The grub is hatched in about a week; and a strange and paradoxical little creature it is. On its back it has an enormous sugar-loaf hump, the weight of which overbalances it each time that it tries to stand on its legs and walk. At every moment it staggers and falls under the burden of the hunch. The Sacred Beetle’s larva showed us long ago a knapsack which was a storehouse of cement to stop up the accidental cracks in the provision-box and protect the food from drying too rapidly. The Onthophagus’ grub exaggerates a similar warehouse to the utmost degree; it makes a cone-shaped monument of it, so extravagant and grotesque as to border on caricature. Is it some mad masquerader’s joke or a rational deformity which will have its uses later? The future will tell us. Without saying anything more about it, for lack of words to give a picture of anything so extraordinary, I will refer the reader to the grub of the Oniticellus, which I sketched in an earlier chapter. [65] The two hunchbacks are very much alike. Unable to keep its hump upright, the grub of the Onthophagus lies down on its side in the cell and licks the cream all around it. There is cream everywhere, on the ceiling, on the walls, on the floor. As soon as one spot is thoroughly bared, the consumer moves a little way on with the help of its well-shaped legs; it capsizes again and starts licking again. As the cabin is large and plentifully supplied, the patent-food diet lasts some time. The fat babies of the Geotrupes, the Copris and the Sacred Beetle finish at one brief sitting the dainty wherewith their narrow lodge is hung, a dainty frugally served and just sufficient to whet the appetite and prepare the stomach for coarser fare; but the Onthophagus’ grub, that puny dwarf, has enough to last it for a week and more. The spacious birth-chamber, which is out of all proportion to the nurseling’s size, has permitted this wastefulness. At last the real loaf is attacked. In about a month everything is consumed, except the wall of the sack. And now the splendid part played by the hump stands revealed. Glass tubes, which I had got ready in anticipation, allow me to watch the grub at work. Growing plumper and plumper and more and more humpbacked, it withdraws to one end of the cell, which has become a crumbling ruin. Here it builds a casket in which the transformation will take place. Its materials are the digestive residuum, converted into mortar and heaped up in the hump. The stercoral architect is about to construct a masterpiece of elegance out of its own ordure, held in reserve in that receptacle.