Forgive me, illustrious master: the number of joints is but twenty, because the two fore-legs are without tarsi. You were carried away by the general rule. Losing sight of the singular exception, which you certainly knew, you said thirty, obsessed for a moment by that overwhelmingly positive rule. Yes, you knew the exception, so much so that the figure of the Scarab accompanying your article, a figure drawn from the insect and not from the Egyptian monuments, is irreproachably accurate: it has no tarsi on its front legs. The blunder is pardonable, because the exception is so unusual. Mulsant, [30] in his volume on the French Lamellicorns, quotes Horapollo and his allowance of thirty fingers to the insect according to the number of days which the sun takes to traverse a sign of the Zodiac. He repeats Latreille’s explanation. He goes even farther. Here are his own words: ‘If we count each joint of the tarsi as a finger, we must admit that this insect was examined with great attention.’ Examined with great attention! By whom, pray? By Horapollo? Not a bit of it! By you, my master: yes, indeed yes! And yet the rule, in its very positiveness, is misleading you for a moment; it misleads you again and in a more serious fashion when, in your illustration of the Sacred Beetle, you represent the insect with tarsi on its fore-legs, tarsi similar to those on the other legs. You, painstaking describer though you be, have in your turn been the victim of a momentary aberration. The rule is so general that it has made you lose sight of the singularity of the exception. What did Horapollo himself see? Apparently what we see in our day. If Latreille’s explanation be right, as everything seems to indicate, if the Egyptian author began by counting the first thirty fingers according to the number of joints in the tarsi, it is because he made a mental enumeration on the basis of the general circumstances. He was guilty of a slip which was not so very reprehensible, seeing that, more than a thousand years later, masters like Latreille and Mulsant were guilty of the same slip. If we must blame something, let us blame the exceptional structure of the insect. ‘But,’ I may be asked, ‘why should not Horapollo have seen the exact truth? Perhaps the Sacred Beetle of his day had tarsi which the insect no longer possesses. In that case, it has been transformed by the slow work of time.’ I am waiting for some one to show me a natural Scarab of Horapollo’s period before I reply to this objection on the part of the evolutionists. The tombs which so religiously guard the Cat, the Ibis and the Crocodile must also contain the sacred insect. All that I have by me is a few figures showing the Scarab as we find him engraved on the monuments or carved in fine stone as an amulet for the mummies. The ancient artist is remarkably faithful in the execution of the thing as a whole; but his graver and chisel have not troubled about such insignificant details as the tarsi.