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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Fabre, Poet of Science by Legros
+Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
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+Title: Fabre, Poet of Science
+
+Author: Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
+
+Release Date: October, 2002  [Etext #3489]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 05/20/01]
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Fabre, Poet of Science by Legros
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+
+
+FABRE, POET OF SCIENCE
+
+by DR. G.-V. LEGROS.
+
+
+
+
+"De fimo ad excelsa."
+J.-H. Fabre.
+
+WITH A PREFACE BY JEAN-HENRI FABRE.
+
+TRANSLATED BY BERNARD MIALL.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+The good friend who has so successfully terminated the task which he felt a
+vocation to undertake thought it would be of advantage to complete it by
+presenting to the reader a picture both of my life as a whole and of the
+work which it has been given me to accomplish.
+
+The better to accomplish his undertaking, he abstracted from my
+correspondence, as well as from the long conversations which we have so
+often enjoyed together, a great number of those memories of varying
+importance which serve as landmarks in life; above all in a life like mine,
+not exempt from many cares, yet not very fruitful in incidents or great
+vicissitudes, since it has been passed very largely, in especial during the
+last thirty years, in the most absolute retirement and the completest
+silence.
+
+Moreover, it was not unimportant to warn the public against the errors,
+exaggerations, and legends which have collected about my person, and thus
+to set all things in their true light.
+
+In undertaking this task my devoted disciple has to some extent been able
+to replace those "Memoirs" which he suggested that I should write, and
+which only my bad health has prevented me from undertaking; for I feel that
+henceforth I am done with wide horizons and "far-reaching thoughts."
+
+And yet on reading now the old letters which he has exhumed from a mass of
+old yellow papers, and which he has presented and co-ordinated with so
+pious a care, it seems to me that in the depths of my being I can still
+feel rising in me all the fever of my early years, all the enthusiasm of
+long ago, and that I should still be no less ardent a worker were not the
+weakness of my eyes and the failure of my strength to-day an insurmountable
+obstacle.
+
+Thoroughly grasping the fact that one cannot write a biography without
+entering into the sphere of those ideas which alone make a life
+interesting, he has revived around me that world which I have so long
+contemplated, and summarized in a striking epitome, and as a strict
+interpreter, my methods (which are, as will be seen, within the reach of
+all), my ideas, and the whole body of my works and discoveries; and despite
+the obvious difficulty which such an attempt would appear to present, he
+has succeeded most wonderfully in achieving the most lucid, complete, and
+vital exposition of these matters that I could possibly have wished.
+
+Jean-Henri Fabre.
+
+Sérignan, Vaucluse,
+November 12, 1911.
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+CHAPTER 1. THE INTUITION OF NATURE.
+
+
+CHAPTER 2. THE PRIMARY TEACHER.
+
+
+CHAPTER 3. CORSICA.
+
+
+CHAPTER 4. AT AVIGNON.
+
+
+CHAPTER 5. A GREAT TEACHER.
+
+
+CHAPTER 6. THE HERMITAGE.
+
+
+CHAPTER 7. THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.
+
+
+CHAPTER 8. THE MIRACLE OF INSTINCT.
+
+
+CHAPTER 9. EVOLUTION OR "TRANSFORMISM."
+
+
+CHAPTER 10. THE ANIMAL MIND.
+
+
+CHAPTER 11. HARMONIES AND DISCORDS.
+
+
+CHAPTER 12. THE TRANSLATION OF NATURE.
+
+
+CHAPTER 13. THE EPIC OF ANIMAL LIFE.
+
+
+CHAPTER 14. PARALLEL LIVES.
+
+
+CHAPTER 15. THE EVENINGS AT SÉRIGNAN.
+
+
+CHAPTER 16. TWILIGHT.
+
+
+NOTES.
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+Here I offer to the public the life of Jean-Henri Fabre; at once an
+admiring commentary upon his work and an act of pious homage, such as ought
+to be offered, while he lives, to the great naturalist who is even to-day
+so little known.
