The apartment is ready. The grub sheds its skin and becomes a nymph. There are very few inhabitants of the insect world that can compare for sober beauty with the delicate creature which, with wing-cases recumbent in front of it like a wide-pleated scarf and fore-legs folded under its head like those of the adult Beetle when counterfeiting death, calls to mind a mummy kept by its linen bandages in the approved hieratic attitude. Semitranslucent and honey-yellow, it looks as though it were carved from a block of amber. Imagine it hardened in this state, mineralized, rendered incorruptible: it would make a splendid topaz gem. In this marvel of beauty, so severe and dignified in shape and colouring, one point above all captivates me and at last provides me with the solution of a far-reaching problem. Have the fore-legs a tarsus, yes or no? This is the great matter that makes me neglect the jewel for the sake of a structural detail. Let us then return to a subject that used to excite me in my early days, for the answer has come at last, late, it is true, but certain and indisputable. The probabilities which were all that my first investigations could give me turn into certainties established by overwhelming evidence. By a very strange exception, the full-grown Sacred Beetle and his congeners have no front tarsi: they lack on their fore-limbs the five-jointed finger which is the rule among the highest section of Beetles, the Pentamera. The remaining legs, on the other hand, follow the general law and possess a very well-shaped tarsus. Does this curious formation of the toothed fore-arms date from birth, or is it accidental? At first sight, an accident seems not unlikely. The Sacred Beetle is a strenuous miner and a great pedestrian. Always in contact with the rough soil, whether in walking or digging, used moreover for constant leverage when the insect is rolling its pill backwards, the front limbs are exposed much more freely than the others to the danger of spraining and twisting their delicate finger, of putting it out of joint, of losing it entirely, from the first moment when the work begins. Lest this explanation should appeal to any of my readers, I will hasten to undeceive him. The absence of the front fingers is not the result of an accident. Here before my eyes lies the unanswerable proof. I examine the nymph’s legs with the magnifying glass: those in front have not the least vestige of a tarsus; the toothed limb ends bluntly, without any trace of a terminal appendage. In the others, on the contrary, the tarsus is as distinct as can be, notwithstanding the shapeless, lumpy condition due to the swaddling-bands and humours of the nymphal state. It suggests a finger swollen with chilblains.