The shaft indeed is open throughout its length. Moreover, to prevent the crumbling of the walls which would result from frequent journeys, the sides are plastered with stucco from end to end. This coat is made of the same material as the puddings and is more than a twenty-fifth of an inch thick. It is continuous and fairly even, without having too elaborate a finish. It keeps the surrounding earth in place, so much so that big fragments of the tunnel can be removed without losing their shape. In the hamlets on the Alps, the south fronts of the buildings are coated with Cow-dung, which, after drying in the summer sun, becomes the winter fuel. The Bison knows this pastoral method, but practises it with another object: he hangs his house with manure to keep it from crumbling. The father might well be entrusted with this work in the intervals of rest which the mother leaves him while she is busy in the ticklish work of making her pudding layer by layer. The Geotrupes, by way of yet another industrial resemblance, has already shown us a similar consolidating plaster. Hers, it is true, is less regular and less complete. After being ousted by my curiosity, the Bison couple set to work again and, by the middle of July, supplied me with three more puddings, making a total of eight. This time I find my two captives dead, one on the surface, the other in the ground. Can it be an accident? Or is it not more likely that the Bison constitutes an exception to the longevity of the Scarabs, Copres and others, who behold their offspring and even fly away to their second wedding in the following spring? I incline to the belief that we come back here to the general insect law of a short life deprived of the chief joy of parenthood, the sight of one’s children, for no regrettable incident happened, so far as I know, in the vivarium. If I am right in my conjectures, why does the Bison, though a near kinsman of the Copris, who attains a green old age, die so quickly, like the common herd, once the future of his family is assured? Here again we have an unsolved mystery. A rapid sketch of the larva is preferable to long descriptions of its jaws and palpi, which make dull reading. I shall have said enough, I think, on the subject if I mention that it is bent into a crook, that it carries a knapsack on its back, that it is a quick evacuator and that it is clever at stopping up any cracks in the dwelling: characteristics and talents which are a general rule among the Dung-beetles. In August, when the pudding has been consumed in the middle and has become something of a ruin, the grub retires to the lower end and here isolates itself from the remainder of the cavity by means of a spherical enclosure, of which the mortar-bag supplies the materials.