: the two fellow-workers labour and cart the lump only for their own purpose. To them it is a gala cake and nothing more. In that part of her work which concerns the family, the Scarabæus mother has no assistant. Alone she rounds her sphere, extracts it from the pile, rolls it backwards by herself in the head-downward posture adopted by the male of the Sisyphus couple; alone she digs her burrow; alone she stores away its contents. Heedless of the laying mother and the brood, the other sex does not assist at all in the exhausting task. How different from the pigmy pill-roller! It is time to inspect the burrow. At no great depth we find a tiny niche, just large enough to allow the mother to move around her work. The smallness of the chamber tells us that the father cannot remain there for long. When the studio is ready, he must go away to leave the sculptress room to turn. We have already seen him coming back to the surface some time before the mother. The contents of the cellar consist of a single pill, a masterpiece of plastic art. It is a copy of the Sacred Beetle’s pear on a very much reduced scale, its smallness making the polish of the surface and the elegance of the curves all the more striking. Its main diameter varies between one-half and three-quarters of an inch. It is the most artistic achievement of the Dung-beetle’s art. But this perfection is of brief duration. Soon the pretty pear is covered with knotty excrescences, black and twisted, which disfigure it with their blotchy lumps. A part of the surface, otherwise intact, disappears beneath an amorphous mass of eruptions. The origin of these ugly warts baffled me at first. I suspected some fungous growth, some Sphæriacea, for instance, recognizable by its black and pimply crust. The larva showed me my mistake.