The Sacred Beetle and Others 



" to set down as fiction what HorapoUo says 

 of the number of this Beetle's fingers: ac- 

 cording to him, there are thirty. Never- 

 theless, this computation, judged by the way 

 in which he looks at the tarsus, is quite 

 correct, for this part consists of five joints; 

 and, if we take each of them for a finger, 

 the legs being six in number and each ending 

 in a five-jointed tarsus, the Sacred Beetles 

 evidently had thirty fingers." 



Forgive me, illustrious master: the num- 

 ber of joints is but twenty, because the tw^o 

 fore-legs are without tarsi. You were car- 

 ried away by the general rule. Losing sight 

 of the singular exception, which you certainly 

 knew, you said thirty, obsessed for a mo- 

 ment by that overwhelmingly positive rule. 

 Yes, you knew the exception, so much so that 

 the figure of the Scarab accompanying your 

 article, a figure drawn from the insect and 

 not from the Egyptian monuments, is irre- 

 proachably accurate : it has no tarsi on its 

 front legs. The blunder is pardonable, be- 

 cause the exception is so unusual. 



Mulsant,^ in his volume on the French 



1 Etienne Marcel Mulsant (1797-1880), author of the 

 His/oire nattirelle des coleopteres en France (1839-1874), 

 mentioned on page 136. — Translator's Note. 



148 