+
+Hitherto it was not easy to speak of Henri Fabre with exactitude. An enemy
+to all advertisement, he has so discreetly held himself withdrawn that one
+might almost say that he has encouraged, by his silence, many doubtful or
+unfounded rumours, which in course of time would become even more
+incorrect.
+
+For example, although quite recently his material situation was presented
+in the gloomiest of lights, while it had really for some time ceased to be
+precarious, it is none the less true that during his whole life he has had
+to labour prodigiously in order to earn a little money to feed and rear his
+family, to the great detriment of his scientific inquiries; and we cannot
+but regret that he was not freed from all material cares at least twenty
+years earlier than was the case.
+
+But he was not one to speak of his troubles to the first comer; and it was
+only after the sixth volume of the "Souvenirs entomologiques" had appeared
+that his reserve was somewhat mitigated. Yet it was necessary that he
+should speak of these troubles, that he should tell everything; and, thanks
+to his conversation and his letters, I have been able to revive the past.
+
+Among the greatest of my pleasures I count the notable honour of having
+known him, and intimately. As an absorbed and attentive witness I was
+present at the accomplishment of his last labours; I watched his last years
+of work, so critical, so touching, so forsaken, before his ultimate
+resurrection. What fruitful and suggestive lessons I learned in his
+company, as we paced the winding paths of his Harmas; or while I sat beside
+him, at his patriarchal table, interrogating that memory of his, so rich in
+remembrances that even the remotest events of his life were as near to him
+as those that had only then befallen him; so that the majority of the
+judgments to be found in this book, of which not a line has been written
+without his approval, may be regarded as the direct emanation of his mind.
+
+As far as possible I have allowed him to speak himself. Has he not sketched
+the finest pages of his "biography of a solitary student" in those racy
+chapters of his "Souvenirs": those in which he has developed his genesis as
+a naturalist and the history of the evolution of his ideas?
+(Introduction/1.) In all cases I have only introduced such indications as
+were essential to complete the sequence of events. It would have been idle
+to re-tell in the same terms what every one may read elsewhere, or to
+repeat in different and less happy terms what Fabre himself has told so
+well.
+
+I have therefore applied myself more especially to filling the gaps which
+he has left, by listening to his conversation, by appealing to his
+memories, by questioning his contemporaries, by recording the impressions
+of his sometime pupils. I have endeavoured to assemble all these data, in
+order to authenticate them, and have also gleaned many facts among his
+manuscripts (Introduction/2.), and have had recourse to all that portion of
+his correspondence which fortunately fell into my hands.
+
+This correspondence, to be truthful, does not appear at any time to have
+been very assiduous. Fabre, as we shall see in the story of his life
+(Introduction/3.), disliked writing letters, both in his studious youth and
+during the later period of isolation and silence.
+
+On the other hand, although he wrote but little, he never wrote with
+difficulty or as a mere matter of duty. Among all the letters which I have
+succeeded in collecting there are scarcely any that are not of interest
+from one point of view or another. No frivolous narratives, no futile
+acquaintances, no commonplace intimacies; everything in his life is
+serious, and everything makes for a goal.
+
+But we must set apart, as surpassing all others in interest, the letters
+which Fabre addressed to his brother during the years spent as schoolmaster
+at Carpentras or Ajaccio; for these are more especially instructive in
+respect of the almost unknown years of his youth; these most of all reveal
+his personality and are one of the finest illustrations that could be given
+of his life, a true poem of energy and disinterested labour.
+
+I have to thank M. Frédéric Fabre, who, in his fraternal piety, has
+generously placed all his family records at my disposal, and also his two
+sons, my dear friends Antonin Fabre, councillor at the Court of Nîmes, and
+Henri Fabre, of Avignon, for these precious documents; and I take this
+opportunity of expressing my profound gratitude.
