In a certain sense, all animated nature is but a single vast
co-operative society. I am no foolish optimist: I will admit, indeed,
that the members of the society so composed often display to one
another the most unfriendly and unfraternal spirit. The hawks, for
instance, show a distinct want of true brotherly love towards the
larks or the tom-tits: and the mice and lizards find the owls and the
cats by no means clubbable. The co-operative society is hardly what
one could call a happy family. Still, in spite of the fact insisted
upon by the poet that "Nature is one with rapine--a harm no preacher
can heal," it is none the less true that a certain rough balance, an
accommodation or adjustment of part to part, occurs in every department
of animal and vegetable life. When we come to think, it could hardly
be otherwise. Things can only exist if they contain in themselves
the conditions necessary to existence. An unadapted animal or plant
perishes instantly. Spiders could not live in an island which contained
no flies; kingfishers necessarily presuppose fish; and silkworms imply
the presence of mulberry leaves. You cannot have vultures wild in a
country where there are no dead animals lying about loose: nor can you
keep bees except where there are honey-bearing flowers. Dutch clover
depends for its very existence upon a few insects which fertilize it
and set its seeds. The draining of the fens killed out a dozen species
of English plants and animals; the inclosure of the prairies deprived
the buffaloes of their chance of pasture. In this sense, all nature
hangs together as it were; each species fills some place in the great
mosaic which cannot be altered without considerable disturbance of
adjacent pieces. Destroy the rabbits in a given area, and you have
nothing left for the weasels to feed upon.
Sometimes, too, apparently unimportant or unnoticed creatures perform
in the aggregate some valuable work for the rest of the plant and
animal community, which little suspects its real indebtedness to them.
Darwin showed long ago that the humble and despised earthworm was
really answerable for the greater part of that rich layer of vegetable
mould or soil which covers the bare rocks; it deposits the material in
which all our plants root and from which they derive a large element
of their sustenance. Kill out the earthworms over the whole of our
earth, and you would reduce a vast proportion of it to the condition of
a desert. For the worms pull down green leaves into their neat little
burrows; and the refuse of these leaves, continually renewed from
season to season by the industrious small workmen, forms by far the
greater share of that dark layer of vegetable mould which is the chief
source of the fertility in plains and lowlands. Sandy upland spots,
where worms are few, form little or no soil, and will only support a
poor moorland growth of gorse and heather. You must have plenty of
worms if you want to grow corn or turnips.
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.
If you _do_ find the body of a mouse or shrew lying unburied in
England, it occurs almost always on a path or high-road. Now this fact
is in itself significant; for the high-road is practically a man-made
desert, so hardened and steam-rollered, so pounded and wheel-ridden,
that no plant can grow on it; so exposed that small animals will only
scurry across it for dear life in fear and trembling; and so difficult
to dig into that no burrowing creature can hope to worm his toilsome
way through it. Hence the animals that die on the road are almost
never buried; while those that die in the field or copse are either
eaten at once by larger beasts, or else decently interred within a few
hours by the sexton beetles and other established scavengers. Indeed,
a common superstition exists among country folk that one of the small
long-nosed, insect-eating animals known as shrews cannot so much as
cross a road without being killed instantly. A human track is supposed
to be fatal to them. The superstition has arisen in this way: shrews
die of cold and hunger in great numbers at the approach of winter.
A certain proportion of them perish thus in the open fields; these,
however, are immediately buried by the proper authorities, the sexton
beetles. But a few happen to die as they are crossing a road or path;
these lie where they fell, because the sextons cannot there pierce the
hard ground, and seldom even dare venture on the road to carry them off
to softer spots for burial. The rustic sees dead shrews in the road,
and none on the open ground: so he hastily concludes in his easy-going
way that to cross a human path is sudden death to shrews, who are
always supposed for other reasons to be witch-like and uncanny animals.
If the road leads to a church, a fatal stroke is specially certain: for
the shrews, like all witch-creatures, hate Christianity.
I need hardly say, however, that the burying beetles do not perform
their strange funereal office out of pure benevolence, without hope of
reward. Like human sextons and undertakers, they adopt their lugubrious
calling for the sake of gain: they expect to be paid for their sanitary
services. The payment is taken in two forms: one, immediate, as food
for themselves: the other, deferred, as board and lodging for their
children.
[Illustration: 1.--GROUPS OF MISCELLANEOUS SEXTON BEETLES, DISCOVERING
A DEAD FIELD-MOUSE.]
