The Sacred Beetle and Others 



it? Draw a short, wrinkled sausage. 

 About the middle of this sausage, on the side, 

 graft an appendix. There you have the 

 beast, in three almost equal parts. The 

 lower portion is the abdomen; the upper, 

 where you are at first inclined to look for 

 the head, so clearly does it appear to be a 

 continuation of the part below, is the hump, 

 the inordinate, extravagant hump, bigger 

 than caricaturist ever dared conceive in the 

 wildest flights of his imagination. It oc- 

 cupies the place which by rights belongs to 

 the chest and head. Then where are these? 

 Thrust aside by the monstrous knapsack, they 

 constitute a lateral appendage, a mere knob. 

 The strange creature bends at right angles 

 under the weight of Its hump. 



When nature goes in for the grotesque, 

 she leaves us behind. Is grotesque the right 

 word? I have seen representations of 

 Monkeys adorned with preposterous noses 

 which Rabelais, for all his inspired vision of 

 the huge, never conceived ; and this though 

 he Invented the nose " like the beak of a 

 limbeck, in every part thereof most variously 

 diapered with the twinkling sparkles of 

 crimson blisters budding forth, and purpled 

 with pimples all enamelled with thick-set 

 wheals of a sanguine colour, bordered with 



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