+
+Let me at the same time thank all those who have associated themselves with
+my efforts by supplying me with letters in their possession and furnishing
+me with personal information; and in particular Mme Henry Devillario, M.
+Achard, and M. J. Belleudy, ex-prefect of Vaucluse; not forgetting M. Louis
+Charrasse, teacher at Beaumont-d'Orange, and M. Vayssières, professor of
+the Faculty of Sciences at Marseilles, all of whom I have to thank for
+personal and intimate information.
+
+I must also express my gratitude to M. Henri Bergson, Professor Bouvier,
+and the learned M. Paul Marchal for the advice and the valuable suggestions
+which they offered me during the preparation of this book.
+
+I shall feel fully repaid for my pains if this "Life" of one of the
+greatest of the world's naturalists, by enabling men to know him better,
+also leads them to love him the more.
+
+
+FABRE, POET OF SCIENCE.
+
+
+CHAPTER 1. THE INTUITION OF NATURE.
+
+Each thing created, says Emerson, has its painter or its poet. Like the
+enchanted princess of the fairy-tales, it awaits its predestined liberator.
+
+Every part of nature has its mystery and its beauty, its logic and its
+explanation; and the epigraph given me by Fabre himself, which appears on
+the title-page of this volume, is in no way deceptive. The tiny insects
+buried in the soil or creeping over leaf or blade have for him been
+sufficient to evoke the most important, the most fascinating problems, and
+have revealed a whole world of miracle and poetry.
+
+He saw the light at Saint-Léons, a little commune of the canton of Vezins
+in the Haut Rouergue, on the 22nd December, 1823, some seven years earlier
+than Mistral, his most famous neighbour, the greater lustre of whose
+celebrity was to eclipse his own.
+
+Here he essayed his earliest steps; here he stammered his first syllables.
+
+His early childhood, however, was passed almost wholly at Malaval, a tiny
+hamlet in the parish of Lavaysse, whose belfry was visible at quite a short
+distance; but to reach it one had to travel nearly twenty-five rough,
+mountainous miles, through a whole green countryside; green, but bare, and
+lacking in charm. (1/1.)
+
+All his paternal forebears came from Malaval, and thence one day his
+father, Antoine Fabre, came to dwell at Saint-Léons, as a consequence of
+his marriage with the daughter of the huissier, Victoire Salgues, and in
+order to prepare himself, as working apprentice, in the tricks and quibbles
+of the law. (1/2.)
+
+In the roads of Malaval, bordered with brambles, in the glades of bracken,
+and amid the meadows of broom, he received his first impressions of nature.
+At Malaval too lived his grandmother, the good old woman who could lull him
+to sleep at night with beautiful stories and simple legends, while she
+wound her distaff or spun her bobbin.
+
+But what were all these imaginary marvels, what were the ogres who smelt
+fresh meat, or "the fairies who turned pumpkins into coaches and lizards
+into footmen" beside all the marvels of reality, which already he was
+beginning to perceive?
+
+For above all things he was born a poet: a poet by instinct and by
+vocation. From his earliest childhood, "the brain hardly released from the
+swaddling-bands of unconsciousness," the things of the outer world left a
+profound and living impression. As far back as he can remember, while still
+quite a child, "a little monkey of six, still dressed in a little baize
+frock," or just "wearing his first braces," he sees himself "in ecstasy
+before the splendours of the wing-cases of a gardener-beetle, or the wings
+of a butterfly." At nightfall, among the bushes, he learned to recognize
+the chirp of the grasshopper. To put it in his own words, "he made for the
+flowers and insects as the Pieris makes for the cabbage and the Vanessa
+makes for the nettle." The riches of the rocks; the life which swarms in
+the depth of the waters; the world of plants and animals, that "prodigious
+poem; all nature filled him with curiosity and wonder." "A voice charmed
+him; untranslatable; sweeter than language and vague as a dream." (1/3.)