Our illustration No. 1 introduces us to a typical miscellaneous group
of these insect scavengers, occupied in appropriating a very fine and
desirable carcass on which they have just lighted. A field-mouse,
vanquished by fate in the struggle for existence, has lately "turned up
his toes" in the most literal sense, and lies unburied, like Archytas,
on the loose sand of a bare patch in a meadow. All carrion-eating
creatures are remarkable for their powerful sense of smell: and the
sexton beetles, like the vultures and condors, are no exception to
the rule. They sniff their prey from afar: for where the carcass is,
there shall the carrion beetles be gathered together. All are eager to
take their share of the feast, and still more to lay their eggs in the
dead body. Some of them may crawl up from the immediate neighbourhood;
others, summoned from afar, come flying on their gauze-like wings from
considerable distances. They are, as a rule, nocturnal creatures, and
they come out on their burying expeditions by night alone.
The insect just alighting from his flight, in the upper part of the
illustration, is _the_ burying beetle _par excellence_ among our
British kinds; he rejoices (we are always supposed to rejoice foolishly
in our personal designations) in the dignified title of _Necrophorus
vespillo_. In stature he measures about an inch long, and he is a
handsome beast, with two bright orange bands on his hard wing-covers.
The illustration shows these wing-covers raised, as is the habit of
beetles when they fly, while the thin but powerful wings beneath
them are expanded as true pinions. When the insect alights, he folds
the wings up carefully and replaces them under the hard protective
wing-covers: he is then securely armour-plated from head to foot, and
need fear no foe, save birds which swallow him whole--a very tough
morsel--and hedgehogs which crunch him in their strong jaws before
eating him. However, he is well prepared for all such enemies, for he
can exude when attacked a very nasty fluid with a disgusting smell:
and this mode of defence, which resembles that of the skunk and the
polecat, usually protects him from obtrusive inquirers. He must be
handled with caution, as the perfume he diffuses spoils woollen clothes
and clings to the fingers after two or three washings.
[Illustration: 2.--THE SEXTONS AT WORK: BURYING THE BODY.]
As a rule, when a carcass appears, a pair of burying beetles of the
same species--a husband and wife--fly up to the scene of operations
together and take possession of the prey; though in the illustration
Mr. Enock has represented several kinds engaged at once in staking
out claims, which indeed happens often enough in nature. But if you
count the number on any one dead bird or animal, you will almost
always find they are even in number--in other words, so many pairs,
male and female. No. 2 shows us the next act in the funeral drama. The
male beetles, after satisfying their own immediate hunger, proceed to
bury the carcass in a very curious and laborious manner. You would
wonder how so small a creature could produce so great a result: the
fact is, the beetles attain their end by continuous under-cutting. The
female hides herself in the body: the male buries her alive and the
dead creature with her. He first drags the mouse, frog, or bird to a
suitable spot where the soil is soft enough to admit of excavation;
and sometimes three or four males have to combine for this purpose.
They then proceed to dig with their heads, which are tools specialized
for the purpose, and provided with strong and powerful muscles. The
antennæ have also assumed for this object a short club-shaped type,
very suitable for a navvy's mattock. The little engineers begin by
excavating a furrow all round the body, and then a second inside that
again, throwing the earth out of each into the previous one: and so
on till the carcass begins to sink into the hollow. They then dig and
tunnel beneath it, carrying out loads of earth, one after another, till
bit by bit the carcass collapses into the hole, first in front, then
behind, and has reached a level considerably below the surface. Then
they throw in the earth they have excavated, and cover up the body with
the females inside it; after which, I regret to say, they proceed
to hold a very cannibalistic funeral service above it. The funeral
service consists in eating as much of the body as they desire for their
own purposes: when they have satisfied their appetite, they begin to
think of the interests of posterity. The mother beetle proceeds to lay
her tale of eggs in the decently-buried body, for every animal knows
by instinct the precise place in which to deposit its young and the
precise food which happens to suit them.
After the eggs are laid, the two parent beetles crawl out of the hole
and cover it carefully up so as to conceal the hiding-place. So far
as they themselves are concerned, their only object in all this is
to procure food for themselves and their infant young. But the wider
effects of such scavenger insects go very far. For we now know that
there is no disinfectant so good as the top layer of the soil, which is
not really mere dead earth (as most people imagine), but a mingled mass
of ramifying life--a little foundation of clay and sand intermixed with
endless minute organisms, both animal and vegetable--fungi, bacteria,
mites, weevils, and all sorts of petty creatures, which eat up and
destroy harmlessly all dead matter subjected to their influence. The
earth is thus a most admirable deodorizer and purifier: and burial in
its top layers, the body being freely exposed to the rapid action of
the devouring microbes, is a most sanitary mode of disposing of refuse.
