The insect goes back to the cut loaf and helps itself to a second slice, which, by the same manipulations as before, becomes an ovoid tenanted by an egg. The surplus suffices for a third ovoid, sometimes even for a fourth. I have never seen this number exceeded when the mother had at her disposal only the materials which she had accumulated in the burrow. The laying is over. Here is the mother in her retreat, which is almost filled by the three or four cradles standing one against the other, pointed end upwards. What will she do now? Go away, no doubt, to recruit her strength a little in the open air after her prolonged fast. He who thinks so is mistaken. She stays. And yet she has eaten nothing since she came underground, taking good care not to touch the loaf, which, divided into equal portions, will provide the sustenance of the family. The Copris is touchingly scrupulous where the children’s inheritance is concerned: she is a devoted mother, who braves hunger rather than let her offspring suffer privation. She braves it for a second reason: to mount guard around the cradles. From the end of June onwards the burrows are difficult to find, because the mounds disappear through the action of storm or wind or the feet of the passers-by. The few which I succeed in discovering always contain the mother dozing beside a group of pills, in each of which a grub, now nearing its complete development, feasts on the fat of the land. My dark appliances, flower-pots filled with fresh sand, confirm what the fields have taught me. Buried with provisions in the first fortnight in May, the mothers do not reappear on the surface, under the glass lid. They keep hidden in the burrow after laying their eggs; they spend the sultry dog-days with their ovoids, watching them, no doubt, as the glass-jars, with their freedom from subterranean obscurity, tell us. They come up again at the time of the first autumnal rains in September. But by then the new generation has attained its perfect form. The mother, therefore, enjoys in her underground home that rare privilege for an insect, the joy of knowing her family; she hears her children scratching at the shell to obtain their liberty; she is present at the bursting of the casket which she has fashioned so conscientiously; maybe she helps the exhausted weaklings when the ground has not been cool enough to soften the walls. Mother and progeny leave the underworld together; and together they arrive at the autumn banquets, when the sun is mild and the ovine manna abounds along the paths.