+
+These peculiarities are all the more astonishing in that they seem to be
+absolutely spontaneous and in nowise hereditary. What his parents were he
+himself has told us: small farmers, cultivating a little unprofitable land;
+poor "husbandmen, sowers of rye, cowherds"; and in the wretched
+surroundings of his childhood, when the only light, of an evening, came
+from a splinter of pine, steeped in resin, which was held by a strip of
+slate stuck into the wall; when his folk shut themselves in the byre, in
+times of severe cold, to save a little firewood and while away the
+evenings; when close at hand, through the bitter wind, they heard the
+howling of the wolves: here, it would seem, was nothing propitious to the
+birth of such tastes, if he had not borne them naturally within him.
+
+But is it not the very essence of genius, as it is the peculiarity of
+instinct, to spring from the depths of the invisible?
+
+Yet who shall say what stores of thought unspoken, what unknown treasures
+of observation never to be communicated, what patient reflections
+unuttered, may be housed in those toil-worn brains, in which, perhaps,
+slowly and obscurely, accumulate the germs of faculties and talents by
+which some more favoured descendant may one day benefit? How many poets
+have died unpublished or unperceived, in whom only the power of expression
+was lacking!
+
+When he was seven years old his parents recalled him to Saint-Léons, in
+order to send him to the school kept by his godfather, Pierre Ricard, the
+village schoolmaster, "at once barber, bellringer, and singer in the
+choir." Rembrandt, Teniers, nor Van Ostade never painted anything more
+picturesque than the room which served at the same time as kitchen,
+refectory, and bedroom, with "halfpenny prints papering the walls" and "a
+huge chimney, for which each had to bring his log of a morning in order to
+enjoy the right to a place at the fireside."
+
+He was never to forget these beloved places, blessed scenes of his
+childhood, amid which he grew up like a little savage, and through all his
+material sufferings, all his hours of bitterness, and even in the
+resignation of age, their idyllic memory sufficed to make his life
+fragrant. He would always see the humble paternal garden, the brook where
+he used to surprise the crayfish, the ash-tree in which he found his first
+goldfinch's nest, and "the flat stone on which he heard, for the first
+time, the mellow ringing of the bellringer frog." (1/4.) Later, when
+writing to his brother, he was to recall the good days of still careless
+life, when "he would sprawl, the sun on his belly, on the mosses of the
+wood of Vezins, eating his black bread and cream" or "ring the bells of
+Saint-Léons" and "pull the tails of the bulls of Lavaysse." (1/5.)
+
+For Henri had a brother, Frédéric, barely two years younger than he;
+equally meditative by nature, and of a serious, upright mind; but his
+tastes inclined rather to matters of administration and the understanding
+of business, so that where Frédéric was bored, Henri was more than content,
+thirstily drinking in science and poetry "among the blue campanulas of the
+hills, the pink heather of the mountains, the golden buttercups of the
+meadows, and the odorous bracken of the woods." (1/6.) Apart from this the
+two brothers "were one"; they understood one another in a marvellous
+fashion, and always loved one another. Henri never failed to watch over
+Frédéric with a wholly fatherly solicitude; he was prodigal of advice,
+helpful with his experience, doing his best to smooth away all
+difficulties, encouraging him to walk in his footsteps and make his way
+through the world behind him. He was his confidant, giving an ear to all
+that befell him of good or ill; to his fears, his disappointments, his
+hopes, and all his thoughts; and he took the keenest interest in his
+studies and researches. On the other hand, he had no more sure and devoted
+friend; none more proud of his first success, and in later days no more
+enthusiastic admirer, and none more eager for his fame. (1/7.)
