The others leave the dried, emptied carcass to the air, the sport of the winds for months on end; he, treating it as a whole, makes a clean job of things at once.

No visible trace of his work remains but a tiny hillock, a burial-mound, a tumulus.
With his expeditious method, the Necrophorus is the first of the little purifiers of the fields.

He is also one of the most celebrated of insects in respect of his psychical capacities.

This undertaker is endowed, they say, with intellectual faculties approaching to reason, such as are not possessed by the most gifted of the Bees and Wasps, the collectors of honey or game.

He is honoured by the two following anecdotes, which I quote from Lacordaire's "Introduction to Entomology," the only general treatise at my disposal: "Clairville," says the author, "records that he saw a Necrophorus vespillo, who, wishing to bury a dead Mouse and finding the soil on which the body lay too hard, proceeded to dig a hole at some distance in soil more easily displaced.