She does nothing at all. She does not even seem to perceive the presence of the object which was so precious to her yesterday, when the egg was not yet laid. Zealous to excess before the laying is over, she is indifferent afterwards. The finished work no longer concerns her. Imagine a pebble in the place of the ovoid or pear: the mother would treat it no better and no worse. One sole preoccupation urges her: to get away. I can see that by the manner in which she paces the enclosure that keeps her prisoner. That is instinct’s way: it buries perseveringly the lifeless lump and leaves the quickened lump to perish on the surface. The work to be done is everything; the work done no longer counts. Instinct sees the future and knows nothing of the past. CHAPTER IX THE SPANISH COPRIS: THE LAYING OF THE EGGS If we show instinct doing for the egg what would be done on the advice of reason matured by study and experience, we achieve a result of no small philosophic importance; and an austere scientific conscience begins to trouble me with scruples. Not that I wish to give science a forbidding aspect: I am convinced that one can say the wisest things without employing a barbarous vocabulary. Clearness is the supreme courtesy of the wielder of the pen. I do my best to observe it. No, the scruple that stops me is of another kind. I begin to wonder if I am not in this case the victim of an illusion. I say to myself: ‘Gymnopleuri and Sacred Beetles, when in the open air, are manufacturers of balls or pills. That is their trade, learnt we know not how, prescribed perhaps by their structure, in particular by their long legs, some of which are slightly curved. When they are making preparations for the egg, is it so wonderful that they continue underground their own ball-making speciality?’ If we leave out of the question the neck of the pear and the projecting tip of the ovoid, details much more difficult to explain, there remains the most important part so far as bulk is concerned, the globular part, a repetition of the thing which the insect makes outside the burrow; there remains the pellet with which the Sacred Beetle plays in the sunshine, sometimes without making any other use of it, the ball which the Gymnopleurus rolls peacefully over the turf. Then what is the object here of the globular form, the best preventative of desiccation during the heat of summer? This property of the sphere and of its near neighbour, the ovoid, is an accepted physical fact; but it is only by accident that these shapes are the right ones to overcome that difficulty. A creature built for rolling balls across the fields goes on making balls underground. If the grub fare all the better for finding tender foodstuffs under its mandibles to the very end, that is a capital thing for the grub, but it is no reason why we should extol the instinct of the mother.