The time has come for retiring with the booty so that we may bury it farther away, at no great depth, and consume it in peace. The owner, therefore, draws his ball out of the dung-yard; and, in accordance with ancient usage, begins straightway to roll it about on the ground, a little at random. Any one who was not present at the beginning and who now saw the ball rolling along, with the insect pushing it backwards, would naturally imagine that the round shape resulted from this method of transport. It rolls, therefore it becomes round, even as a shapeless lump of clay would soon become round if trundled in the same way. Though apparently logical, the idea is erroneous in every respect: we have just seen this perfect sphericity acquired before the ball moved from the spot. The rolling therefore has nothing to do with this geometrical accuracy; it merely hardens the surface into a tough crust and polishes it a little, if only by working into the substance of the pellet any coarse bits that might have made it rough at the beginning. Between the pill that has been rolled for hours and the pill that is stationary in the dung-yard there is no difference in configuration. What is the advantage of this particular shape, which is invariably adopted at the very outset of the work? Does the Scarab derive any benefit from the circular form? Your spectacles would have to be made of walnut-shells if you failed to see that the insect is brilliantly inspired when it kneads its cake into a ball. These victuals, the meagrest of meagre pittances from the point of view of nourishment, for the Sheep’s fourfold stomach has already extracted pretty nearly all the assimilable matter, have to make up in quantity for what they lack in quality. It is the same with various other Dung-beetles. They are all insatiable gluttons; they all need a much larger amount of food than their modest dimensions would lead us to suspect. The Spanish Copris, no bigger than a good-sized hazel-nut, accumulates underground, for a single meal, a pie as big as my fist; the Stercoraceous Geotrupes hoards in his hole a sausage nine inches long and as wide as the neck of a claret-bottle. These mighty eaters have an easy time of it. They establish themselves immediately under the heap dropped by some standing Mule. Here they dig passages and dining-rooms. The provisions are at the door of the house; they form a roof for it. All that you have to do is to bring them in, armful by armful, taking only as much as you can carry comfortably, for you can go on fetching more as long as you like. In this way, scandalous quantities of food are unobtrusively stored away in peaceful manors whose presence no outward sign betrays.