BEETLES MOKALIZED. 1 1 



from De Mouffet's quaint and elaborate treatise upon the Sacred 

 Scarabaeus, in which he compares men and beetles together, and 

 shows, very much to his own satisfaction, that the man ought to 

 take example by the insect : — 



"The Latines call it Pilularius, because it turns up round 

 pills, which it fashions by turning them backwards with its 

 hinder feet. All your Pilularii have no females, but have their 

 generation from the sun; they make great balls with their 

 hinder feet, and drive them the contrary way; like the sun, it 

 observes a circuit of twenty-eight daies. . . . The Beetle called 

 Pilularius makes a round ball of the roundness of the heavens, 

 which it turns from east to west so long till it hath brought it 

 to the figure of the world ; afterwards it laies it up under the 

 earth where it breeds, and when that hath so laid it up, it lets 

 it remain there for a binary rroneth; when that is ended, it 

 casts every ball out of its nest by itself, which being dissolved in 

 water, the beetle-worm comes forth without wings, but in a few 

 daies it grows up to bo a flying Beetle. For this reason the 

 ^Egyptians consecrated this to Apollo, and adored it for no 

 small god, by the curious interpretation of Apion, whereby he 

 collected that the likeness of the sun was given to this creature, 

 and so he excused the idolatrous customs of his country. 



" They wonderfully hate roses as the plague of their family, 

 but dung, especially of cowes, and dunghils, they love so much 

 that, smelling the smell of them a very long way off, they 

 will fly suddenly to it. But they go but slowly, yet they 

 labour continually and exceedingly, and delight most of all to 

 produce their young ones ; for ofttimes the little round bals that 

 they make, by the injury of the winds in places, fall away, and 

 fall from a high place to the bottome ; but this Beetle, desiring 

 a propagation, watcheth with perpetual care, and raising this 

 Sisyphian ball to its hold with continual striving, and that 

 tumbling back again, at length she produceth it. And truly, 

 unless it were endowed with a kinde of Divine soul (as all things 

 are full of God's wonderfulnesse), it would faint and be spent 

 in this great contest, and would never take this pains any more. 



"Beetles serve divers uses, for they both profit our mindes 

 and they cure some infirmities of our bodies. For when this 

 living creature (and scarce a living creature, for it wants some 

 senses), being of the basest kinde of insects, and nothing but a 



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