But there are other unconsidered creatures besides these, creatures which perform for us functions almost as useful and important as those of the earthworms; and I propose to devote a few pages here to one such group, the sanitary commissioners of the insect world, as I will venture to call them--the vast body of minor sextons and six-legged scavengers. Has it ever struck you that as you walk abroad through the rich green meadows and pastures of England, you almost never come across a dead and decaying animal? I do not mean large animals like horses and donkeys: those do sometimes occur unburied, giving us bold and unpleasant advertisement of their near presence. But just consider that the fields through which you stroll are a perfect warren of moles and shrews and field-mice and water-voles and frogs and lizards and rabbits and weasels, to say nothing of smaller fry; and then think how seldom on your morning rounds in the country you come across a single dead bird or rat or adder, a departed toad, or a late lamented leveret. The ground about you teems with life: but where are its cemeteries? Squirrels and dormice are dying in every copse: but what becomes of their bodies? Who ever saw a dead bat? Who knows the tomb of the deceased hedgehogs? Of course a great many of the smaller animals die a violent death, and find their living grave in the maw of their devourers--one must admit that explanation as covering a very large number of cases. Thirty field-mice have been disinterred from the stomach of a single buzzard when it was shot in the act of digesting after a good dinner; and owls and snakes are answerable for the fate of no small proportion of our minuter wild animals. In other countries, too, vultures and jackals devour most of the carrion as it lies; while even in England we have a few dead-meat-eaters, such as the carrion-crow, the rat, and the shrike. But for the most part our rural English public scavengers are smaller and less conspicuous creatures. Foremost among them in number and utility we may reckon the various kinds of burying beetle.