BURYING-BEETLES: THE BURIAL 61 



Lizard — will provide us with the most vigorous and 

 famous of these expurgators of the soil. This is the 

 Burying-beetle, the Necrophorus, so different from the 

 cadaveric mob in dress and habits. In honor of his ex- 

 alted functions he exhales an odor of musk; he bears a 

 red tuft at the tip of his antennae; his breast is covered 

 with nankeen; and across his wing-cases he wears a 

 double, scalloped scarf of vermilion. An elegant, almost 

 sumptuous costume, very superior to that of the others, 

 but yet lugubrious, as befits your undertaker's man. 



He is no anatomical dissector, cutting his subject open, 

 carving its flesh with the scalpel of his mandibles; he is 

 literally a gravedigger, a sexton. While the others — 

 Silphae, Dermestes, Horn-beetles — gorge themselves 

 with the exploited flesh, without, of course, forgetting the 

 interests of the family, he, a frugal eater, hardly touches 

 his booty on his own account. He buries it entire, on the 

 spot, in a cellar where the thing, duly ripened, will form 

 the diet of his larvae. He buries it in order to establish 

 his progeny therein. 



This hoarder of dead bodies, with his stiff and almost 

 heavy movements, is astonishingly quick at storing away 

 wreckage. In a shift of a few hours, a comparatively 

 enormous animal — a Mole, for example — disappears, 

 engulfed by the earth. The others leave the dried, emp- 

 tied carcass to the air, the sport of the winds for months 

 on end; he, treating it as a whole, makes a clean job of 

 things at once. No visible trace of his work remains but 

 a tiny hillock, a burial-mound, a tumulus. 



With his expeditious method, the Necrophorus is the 



