The inside of the cabin, said I to myself, is no doubt a semifluid porridge. Turning round, as is shown by the sudden slide of its back, the grub has collected a handful of this material and, completing the circuit, has stuck its load, by way of mortar, in the breach which it considered dangerous. I remove the plug. The grub acts as before, puts its head at the window, withdraws it, spins round as easily as a nut in its shell and forthwith produces a second plug as ample as the first. Forewarned of what was coming, this time I saw more clearly. What a mistake I had made! However, I am not so much startled as I might be: in the art of defence, animals often employ means which our imagination would not dare to contemplate. It is not the grub’s head that is presented at the breach, after the preliminary twisting: it is the other extremity. It does not bring a lump of its alimentary dough, gathered by scraping the walls: it excretes upon the aperture to be closed, which is a much more economical proceeding. Sparingly measured out, the rations must not be wasted: there is just enough to live upon. Besides, the cement is of better quality; it soon sets. Lastly, the urgent repairs are more quickly effected if the intestines lend their kindly aid. They do, in point of fact, and to an astonishing degree. Five, six times in succession and oftener, I remove the plug; and, time after time, the mortar ejects a copious discharge from its apparently inexhaustible reservoir, which is ever at the mason’s service, without an interval for rest. The grub is already beginning to resemble the Sacred Beetle, whose stercoraceous prowess we know: it is a past master in the art of dunging. It possesses above any other animal in the world an intestinal docility which anatomy presently will undertake to explain to us in part. The plasterer and the mason have their trowels. In the same way, the grub, that zealous repairer of breaches made in its home, has a trowel of its own. The last segment is lopped off slantwise and carries on its dorsal surface a sort of inclined plane, a broad disk surrounded by a fleshy pad. In the middle of the disk is a slit, forming the cementing-aperture. There you have your trowel, a most respectable one, flattened out and supplied with a rim to prevent the compressed matter from flowing away uselessly.