+
+He was twelve years old when his father, "the first of all his line, was
+tempted by the town," and led all his family to Rodez, there to keep a
+café. The future naturalist entered the school of this town, where he
+served Mass on Sunday, in the chapel, in order to pay his fees. There again
+he was interested in the animal creation above all. When he began to
+construe Virgil the only thing that charmed him, and which he remembered,
+was the landscape in which the persons of the poem move, in which are so
+many "exquisite details concerning the cicada, the goat, and the laburnum."
+
+Thus four years went by: but then his parents were constrained to seek
+their fortune elsewhere, and transported their household to Toulouse, where
+again the father kept a café. The young Henri was admitted gratuitously to
+the seminary of the Esquille, where he managed to complete his fifth year.
+Unfortunately his progress was soon interrupted by a new exodus on the part
+of his family, which emigrated this time to Montpellier, where he was
+haunted for a time by dreams of medicine, to which he seemed notably
+adapted. Finally, a run of bad luck persisting, he had to bid farewell to
+his studies and gain his bread as best he could. We see him set out along
+the wide white roads: lost, almost a wanderer, seeking his living by the
+sweat of his brow; one day selling lemons at the fair of Beaucaire, under
+the arcades of the market or before the barracks of the Pré; another day
+enlisting in a gang of labourers who were working on the line from
+Beaucaire to Nîmes, which was then in process of construction. He knew
+gloomy days, lonely and despairing. What was he doing? of what was he
+dreaming? The love of nature and the passion for learning sustained him in
+spite of all, and often served him as nourishment; as on the day when he
+dined on a few grapes, plucked furtively at the edge of a field, after
+exchanging the poor remnant of his last halfpence for a little volume of
+Reboul's poems; soothing his hunger by reciting the verses of the gentle
+baker-poet. Often some creature kept him company; some insect never seen
+before was often his greatest pleasure; such as the pine-chafer, which he
+encountered then for the first time; that superb beetle, whose black or
+chestnut coat is sprinkled with specks of white velvet; which squeaks when
+captured, emitting a slight complaining sound, like the vibration of a pane
+of glass rubbed with the tip of a moistened finger. (1/8.)
+
+Already this young mind, romantic and classic at once, full of the ideal,
+and so positive that it seemed to seek support in an intense grasp of
+things and beings--two gifts well-nigh incompatible, and often mutually
+destructive--already it knew, not only the love of study and a passion for
+the truth, but the sovereign delight of feeling everything and
+understanding everything.
+
+It was under these conditions--that is, amid the rudest privations--that he
+ventured to enter a competitive examination for a bursary at the École
+Normale Primaire of Avignon; and his will-power realized this first miracle
+of his career--he straightway obtained the highest place.
+
+In those days, when education had barely reached the lower classes, the
+instruction given in the primary normal school was still of the most
+summary. Spelling, arithmetic, and geometry practically exhausted its
+resources. As for natural history, a poor despised science, almost unknown,
+no one dreamed of it, and no one learned or taught it; the syllabus ignored
+it, because it led to nothing. For Fabre only, notwithstanding, it was his
+fixed idea, his constant preoccupation, and "while the dictation class was
+busy around him, he would examine, in the secrecy of his desk, the sting of
+a wasp or the fruit of the oleander," and intoxicate himself with poetry.
+(1/9.) His pedagogic studies suffered thereby, and the first part of his
+stay at the normal school was by no means extremely brilliant. In the
+middle of his second year he was declared idle, and even marked as an
+insufficient pupil and of mediocre intelligence. Stung to the quick, he
+begged as a favour that he should be given the opportunity of following the
+third year's course in the six months that remained, and he made such an
+effort that at the end of the year he victoriously won his superior
+certificate. (1/10.)
