Now this wonderful metamorphosis of ordure has to be accomplished in the shortest possible time: the public health demands it. And so the Scarab is endowed with matchless digestive powers. Once housed in the company of food, he goes on eating and digesting, day and night, until the provisions are exhausted. There is no difficulty in proving this. Open the cell to which the Dung-beetle has retired from the world. At any hour of the day, we shall find the insect seated at table and, behind it, still hanging to it, a continuous cord, roughly coiled like a pile of cables. One can easily guess, without embarrassing explanations, what this cord represents. The great ball of dung passes mouthful by mouthful through the Beetle’s digestive canals, yielding up its nutritive essences, and reappears at the opposite end spun into a cord. Well, this unbroken cord, which is always found hanging from the aperture of the draw-plate, is ample proof, without further evidence, that the digestive processes go on without ceasing. When the provisions are coming to an end, the cable unrolled is of an astounding length: it can be measured in feet. Where shall we find the like of this stomach which, to avoid any loss when life’s balance-sheet is made out, feasts for a week or a fortnight, without stopping, on such distasteful fare? When the whole ball has passed through the machine, the hermit comes back to the daylight, tries his luck afresh, finds another patch of dung, fashions a new ball and starts eating again. This life of pleasure lasts for a month or two, from May to June; then, with the coming of the fierce heat beloved of the Cicadæ, [11] the Sacred Beetles take up their summer quarters and bury themselves in the cool earth. They reappear with the first autumn rains, less numerous and less active than in spring, but now seemingly absorbed in the most important work of all, the future of the species. CHAPTER II THE SACRED BEETLE IN CAPTIVITY If we ransack the books for information about the habits of the dung-rollers in general and the Sacred Beetle in particular, we find that modern science still clings to some of the beliefs which were current in the days of the Pharaohs. We are told that the ball which is bumped across the fields contains an egg, that it is a cradle in which the future larva is to find both board and lodging. The parents roll it over hilly country to make it nice and round; and, when jolts and jars and tumbles down steep places have shaped it properly, they bury it and abandon it to the care of that great incubator, the earth.