Thus the part that is played in the East by vultures and jackals,
or by the wild dogs of Constantinople, is far more effectually and
unobtrusively played in our fields and meadows by the many kinds of
burying beetles and other insect scavengers. If we remember how great a
nuisance a single dead rat becomes in a house, we can faintly picture
to ourselves the debt we owe to these excellent and unnoticed little
sanitary commissioners. Without them, our fields would not smell so
fresh, nor would our flowers bloom so bright; for we must remember that
by burying the dead beasts they are not only preventing disease but
also manuring the pastures in the best possible fashion. The bones of
small animals decay rapidly and make excellent material for the growth
of vegetation. The beetles as a rule hunt by night only, and find their
prey, as vultures do, by the sense of smell. When they first find it,
the male hovers above it like an eagle, circling round and round, so
as to point it out to his mate; the female flies straight to it, and
buries herself without delay in the rich banquet.
But what becomes at last of the buried bodies? No. 3 will show you.
The female beetle lays in each body about as many eggs as she thinks
it will support. In a very short time the eggs hatch out, and the
grubs begin to devour the abundant feast provided for them. The two
grubs to the right in the illustration are the young of our friend the
orange-banded burying beetle: the one to the left is a larva of an
allied form known by the poetical name of Silpha. They set to work at
once on the remains of the mouse, and thoroughly strip the bones of
every fibre of flesh. As soon as the skeleton is bare, they consider
it time to leave off feeding, and pass on to the second stage of their
existence--the pupa, or mummy-case.
[Illustration: 3.--THE GRUBS UNDERGROUND; FEEDING UPON THE BODY.]
As larvæ, the young burying beetles look like worms, and have six
short legs. No. 4 shows them in the intermediate stage, when they
have retired into a clay cell, or cocoon, and are undergoing their
transformation into the perfect insect. We are here supposed to have
removed the soil on one side so as to give a view into the concreted
earthen chambers where the pupæ are changing into full-grown beetles.
You can see the much longer legs of the adult insect beginning to
develop, while the head assumes slowly its later form. The grubs remain
in the cocoon through the winter, and emerge in spring as winged
beetles, when they fly away with their brilliant wing-cases raised, in
search of congenial mates and more dead field-mice. The best places
to look for all these beetles are the "keeper's trees," on which
game-keepers hang up the jays and weasels they shoot, to encourage the
others. If you tap one such dead weasel you will generally find it is
simply swarming with insect life.
[Illustration: 4.--NO MORE LEFT! THE GRUBS IN THEIR COCOONS TURNING
INTO BEETLES.]
Yet, strange to say, even the insect undertakers themselves are not
without their ideas of beauty and their musical perceptions. The orange
bands of our commonest English kind have been developed as attractions
for their admiring mates; and the male beetles have also a musical
instrument of their own in the shape of a peculiar rasp-like ring on
the body, which they can rub against the wing-cases, and so produce a
much-appreciated chirping. Such instrumental music is always employed,
like the song of birds, as a charm to heighten the attractiveness of
the suitor: and male burying beetles may be heard on the evenings of
sunny days competing with one another in musical contests. Indeed,
it often happens that animals which seem to us disgusting or unclean
display among themselves much æsthetic taste, and are gifted with more
sense of beauty or love of music than many other forms where our human
eyes would be more inclined to look for the presence of these higher
endowments.
I may add that if the beetles left the bodies in which they laid their
eggs to lie above ground, the bodies would dry up, and the eggs would
run much greater risks. By burying the dead animal, they provide their
young with food and shelter together, and so display considerable
intelligence.
Another very distinct group of insects which act as scavengers in a
different way in hotter climates than ours are the famous scarabs or
sacred beetles, worshipped almost like gods by the ancient Egyptians.
