36 INSECT LIFE 



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creature in its birthplace, recently transformed, new 

 to all labour, so that I might have examined the 

 worker's hand before it set to its tasks, and for the 

 following reason. 



Insects have each foot terminated by a kind of 

 finger or tarsus, composed of a series of delicate 

 portions which may be compared to the joints of 

 our fingers. They end in a crooked nail. One 

 claw to each foot is the rule, and this claw, at least 

 in the case of the superior Coleoptera, especially the 

 scavenger beetles, contains five joints. Now by a 

 strange exception, the Scarabaeus has no tarsi on its 

 forefeet, while possessing well-shaped ones with five 

 joints on the two other pairs. They are imperfect, 

 maimed, wanting in their front limbs in that which 

 represents, roughly indeed, our hand in an insect. 

 A like anomaly is found in the Onitis and Bubas, 

 also of the scavenger family. Entomology has long 

 noted this curious fact without being able to give a 

 satisfactory explanation. Is it a birth imperfection ? 

 Does the beetle come into the world without fingers 

 on its front limbs, or does it lose them as soon as it 

 enters on its toilsome labours ? 



One might easily suppose such mutilation a 

 consequence of the insect's hard work. To grope, 

 to excavate, to rake, to divide now among the gravel 

 in the soil, now in the fibrous mass of manure, is 

 not a work in which organs so delicate as the tarsi 

 can be used without danger. Yet graver is it that 

 when the insect is rolling its ball backward, head 

 downward, it is with the end of the forefeet that it 

 grips the ground. What becomes of the weak feet, 

 no thicker than a thread, in this perpetual contact 



