Author's Preface 



Amyntas, Corydon, Mopsus and Alexis. 

 We find here the whole series of bucolic ap- 

 pellations made famous by the poets of 

 antiquity. Virgil's eclogues have lent their 

 vocabulary for the Dung-beetles' glorifica- 

 tion. We should have to go back to the 

 Butterflies with their dainty graces to find 

 an equally poetic nomenclature. In their 

 case the epic names of the Iliad ring out, 

 borrowed from the camps of Greek and 

 Trojan, and perhaps too magnificently 

 bellicose for those peaceable winged flowers 

 whose habits in no wise recall the martial 

 deeds of an Ajax or an Achilles. Much 

 better-imagined is the bucolic title given to 

 the Dung-beetles; it tells us the insect's chief 

 characteristic, its predilection for pasture- 

 lands. 



The dung-manipulators have as head of 

 their line the Sacred Beetle or Scarab, whose 

 strange behaviour had already attracted the 

 attention of the fellah in the valley of 

 the Nile, some thousand years before the 

 Christian era. As he watered his patch of 

 onions in the spring, the Egyptian peasant 

 would see from time to time a fat black in- 

 sect pass close by, hurriedly trundling a ball 

 of Camel-dung backwards. He would watch 

 the queer rolling thing in amazement, even 



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