English people know the scarabs best, I think, in the neighbourhood of
Naples, or on the Lido at Venice--that great bank of sand and shingle
which separates the lagoons from the open Adriatic. When wearied with
sight-seeing at St. Mark's and the Doge's Palace, we have, most of us,
taken the little steamer that runs across to the baths on the Lido, and
spent a pleasant hour or two in picking up shells and dried sea-horses
on the firm belt of beach that stretches away to Malamocco. A little
inland, the beach gives way to dry sand-hills, blown about by the wind,
and over-grown by patches of blue-green marram-grass and other sandy
seaside weeds. If you lie down on one of these sand-hills, choosing a
spot not quite so dirty as its neighbours, you will soon be amused by
seeing a curious little comedy going on perpetually around you in every
direction. A number of odd-looking beetles, with long hind legs and
very quaint heads, are occupied with ceaseless industry in rolling a
lot of dark, round balls almost as big as themselves along the slopes
of the sand-hills. In many places, the whole ground is alive with the
tugging and pushing little beasts: indeed, when you come to look close
you will find that every half acre of sand on the Venetian shore or
the lower edge of the Egyptian desert is a perfect city of these busy
wee creatures. Earth is honeycombed with their holes, towards which
innumerable beetles are continually rolling their mysterious balls at
every possible angle.
Now, what are the balls composed of? There comes the oddest part of
the whole odd proceeding. The plain truth of it is that the sacred
beetles are assistant scavengers--imperfect Southern and Oriental
substitutes for a main drainage system. The balls consist of dung,
dirt, and refuse, and the beetles collect them on the open, dry them
hard in the sun, roll them to the mouths of their burrows, and then
live on them till the ball has all been eaten. It is the funniest thing
in the world to watch them. They tumble about in the loose sand and
stumble over little eminences in the most comical fashion. No. 5 shows
a pair of scarabs engaged in this habitual and quaint amusement. They
have each collected a round mass of manure, and rolled and dried it
nicely into shape; they are now engaged in trundling their booty off at
their leisure to a place of safety. But they are obliged to push the
balls backward with their long hind legs: and as this precludes the
possibility of the scarab seeing where it is going, each beetle pauses
every now and again and turns round, like a man sculling in a boat
alone, to look what is ahead of him. Sometimes in doing so he loses his
ball, a misfortune which has just happened to the beetle on the right
in No. 5. The precious pellet goes bounding off down hill as fast as
gravitation will take it. In this case, the disappointed little workman
faces round and darts after it at full speed, going forward now instead
of backward, and trying to head the ball as it rolls down the uncertain
slope of the sand-hills. If he succeeds, he puts himself in front of
the ball as it falls, catches it with his hind legs, and begins once
more laboriously to push it backward up hill again, towards the mouth
of his hole. But as the pellets roll quickly, and the beetles are by no
means rapid runners, he seldom succeeds in recovering his own property,
unless the ball happens to catch for a moment on some projecting little
hillock of sand, or be checked on its downward course by a weed, a
stick, or a dead shell or starfish.
[Illustration: 5.--SACRED SCARABS ROLLING THEIR FOOD-BALLS BACKWARD
(THE INSECT TO THE RIGHT HAS LOST HIS DINNER).]
On the other hand, the scarabs, I fear I must admit, are terrible
thieves; and if one scarab has lost his own ball, and sees some
companion's pellet come rolling down hill towards him, he will often
give up the pursuit of his lost property, and quietly and barefacedly
appropriate his neighbour's. I have seen great fights take place at
times over a disputed ball; though sometimes the combatants agree
amicably to roll it along in common, and probably share it when they
have reached their hole. Sometimes, again, three or four will unite to
roll a ball: and then, when one loses it, the others combine to hold it
up or catch it. I have spent hours together both in Egypt and on the
Mediterranean or the Adriatic in watching the queer antics of these
comic little commissioners of drainage: and I never tire of observing
their odd and unexpected combinations of interest. I have sometimes
known the real owner abandon a ball in despair, from the unevenness of
the ground, and then seen a couple of outsiders come up and succeed in
doing what the true owner had been unable to accomplish.
In No. 6 you see two such scarabs whose toil has at last been crowned
by success, and who are delivering their balls with joy into the holes
in the sand which form their residences. As far as I can make out,
a pair of beetles, male and female, seem usually to share a hole in
common, and to roll balls of food to it either alone or in concert.
I cannot say I have ever seen much co-operation except between such
partners. Once a ball is secured and safely landed--for here, as
elsewhere, there's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip--the happy
couple proceed to eat it up, and apparently do not emerge again from
their burrow till the supply is exhausted. Patient naturalists say
that one ball has been known to last a scarab as long as a fortnight,
but this I do not vouch for of personal knowledge. When more food is
wanted, the couple emerge once more on the open sand and begin to
collect fresh dung and refuse, which they roll into a new food-ball and
then dry and harden.
