Though such numbers of true ancient scarabs have been unearthed in Egypt, still the supply of the genuine article does not quite keep pace with the increasing demands of the modern tourist: and there is now a flourishing manufactory of sham antiques at Luxor, where hundreds of false scarabs with nice imitation hieroglyphic inscriptions are neatly turned out for the market every season.
About sixty different kinds of live scarabs are known to inhabit the Mediterranean district in Europe, Asia, or Africa: and four of these kinds can be easily distinguished as being individually represented in the old Egyptian gems. We have no true scarab of this class living in Britain: but there are other scavenger beetles which take their place, the best known being the common dorbeetle. One of the same family, but with a quaintly horned head, exists in vast numbers on the Surrey hills where I have pitched my tent. The English dung-beetle burrows in the soft sandstone, and throws up neat little heaps of clean sand at the mouth of its hole, like miniature molehills. Still, our English scavenger beetles--known to science as Geotrupes--are not nearly so clever or so interesting as the southern type, for the female in our sort merely grubs a straight tunnel in the ground, and lays her egg in a loose mass of dung, which she drags to the bottom in a shapeless condition. This beetle utters a plaintive buzzing cry when it is chasing its mate--a soft of "last appeal" which seems calculated to soften the heart of the hardest lady beetle. It is as cunning in its way as most others of its race, for if you catch it in your hand, it at once draws in its legs to its side and "shams dead." All the English and foreign scavenger beetles perform a useful task by following up animals and clearing away their refuse; indeed, a special kind of beetle lays itself out as scavenger for each species of large animal, one kind being attached to the cow, one to the donkey, one to the camel, and so on through a long list of patrons and satellites.
You will thus see that in this wider sense all creation moved together like a vast joint-stock co-operative society, each kind working consciously for its own good alone, but each also in a certain deeper and unconscious way contributing to the general well-being of all, by its exercise of some special function. Nevertheless, the function is always performed by each plant or animal itself for its own purposes; it only incidentally serves to benefit the others. Thus the burying beetles and the scavenger beetles work first of all and ostensibly for their own food and the food of their offspring: it is merely as an incidental result, undesigned by themselves, that they assist in purifying the air and the soil for all other species. Or, to put it still more simply, while these industrious little creatures are working individually for their own ends, they are also in the wider scheme of nature working unconsciously and almost unwillingly in the service of others. Nature bribes each kind, as it were, by some personal advantage to perform good work for the benefit of the totality.