An artist corrects the crude work of reason. He replaces the cylinder by a semi-ellipsoid, so much prettier in form; he joins this ellipsoid to the sphere by means of a graceful curved surface; and the whole becomes the pear, the necked gourd. It is now a work of art, a thing of beauty. The Sacred Beetle does exactly what æsthetic considerations dictate to ourselves. Can she, too, have a sense of beauty? Is she able to appreciate the elegance of her pear? True, she does not see it: she manipulates it in profound darkness. But she touches it. A poor touch hers, roughly clad in horn, yet not insensible, after all, to delicate contours. It occurred to me to put children’s intelligence to the test with this problem in æsthetics suggested by the Sacred Beetle’s work. I wanted very immature minds, hardly opened, still slumbering in the misty clouds of early childhood, in short, approximating as nearly as possible to the vague intellect of the insect, if any such approximation is permissible. At the same time I wanted them to be clear-headed enough to understand me. I selected some untutored youngsters, of whom the oldest was six. I submitted to this tribunal the work of the Sacred Beetle and a geometrical production of my own fingers, representing in the same dimensions the sphere surmounted by a short cylinder. Taking each of them aside, as though for confession, lest the opinion of one should influence the opinion of another, I sprang my two toys upon them and asked them which they thought the prettier. There were five of them; and they all voted for the Sacred Beetle’s pear. I was struck by this unanimity. The rough little peasant-lad, who has scarcely yet learnt how to blow his nose, has already a certain sense of elegance of form. He can distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly. Can this be also true of the Sacred Beetle? No one who knew what he was talking about would venture to say yes; no one either would venture to say no. It is a question that cannot be answered, since we cannot consult the one and only judge in this case. After all, the solution might very well be exceedingly simple. What does the flower know of its glorious corolla? What does the snowflake know of its exquisite hexagonal stars? Like the flower and the snowflake, the Sacred Beetle might well be ignorant of the beautiful, though it be her work.