[Illustration: 6.--PRIMITIVE GOLF--END OF A ROUND: THE SCARABS HOLING
THEIR BALLS.]
Till very lately, it was universally believed that the female scarab
laid an egg in some of the balls, and that the young grubs hatched
within such food-stocks and began at once to devour them. This belief
has recently been contradicted with great emphasis by a good French
observer, who opened many balls and found no eggs; but I cannot accept
his conclusion. I opened numbers of balls myself near Venice this
year, and saw in several one or two eggs, while in one case (unearthed
from a hole) I discovered a half-grown larva. I venture therefore in
this matter to believe my own eyes as against those of even the most
celebrated and authoritative entomologists.
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.
Once started on so strange a set of ideas, the Egyptians proceeded
to evolve a worship of the scarab which grew ever and developed, as
they thought the scarab itself did, practically out of nothing. The
immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body were the
central ideas of Egyptian religion; the thinkers of Thebes and Memphis
instantly perceived a fanciful analogy between the scarab rising
from its bed of dirt and the mummy reviving when the expected day of
resurrection should at last arrive. As a consequence of this analogy,
the scarab was made sacred: it was reverenced during its life and
often preserved after its death, like the mummied cats and hawks and
sacred Apis bulls which formed such special objects of veneration to
the devout of Egypt. All sorts of mystic relations were also discovered
before long in the scarab: its "toes" were counted as thirty, and
held to symbolize the days of the month: it was said to be male only,
without a female, and so to typify the creative power and the paternal
or masculine principle in nature. Sun-worship, as we know, formed a
large part of the later (though not of the most primitive) Egyptian
religion: and the ball rolled by the scarab was therefore supposed to
personify Ra, the great sun-god. In one way or another, the sanctity
and the mystic implications of the scarab grew and grew, age after age,
until at last scarab-worship became one of the chief practical elements
in the religion of Egypt. There was a scarab-headed god, and scarab
hieroglyphs appear on the face of all the monuments.
It is as a charm or amulet, however, that the ancient Egyptian
imitation scarab is best known. From a very early period in the history
of the Nile valley it became usual for luck's sake to bury some of
these sacred beetles with the mummy, perhaps alive (in which case most
of them would no doubt creep out again) and perhaps also dead. A few
real scarabs have thus been found here and there in tombs. But for
the most part, just as the Egyptians buried little porcelain images
to accompany the mummy, so they buried porcelain or stone scarabs;
and these were rather closely imitated from the living insect, but
made still more sacred by being enamelled or engraved with the holy
name of some king or god. Scarabs of this kind, inscribed with sacred
words, and regarded as talismans, form some of the commonest objects
disinterred in all the Egyptian excavations: one of them, from a
specimen in the British Museum, is illustrated in No. 7. Comparison
with the live beetles in the other engravings will show how well the
Egyptians copied nature in this instance.
[Illustration: 7.--AN EGYPTIAN SACRED SCARAB, IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.]
These beautiful and often costly Egyptian scarabs have been made the
subject of very exhaustive study by various writers, more particularly
by Mr. Loftie and Mr. Flinders Petrie. The Egyptians did not coin
money, so that scarabs bearing the names of kings came to have somewhat
the same importance for Egyptian history as coins have for the history
of later civilized nations. Mr. Loftie traces the origin of the
inscribed scarabs to a very early epoch in the Egyptian annals. "From
the earliest times until the end of the native monarchy," he says,
"certain usages continued unchanged. Among them was the inscription
of names and texts on scarabs. The beetle which rolls before it"--he
ought rather to have said behind it--"a ball of mud in which its
egg is concealed was, at some period so remote that we cannot even
approximately date it, seized upon as the embodiment of the idea of
futurity.... The scarab, burying his egg, became the symbol of the
resurrection, of the happy time to come, of a re-creation of all
things; and with every corpse scarabs were buried, and scarabs were
sewed upon the shroud, and strung into a network to cover the body,
and suspended round the neck, and clasped in the dead hands. As many
as three thousand scarabs have been found in one tomb, and the number
in existence in museums and private collections is past count." Some
of these imitation beetles are of blue pottery, enamelled outside;
but others are of lapis lazuli, jade, carnelian, and many other
precious stones. Sacred in themselves by their very form, that of
the revered insect god, they are rendered still more sacred by their
mystic inscriptions, which consist of appropriate religious phrases in
hieroglyphic writing.
