116 INSECTS ABROAD. 



crust, doth excel man iu divers faculties, this slioukl teach us 

 modesty, temperance, labour, magnanimity, justice, and pru- 

 dence. For, though its house be but a dunghil, yet it lives 

 contented therewith, and is busied and delighted in it ; nor doth 

 it more willingly eat or drink among roses than in goat's dung, 

 which smels in its senses as sweet as marjoram. For it lives by 

 the laws of Nature, and will not exceed her orders. 



" The greatest care it takes is to make the greatest bals it can, 

 as if they were sweet bals which with wonderful labour it 

 rolleth from her; and if it chance to roll its burden against 

 some heap, that the bals slip away and fall down again, you 

 would imagine that you saw Sisyphus rolling a stone to the top 

 of a mountain, and falling back upon him, yet is it not weary, 

 nor will it rest till it hath rolled it to its nest, so earnest is it 

 about its work. But we poor men do nothing that is worth our 

 labour, or as we have power to do, and we give off in the very 

 steep entrance of vertue, and we spend all our pains and daies 

 in idleness, following ill-counsel, till we get a habit of mischief 

 to our own destruction. 



" Who doth not see the courage of the Beetle ? if he shall 

 observe him fighting with an eagle (as 'tis related of the Beetles 

 in India). And indeed, though the eagle, its proud and cruel 

 enemy, do no less make havoc of and harm this creature ot 

 so mean a rank, than our lordly storks do to the peasant frogs ; 

 yet, as soon as it gets an opportunity, it returneth like for like, 

 and sufficiently punislieth that spoiler. For it flyeth up nimbly 

 into her nest with its fellow-soul diers the Scara Beetles, and in 

 the absence of the old she-eagle bringeth out of the nest the 

 eagle's eggs one after another till there be none left : which 

 falling and being broken, the young ones, while they are yet 

 nnshapen, being dasht miserably against the stone, are deprived 

 of life before they have any sense of it." 



After narrating many similar anecdotes showing how the Beetle 

 ought to " profit our niindes," the author proceeds to instruct us 

 how to use the Beetle so as to " cuje some infirmities of our 

 bodies." Among many remedies the following deserves to be 

 quoted: — "Tor the awaking of such as are troubled with the 

 dead sleep and with the lethargy (when cantharides and 

 cauteries have done no good), two or three Dung Beetles alive, 

 put up together under half a walnut-shell, to be made fast about 



