But where? Why, in the narrow part of the pear, in the neck, right at the end! Let us cut this neck lengthwise, taking the necessary precautions not to damage the contents. It is hollowed into a niche with polished and shiny walls. This niche is the tabernacle of the germ, the hatching-chamber. The egg, which is very large in proportion to the size of the mother, is an elongated oval, about ten millimetres in length with a diameter of five millimetres at the widest part. [21] It is white and is separated on all sides from the walls of the chamber by a slight empty space, the only contact being at the rear end of the egg, which adheres to the top of the niche. Lying horizontally, in conformity with the normal position of the pear, the whole of it, excepting the point of attachment, thus rests upon an air-mattress, warmest and most buoyant of beds. Now we know all about it. Let us next try to understand the Scarab’s logic. Let us find out why she has to make that pear of hers, so unusual a shape in insect structures; let us seek to explain the suitability of the egg’s curious position. We are venturing on dangerous ground when we enquire into the how and wherefore of things. We easily lose our footing in that mysterious land where the moving soil gives way beneath us, swallowing the foolhardy in the quicksands of error. Must we abandon such excursions, because of the risk? Why should we? What does our science, so sublime compared with the feebleness of our resources, so contemptible in the face of the boundless stretches of the unknown, what does it know of absolute reality? Nothing. The world interests us only because of the ideas which we form of it. Remove the idea and everything becomes a desert, chaos, nothingness. An omnium-gatherum of facts is not knowledge, but at most a cold catalogue which we must thaw and quicken at the fire of the mind; we must bring to it thought and the light of reason; we must interpret. Let us adopt this course to explain the work of the Sacred Beetle. Perhaps we shall end by attributing our own logic to the insect. After all, it will be just as remarkable to see a wonderful agreement prevail between that which reason dictates to us and that which instinct dictates to the insect. A grave danger threatens the Sacred Beetle in his grub state: the drying-up of the food. The crypt in which the larval life is spent has a layer of earth, some four inches thick, for a ceiling. Of what avail is this flimsy screen against the torrid heat that beats down upon the soil, baking it like a brick to a far greater depth than that? At times the temperature of the grub’s abode mounts towards boiling-point; when I thrust my hand into it, I feel the hot air of a Turkish bath.