Iron County register., 1880-07-15

II
ton for them to move the corpse i'm the
very least. And they know this perfectly
well. So, being unable to bring the
corpse to the grave, they bring the
grave to the corpse.
Our two sections, having sufficiently
surveyed their prize, suddenly disap-
peared beneath it. Very soon, a little
heap of sand began to appear to one
side, and then, bending cautiously, we
could see the tiny grave-diggers' mode
OF procedure. They were working side
by side, their heads bent, their slender
black legs vigorously scraping, pushing
and kicking; their shoulders, or collars,
which were much broader than their
heads, serving the while as a brace or
support. Gradually the mole sank into
the grave that was being dug beneath
| 1t; but our sections must have been
new to their work-they were not ex-
perts--and SO they suddenly discovered
that one end of the corpse was sinking
much lower than the other, instead Of
being, as was proper, on level. This
seemed to puzzle them sadly. They
stopped digging, and, mounting the
| body, laid their heads together, as If
| in consultation over the dire catastro-
phe; but directly they set to work
again, and proved themselves to be
possessed of enough intelligence to
remedy the fault; for this time they
commenced at once to deepen the
shallOwer part of the grave. and the
mole was fast settling down Into
more level position, when darkness
made us desert our post of observation.
Our little friends had been hard at
work for three hours, ahd the mole was
scarcely more than one fourth buried.
But in the morning Gas we felt sure
would be the case), the mole had DIS
appeared, and on scraping away the
soil we found it carefully covered, three
or four inches below the surface, and
leading out from beneath it was little
round hole, where Lady Necrophorus
had come up, after laying her eggs
upon the tit-bit so laboriously provided
for her coming progeny.
A famous entomolOgist, M. Gleiditsch,
tells us some strange things about these
same curious insect sections, he having
made them a special study and subject
of experiments. Once he half-filled
glass vessel with moist earth, and
placed four sections within it; then he
laid dead Gnnet on the surface of the
soil. The insects, so far from showing
alarm at their captivity, appeared to
have but one idea in life, that of bury
ing the linnet as quickly as possible.
M. Gleiditsch had observed that one OF
the beetles was smaller than the others
Che supposed it to be a female), and
now, after two hours of hard work.
there was a sudden pause, and the
three large beetles united to drive away
the smaller one. Why did they do
la, I, f0v
such unanimous action? Was the out
cast beetle not working skillfully, or
was it working beyond its strength
Was it driven away in friendship or
enmityP Who shall sayP At all events,
the three resumed their occupation,
and though the smaller one strove sew
eral times to come back, it was not al
lowed to do so, so it finally kept at a
distance and watched the others as they
worked steadily on. But at last even
their more sturdy strength began to
give out, despite their evident resolve
to bury that innet without loss of time.
Just one little black sexton rested from
his labors, then another, but the third
beetle kept on and on and on, till nj.
Gleiditsch noted, with astonishment,
that no less than five hours had passed
since its last fellow-worker had given
out; but at last, it, too, sank down ex-
hausted. After very short rest, how
ever, it reused itself, and, with a Won
derful effort of strength, actually lifted
the linnet on its back, and settled it
down into the grave. The other bee
ties, recovering, went to work again,
but it took them three days to hollow
out the grave beneath the linnet, and
cover il out of SIGHT.
But M. Gleiditsch gave them plenty
more work to do, desiring to test their
burial capacities, and thus. in fifty days,
these four busy sections for after time
the fourth was allowed to resume work)
proceeded to dig graves for three birds,
two grasshoppers, four frogs, two fish,
two large pieces of meat, and the en-
trails of a large fish.
Another of these little grave-diggers
was so strong, and SO persevering. that
it succeeded, by its own single exer-
tions, in burying mole in two days, and,
as we have seen, the mole being fifty
times as large as the beetle. it cost
that little sexton just as much labor as
it would cost a man to bury an object
fifty times his own size-no light under
taking.
But sometimes these queer little SEX
tons encounter corpse that is too much
for them. For instance, we are told OF
a sheep that was skinned and thrown
where the beetles "most did congre-
gate" The result was that anticipated
by the naturalist who thus prepared the
bait. The body swarmtd with hungry
beetles, but all theft efforts were of no
avail The united exertions of hundreds
of Necrophagp were only able to sink it
one-fourth below the surface OF the
ground, and then they left it in despair,
but not before their entertainer-a
second Tantalus captured speci-
mems of every species existing in En-
gland, which was the scene of the ex-
pertinent.
And now a word in closing regard
ing the method of grave-digging prac-
ticed by the sextor-beet.e. Is it not
wonderfully like the plan adopted by
man in sinking wells in sandy. soilsP
The insect digs away the ground from
beneath the body, and the latter sinks