So rough an upbringing has always seemed to me improbable. How could a Beetle’s egg, that delicate thing, so sensitive under its soft wrapper, survive the shaking-up which it would undergo in that rolling cradle? In the germ is a spark of life which the least touch, the veriest trifle can extinguish. Are we to believe that the parents would deliberately bump it over hill and dale for hours? No, that is not the way in which things happen; a mother does not subject her offspring to the torture of a Regulus’ barrel. However, something more than logic was needed to make a clean sweep of accepted opinion. I therefore opened some hundreds of the pellets that were being rolled along by the Dung-beetles; I opened others which I took from holes dug before my eyes; and never once did I find either a central cell or an egg in those pellets. They were invariably rough lumps of food, fashioned in haste, with no definite internal structure, merely so much provender with which the Beetle retires to spend a few days in undisturbed gluttony. The dung-rollers covet and steal them from one another with a keenness which they would certainly not display in robbing one another of new family charges. For Sacred Beetles to go stealing eggs would be an absurdity, each of them having quite enough to do in securing the future of her own. So this point is henceforward settled beyond question: the pellets which we see the Dung-beetles rolling never contain eggs. My first attempt to solve the knotty problem of the larva’s rearing involved the construction of a spacious vivarium, with an artificial soil of sand and a constant supply of provisions. Into this cage I put some twenty Sacred Beetles, together with Copres, Gymnopleuri and Onthophagi. No entomological experiment ever cost me so many disappointments. The difficulty was the renewing of the food supply. Now my landlord owned a stable and a Horse. I gained the confidence of his man, who at first laughed at my proposals, but soon allowed himself to be convinced by the sight of silver. Each of my insects’ breakfasts came to twenty-five centimes. I am sure that no Beetle budget ever amounted to such a sum before. Well, I can still see and I shall always see Joseph, after grooming the Horse of a morning, put his head over the garden-wall and, making a speaking-trumpet of his hand, call ‘Hi!’ to me in a whisper. I would hurry up to receive a potful of droppings. Caution was necessary on both sides, as the sequel will show you. One day the master happened to come up just when the transfer was being made, and took it into his head that all his manure was going over the wall and that what he wanted for his cabbages went to grow my verbenas and narcissi. Vainly I tried to explain: he thought that I was being funny. Poor Joseph was scolded, called all manner of names and threatened with dismissal if it happened again. It didn’t.