dissertation, I take the
beetle from the Pharaonic point of view, and, looking over all I know of
the reasons for reverence, and for being cut in stone, I make them
these:--

Firstly, he was a scavenger, and the wise men taught the people to
respect him as a means of preserving the race undiminished. The common
people have always a profound contempt for the beings who do their dirty
work, and contempt with them goes before enmity. In this the Egyptians
would only show that they were a Southern people, and so had much dirty
work to do. And in this connection I must say, that I consider that, an
undeveloped people not being awake to fine distinctions, and being
predisposed to despise everything differing from themselves, we must
attribute all the respect paid the _Scarabaeus pilularius_ to the advice
and influence of their wise men, who, so long as they _were_ wise, would
persuade them to protect every useful creature.

Secondly, the mechanical instincts of the _Scarabaeus pilularius_ must
have always excited the interest of the geometers and mechanists at a
time when geometry and mechanics were known in their simplest elements
mainly, and considered the marvellous secrets of creation. The absolute
rotundity of the pedifacture of the insect must have seemed the result
of a sense little less than preternatural, to people who were not
accustomed to reason away all recognition of the preternatural. But that
which was wonderful to me, the power of weighing so accurately the load
he was to propel, must have been not a little amazing to them, less
familiar than we have become, through subsequent researches in natural
history, with the powers of the brute creation.

Thirdly, that the _Scarabaeus pilularius_ was a soldier and hero was less
noteworthy in those days than in modern times; for then he was no man
who was no soldier, and to be brave was only a human virtue, but was
still marvellous in an insect.

And, if last, not least of the claims of our friend to reverence was the
strange line of hieroglyph he left on the _tabula rasa_ sea-washed, in
column like the message written down an obelisk; and that the most high
priest had no key to the cipher only made it more curious and more
revered.

I do not know that anything so simple ever impressed me more strangely
than the meeting for the first time on the solitary sands of Antium,
amid thoughts of Egypt's queen and her sad loves, this line of curious
figures, sand-written