We must not finish the history of the grub without saying a few words about its internal structure. Anatomy will show us the works wherein the cement employed in so eccentric a manner is manufactured. The stomach or chylific ventricle is a long, thick cylinder, starting from the creature’s neck after a very short œsophagus. It measures about three times the insect’s length. In its last quarter, it carries a voluminous lateral pocket distended by the food. This is a subsidiary stomach in which the supplies are stored so as to yield their nutritive principles more thoroughly. The chylific ventricle is much too long to lie straight and twists round in front of its appendix, in the form of a large loop occupying the dorsal surface. It is to contain this loop and the side-pocket that the back swells into a hump. The grub’s knapsack is, therefore, a second paunch, an annexe, as it were, of the stomach, which is by itself incapable of holding the voluminous digestive apparatus. Four very fine, very long tubular glands, very much entangled, four Malpighian vessels mark the limits of the chylific ventricle. Next comes the intestine, which is narrow and cylindrical and rises in front. The intestine is followed by the rectum, which pushes backwards. This last, which is exceptionally large and furnished with stout walls, is wrinkled across, bloated and distended with its contents. There you have the roomy warehouse in which the digestive refuse accumulates; there you have the mighty ejaculator, ever ready to provide cement. CHAPTER VII THE SACRED BEETLE: THE NYMPH; THE RELEASE The larva increases in bulk as it eats the walls of its house from the inside. Little by little, the belly of the pear is scooped out into a cell whose capacity grows in proportion to the growth of its inhabitant. Ensconced in its hermitage, supplied with board and lodging, the recluse waxes big and fat. What more is wanted? Certain hygienic duties have to be attended to, though it is no easy matter in a cramped little niche nearly all the room in which is occupied by the grub; the mortar incessantly elaborated by an excessively obliging intestine must be shot somewhere when there is no breach that needs repairing. The larva is certainly not fastidious, but even so the bill of fare must not be too outrageous. The humblest of the humble does not return to what he or his kin have already digested. Matter from which the intestinal alembic has extracted the last available atom yields nothing more, unless we change both chemist and apparatus. What the Sheep, with her fourfold stomach, has left behind as worthless residue is an excellent thing for the grub, which also boasts a mighty paunch; but the larva’s own droppings, though no doubt pleasing in their turn to consumers of another class, are loathsome to the grub itself. Then where shall the cumbrous refuse be stored, in a lodging of such niggardly dimensions?