248 INSECT ARCHITECTURE. 



about the whole day, as if busied in measuring the 

 dimensions of the remaining corpse, which on the 

 third day was also found buried. He then introduced 

 a dead hnnet. A pair of the beetles were soon en- 

 gaged upon the bird. They began their operations 

 by pushing out the earth from under the body, so as 

 to form a cavity for its reception; and it was curious 

 to see the efibrts which the beetles made, by dragging 

 at the feathers of the bird from below, to pull it into 

 its grave. The male, having driven the female away, 

 continued the work alone for five hours. He lifted 

 up the bird, changed its place, turned it and arranged 

 it in the grave, and from time to time came out of 

 the liole, mounted upon it, and trod it under foot, 

 and then retired below, and pulled it down. At 

 length, apparently wearied ^vith this uninterrupted 

 labour, it came forth, and leaned its head upon the 

 earth beside 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 seem- 

 ing 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 com- 

 pleted, and the bird covered, M. Gleditsch con- 

 tinued to add other small dead animals, which were 

 all sooner or later buried; and the result of his 

 experiment was, that in fifty days four beetles had 

 interred, in the very small space of earth allotted to 

 them, twelve carcasses: viz., four frogs, three small 

 birds, two fishes, one mole, and two grasshoppers, 

 besides the entrails of a fish, and two morsels of the 

 lungs of an ox. In another experiment, a single 

 beetle buried a mole forty times its own bulk and 

 weight in two days."* 



* Act. Acad. Berolin. 1752, et Gleditsch, Phys. Botan. 

 quoted by Kirby and Spence, ii. 353. 



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