From Egypt, the belief in the luck and value of engraved scarabs as
charms or amulets passed on to the Greeks, and also to the Etruscans.
Many Greek scarabs have been found; and in the old Etruscan tombs such
lucky beasts are comparatively common. They are mostly made more or
less in imitation of the Egyptian originals. Oddly enough, even the
early Christians themselves did not at once get over the belief in the
sanctity and talismanic character of the sacred beetle, for the Rev.
W. J. Loftie has pointed out examples of late scarabs engraved with
undoubted Christian symbols--not only crosses but even crucifixes. In
our own days, a slight revival of the antique superstition has once
more taken place, and some ladies of my acquaintance wear specimens
of the old sacred beetles as charms in brooches or suspended on their
watch-chains.
Though such numbers of true ancient scarabs have been unearthed in
Egypt, still the supply of the genuine article does not quite keep pace
with the increasing demands of the modern tourist: and there is now a
flourishing manufactory of sham antiques at Luxor, where hundreds of
false scarabs with nice imitation hieroglyphic inscriptions are neatly
turned out for the market every season.
About sixty different kinds of live scarabs are known to inhabit the
Mediterranean district in Europe, Asia, or Africa: and four of these
kinds can be easily distinguished as being individually represented in
the old Egyptian gems. We have no true scarab of this class living in
Britain: but there are other scavenger beetles which take their place,
the best known being the common dorbeetle. One of the same family,
but with a quaintly horned head, exists in vast numbers on the Surrey
hills where I have pitched my tent. The English dung-beetle burrows in
the soft sandstone, and throws up neat little heaps of clean sand at
the mouth of its hole, like miniature molehills. Still, our English
scavenger beetles--known to science as Geotrupes--are not nearly so
clever or so interesting as the southern type, for the female in our
sort merely grubs a straight tunnel in the ground, and lays her egg
in a loose mass of dung, which she drags to the bottom in a shapeless
condition. This beetle utters a plaintive buzzing cry when it is
chasing its mate--a soft of "last appeal" which seems calculated to
soften the heart of the hardest lady beetle. It is as cunning in its
way as most others of its race, for if you catch it in your hand, it at
once draws in its legs to its side and "shams dead." All the English
and foreign scavenger beetles perform a useful task by following up
animals and clearing away their refuse; indeed, a special kind of
beetle lays itself out as scavenger for each species of large animal,
one kind being attached to the cow, one to the donkey, one to the
camel, and so on through a long list of patrons and satellites.
You will thus see that in this wider sense all creation moved together
like a vast joint-stock co-operative society, each kind working
consciously for its own good alone, but each also in a certain deeper
and unconscious way contributing to the general well-being of all, by
its exercise of some special function. Nevertheless, the function is
always performed by each plant or animal itself for its own purposes;
it only incidentally serves to benefit the others. Thus the burying
beetles and the scavenger beetles work first of all and ostensibly
for their own food and the food of their offspring: it is merely as
an incidental result, undesigned by themselves, that they assist in
purifying the air and the soil for all other species. Or, to put it
still more simply, while these industrious little creatures are working
individually for their own ends, they are also in the wider scheme of
nature working unconsciously and almost unwillingly in the service of
others. Nature bribes each kind, as it were, by some personal advantage
to perform good work for the benefit of the totality.
The good work performed by the scavengers may be thus summed up. If
dead bodies and the refuse of food were left about everywhere freely on
the open, germs of disease and putrefaction would fly about much more
commonly than even at present. But a large number of scavenger animals,
scavenger birds, and scavenger insects--hyenas, vultures, burying
beetles, and so forth--act as public servants to prevent this calamity.
Again, the earth needs the bodies and the refuse as fertilizers: and
many of the scavengers carry down such materials into the first layer
of the soil, where they become of enormous use in promoting the freer
growth of vegetation. Thus, long before men learnt to bury their dead
or to manure their fields, nature had invented both these processes,
and registered them, so to speak, in the instincts and habits of a
special class of insect sextons and sanitary inspectors. It is always
so in life. There is hardly a human trade or a human activity which
does not find its counterpart somewhere in animal or vegetable life:
and it will be my object, in future numbers of these papers, to set
before you in other directions some such natural anticipations or
foreshadowings of man's inventions.
[Illustration: