Still, though he refused to display his talents on my behalf, his very presence on the top of the ovoids betrays them. Not for nothing was he in that uncomfortable attitude, so ill-adapted to an idler’s slumbers. He was then watching like his companion, touching up the damaged parts, listening through the walls of the shells to find out how the youngsters were progressing. The little that I saw assures me that the father almost rivals the mother in domestic solicitude until the family is finally emancipated. The offspring gain in numbers by this paternal devotion. In the Spanish Copris’ mansion, where the mother alone resides, we find four nurselings at most, often two or three, sometimes only one. In that of the Lunary Copris, where the two sexes cohabit and help each other, we count as many as eight, twice the largest population of the other. The hard-working father enjoys a magnificent proof of his influence upon the fate of the household. Apart from labour in common, this prosperity demands another condition without which the zeal of the couple would be ineffectual. Before everything, if you want a big family you must have enough to feed it on. Remember the victualling methods of the Copris-tribe generally. They do not, like the pill-rollers, go gathering here and there a booty which is rounded into a ball and subsequently rolled to the burrow; they settle immediately underneath the heap which they find, and there, without leaving the threshold of the house, carve themselves slices which they carry down singly to their store until they have collected enough. The Spanish Copris, at least in my neighbourhood, handles the product of the Sheep. It is of high quality, but not plentiful, even when the purveyor’s intestines are in their most generous mood. The whole of it, therefore, is packed into the cavern and the insect does not come out again, being kept underground by family-cares, even though there be but one youngster to attend to. The niggardly morsel as a rule supplies material only for two or three larvæ. Consequently the family is a small one, through the difficulty in procuring provisions. The Lunary Copris works under different conditions. His part of the country provides the Cow-clap, that rich patch of dung in which the insect finds inexhaustible supplies of the food needed by a flourishing offspring. This prosperity is assisted by the size of the abode, whose ceiling, with its exceptional breadth, is able to shelter a number of pills that would never fit into the Spanish Copris’ much less roomy burrow.