+
+A year in advance of the regulation studies, his curiosity might now
+exercise itself freely in every direction, and little by little it became
+universal. A chance chemistry lesson finally awakened in him the appetite
+for knowledge, the passion for all the sciences, of which he thirsted to
+know at least the elements. Between whiles he returned to his Latin,
+translating Horace and re-reading Virgil. One day his director put an
+"Imitation" into his hands, with double columns in Greek and Latin. The
+latter, which he knew fairly well, assisted him to decipher the Greek. He
+hastened to commit to memory the vocables, and idioms and phrases of all
+kinds (1/11.), and in this curious fashion he learned the language. This
+was his only method of learning languages. It is the process which he
+recommended to his brother, who was commencing Latin:
+
+"Take Virgil, a dictionary, and a grammar, and translate from Latin into
+French for ever and for ever; to make a good version you need only common
+sense and very little grammatical knowledge or other pedantic accessories.
+
+"Imagine an old inscription half-effaced: correctness of judgment partly
+supplies the missing words, and the sense appears as if the whole were
+legible. Latin, for you, is the old inscription; the root of the word alone
+is legible: the veil of an unknown language hides the value of the
+termination: you have only the half of the words; but you have common sense
+too, and you will make use of it." (1/12.)
+
+
+CHAPTER 2. THE PRIMARY TEACHER.
+
+Furnished with his superior diploma, he left the normal school at the age
+of nineteen, and commenced as a primary teacher in the College of
+Carpentras.
+
+The salary of the school teacher, in the year 1842, did not exceed 28
+pounds sterling a year, and this ungrateful calling barely fed him, save on
+"chickpeas and a little wine." But we must beware lest, in view of the
+increasing and excessive dearness of living in France, the beggarly
+salaries of the poor schoolmasters of a former day, so little worthy of
+their labours and their social utility, appear even more disproportionately
+small than they actually were. What is more to the point, the teachers had
+no pension to hope for. They could only count on a perpetuity of labour,
+and when sickness or infirmity arrived, when old age surprised them, after
+fifty or sixty years of a narrow and precarious existence, it was not
+merely poverty that awaited them; for many there was nothing but the
+blackest destitution. A little later, when they began to entertain a vague
+hope of deliverance, the retiring pension which was held up to their gaze,
+in the distant future, was at first no more than forty francs, and they had
+to await the advent of Duruy, the great minister and liberator, before
+primary instruction was in some degree raised from this ignominious level
+of abasement.
+
+It was a melancholy place, this college, "where life had something
+cloistral about it: each master occupied two cells, for, in consideration
+of a modest payment, the majority were lodged in the establishment, and ate
+in common at the principal's table."
+
+It was a laborious life, full of distasteful and repugnant duties. We can
+readily imagine, with the aid of the striking picture which Fabre has drawn
+for us, what life was in these surroundings, and what the teaching was:
+"Between four high walls I see the court, a sort of bear-pit where the
+scholars quarrelled for the space beneath the boughs of a plane-tree; all
+around opened the class-rooms, oozing with damp and melancholy, like so
+many wild beasts' cages, deficient in light and air...for seats, a plank
+fixed to the wall...in the middle a chair, the rushes of the seat departed,
+a blackboard, and a stick of chalk." (2/1.)
+
+Let the teachers of our spacious and well-lighted schools of to-day ponder
+on these not so distant years, and measure the progress accomplished.
+Evoking the memory of their humble colleague of Carpentras, may they feel
+the true greatness of his example: a noble and a glorious example, of which
+they may well be proud.
+
+And what pupils! "Dirty, unmannerly: fifty young scoundrels, children or
+big lads, with whom," no doubt, "he used to squabble," but whom, after all,
+he contrived to manage, and by whom he was listened to and respected: for
+he knew precisely what to say to them, and how, while talking lightly, to
+teach them the most serious things. For the joy of teaching, and of
+continually learning by teaching others, made everything endurable. Not
+only did he teach them to read, write, and cipher, which then included
+almost the entire programme of primary education; he endeavoured also to
+place his own knowledge at their service, as he himself acquired it.
