As each pill is carted away, I seize it, together with its owner, and place both on the surface of a layer of fresh, close-packed sand in a flower-pot. A sheet of glass serves as a lid, keeps the sand nice and cool, prevents escape and admits the light. By interning each Beetle separately, I am saved from the mistakes which might arise if I put them in the common cage, where a number of my boarders are at work; and I shall not risk ascribing to several what may be the performance of one alone. By this solitary confinement, each individual Beetle’s work can be studied more easily. The interned mother makes hardly any protest against her servitude. Soon she is digging the sand and disappears in it with her pill. Let us give her time to establish her quarters and to get on with her domestic labours. Three or four weeks go by. The Beetle has not reappeared upon the surface, a proof of her patient absorption in her maternal duties. At last I remove the contents of the pot, very carefully, layer by layer, until I uncover a spacious burrow. The rubbish from this cavity was heaped up on the surface, forming a little mound. This is the secret chamber, the gynæceum in which the mother now and for a long time to come keeps watch over her budding family. The original pill has disappeared. In its stead are two little pears, elegantly shaped and wonderfully finished: two, not one, as I naturally expected from the information already in my possession. They strike me as being even more delicately and gracefully rounded than the Sacred Beetle’s. Perhaps their tiny dimensions cause my preference: maxime miranda in minimis. They measure 33 millimetres in length and 24 millimetres across their greatest width. [32] Let us drop figures and admit that the dumpy modeller, with her slow and awkward ways, is the artistic rival or even the superior of her famous kinswoman. I expected to see some clumsy apprentice; I find a consummate artificer. We must not judge people by appearances; it is a wise maxim, even when applied to insects. If we examine the pot somewhat earlier, it will tell us how the pear is made. I find sometimes a perfectly round ball and a pear without any traces of the original pill; sometimes a ball only, with a nearly hemispherical remnant of the pill, a lump from which the materials subjected to modelling have been detached in one piece. The method of work can be deduced from these facts. The pill which the Scarab fashions on the surface of the soil by taking armfuls from the heap encountered is but a temporary piece of work, which is given a round form with the sole object of facilitating its transport. He gives his attention to it, no doubt, but is not unduly anxious about it; all that he wants is that the journey should be effected without any crumbling of his treasure or impediment in the rolling. The surface of the sphere, therefore, is not thoroughly treated; it is not compressed into a rind or made scrupulously even.