The Sisyphus: the Instinct of Paternity 



enough to allow the mother to move around 

 her work. The smallness of the chamber 

 tells us that the father cannot remain ther« 

 for long. When the studio is ready, he must 

 go away in order to leave the sculptress 

 room to turn. We have already seen him 

 coming back to the surface some time before 

 the mother. 



The contents of the cellar consist of a 

 single pill, a masterpiece of plastic art. It 

 is a copy of the Sacred Beetle's pear on a 

 very much reduced scale, its smallness 

 making the polish of the surface and the 

 elegance of the curves all the more striking. 

 Its main diameter varies between one-half 

 and three-quarters of an inch. It is the most 

 artistic achievement of the Dung-beetle's art. 



But this perfection is of brief duration. 

 Soon the pretty pear is covered with knotty 

 excrescences, black and twisted, which dis- 

 figure it with their blotchy lumps. A part 

 of the surface, otherwise intact, disappears 

 beneath an amorphous mass of eruptions. 

 The origin of these ugly warts baffled me at 

 first. I suspected some fungous growth, 

 some Sphaeriacea, for instance, recognizable 

 by its black and pimply crust. The larva 

 showed me my mistake. 



As usual, this is a grub bent into a hook 



351 



