In Egypt, it has been universally believed from all antiquity--and I think quite rightly--that after the scarab has laid an egg in the ball, the parents unite in rolling it to a place of safety, above the level of the annual inundation due to the rise of the Nile. At any rate, scarabs abound in Egypt. At a very early date, it would seem, the curious action of these beetles attracted the attention of the ancient Egyptians, whose worship of animals was one of the most marked features in their monstrous religion. Hence grew a strange and widespread superstition. A race which deified the hawk, the cat, the ibis, and the jackal was not likely to overlook the marvellous proceedings of the pious and dutiful scarab. So the very early Egyptians, we may conjecture, began by thinking there must be something divine in the nature of an insect which worked so ceaselessly on behalf of its young, and rolled such big round balls behind it up such relatively large hillocks. Watching a little closer, as time went on, the Egyptian discovered, no doubt, that sacred beetles did not proceed directly from sacred beetles, like lambs from ewes, but grew, as it were, out of the dirt and corruption of the mysterious pellets. A modern observer would, of course, at once suspect that the scarab laid an egg inside the ball, and would promptly proceed to pull one open and look for it. But that cold scientific method was not likely to commend itself to the mystic and deeply religious Egyptian mind. The priests by the Nile jumped rather to the conclusion that the scarab collected dirt in order to make a future scarab out of clay, and that from this dirt the young beetle grew, self-existent, self-developed, self-created. Considering the absence of scientific knowledge and comparative groups of scientific facts at the time, such a conclusion was by no means unnatural.