236 INSECT ARTIZANS AND THEIR WORK 



the bird without the smallest motion, as if to rest 

 itself, for a full hour, when it again crept under 

 the earth. The next day in the morning the bird 

 was an inch and a half under ground, and the trench 

 remained open the whole day, the corpse seeming 

 as if laid out upon a bier, surrounded with a rampart 

 of mould. In the evening it had sunk half an inch 

 lower, and in another day the work was completed 

 and the bird covered." 



Gleditsch, having got his beetles to work in 

 captivity, tested the results he had already obtained 

 by adding other small dead animals, until the 

 earth in his glass vessel must have become almost 

 as full of remains as the soil in a cemetery. In 

 the course of fifty days these four Sextons had 

 buried no fewer than twelve subjects, including 

 four frogs, three birds, two fishes, a mole, and two 

 grasshoppers, as well as the entrails of a fish and 

 two pieces of ox lung. Another beetle, unaided, 

 in two days buried a mole that was forty times its 

 own bulk and weight. These beetles always hunt 

 in couples, but it is the male that performs the 

 chief part of the digging. 



Beetles of allied genera, though they do not 

 bury, are quick to note the presence of dead animals 

 and lay their eggs in them so that their larva? can 

 feed on the flesh and rapidly dispose of it. If one 

 wishes to know the kinds of beetles that engage in 

 this work, the shaking over a newspaper of any dead 

 bird or small mammal found in the woods or fields 

 will give him some idea of the types. 



