CHAPTER V 



THE SPANISH COPRIS 



To show instinct performing on behalf of the egg what 

 reason, ripened by study and experience, would advise 

 is a result of no mean philosophic import ; and I find 

 myself seized with a scruple aroused by scientific austerity. 

 Not that I wish to give science a forbidding aspect : 

 I am convinced that one can say excellent things without 

 employing a barbarous vocabulary. Clearness is the 

 supreme politeness of whoso wields a pen. I do my 

 best to observe it. And the scruple that stops me is 

 of another kind. 



I ask myself if I am not here the victim of an illusion. 

 I say to myself : 



" The Sacred Beetles and others are manufacturers of 

 balls, of pills. That is their trade, learnt we know not 

 how, prescribed perhaps by their structure, in particular 

 by their long legs, some of which are slightly curved. 

 When working for the egg, what wonder if they continue 

 underground their special craft as ball-making artisans ?" 



Setting aside the neck of the pear and the jutting tip 

 of the ovoid, details the interpretation of which presents 

 quite other difficulties, there remains the most important 

 mass as regards bulk, the globular mass, a repetition of 

 that which the insect makes outside the burrow ; there 

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