+
+It was not only his love of the work that sustained him; it was the desire
+to escape from the rut, to accomplish yet another stage; to emerge, in
+short, from so unsatisfactory a position. Now nothing but physical and
+mathematical science would allow him to entertain the hope of "making an
+opening" in the world of secondary schoolmasters. He accordingly began to
+study physics, quite alone, "with an impossible laboratory, experimenting
+after his own fashion"; and it was by teaching them to his pupils that he
+learned first of all chemistry, inexpensively performing little elementary
+experiments before them, "with pipe-bowls for crucibles and aniseed flasks
+for retorts," and finally algebra, of which he knew not a word before he
+gave his first lesson. (2/2.)
+
+How he studied, what was the secret of his method, he told his brother a
+few years later, when the latter, marking time behind him, was pursuing the
+same career. A very disappointing career, no doubt, and far from lucrative,
+but "one of the noblest; one of those best fitted for a noble spirit, and a
+lover of the good." (2/3.)
+
+Listen to the lesson which he gives his brother:
+
+"To-day is Thursday; nothing calls you out of doors; you choose a
+thoroughly quiet retreat, where the light is not too strong. There you are,
+elbows on table, your thumbs to your ears, and a book in front of you. The
+intelligence awakes; the will holds the reins of it; the outer world
+disappears, the ear no longer hears, the eye no longer sees, the body no
+longer exists; the mind schools itself, recollects itself; it is finding
+knowledge, and its insight increases. Then the hours pass quickly, quickly;
+time has no measure. Now it is evening. What a day, great God! But hosts of
+truths are grouped in the memory; the difficulties which checked you
+yesterday have fused in the fire of reflection; volumes have been devoured,
+and you are content with your day...
+
+"When something embarrasses you do not abuse the help of your colleagues;
+with assistance the difficulty is only evaded; with patience and reflection
+IT IS OVERTHROWN. Moreover, one knows thoroughly only what one learns
+oneself; and I advise you earnestly, as far as possible, to have recourse
+to no aid other than reflection, above all for the sciences. A book of
+science is an enigma to be deciphered; if some one gives you the key of the
+enigma nothing appears more simple and more natural than the explanation,
+but if a second enigma presents itself you will be as unskilful as you were
+with the first...
+
+"It is probable that you will get the chance of a few lessons; do not by
+preference accept the easier and more lucrative, but rather the more
+difficult, even when the subject is one of which as yet you know nothing.
+The self-esteem which will not allow one's true character to be seen is a
+powerful aid to the will. Do not forget the method of Jules Janin, running
+from house to house in Paris for a few wretched lessons in Latin: 'Unable
+to get anything out of my stupid pupils, with the besotted son of the
+marquis I was simultaneously pupil and professor: I explained the ancient
+authors to myself, and so, in a few months, I went through an excellent
+course of rhetoric...'
+
+"Above all you must not be discouraged; time is nothing provided the will
+is always alert, always active, and never distracted; 'strength will come
+as you travel.'
+
+"Try only for a few days this method of working, in which the whole energy,
+concentrated on one point, explodes like a mine and shatters obstacles; try
+for a few days the force of patience, strength, and perseverance; and you
+will see that nothing is impossible!" (2/4.)
+
+These serious reflections show very clearly that his mind was already as
+mature, as earnest, and as concentrated as it was ever to be.
+
+Not only did he join example to precept; he looked about him and began to
+observe nature in her own house. The doings of the Mason-bee, which he
+encountered for the first time, aroused his interest to such a pitch that,
+being no longer able to constrain his curiosity, he bought--at the cost of
+what privations!--Blanchard's "Natural History of the Articulata," then a
+classic work, which he was to re-read a hundred times, and which he still
+retains, giving it the first place in his modest library, in memory of his
+early joys and emotions.
+
+The rocks also arrested and captivated his attention: and already the first
+volumes were corpulent of what was eventually to become his gigantic
+herbiary. His brother, about to leave for Vezins on vacation, was told of
+the specimens which he wanted to complete his collection; for although he
+had never set foot there since his first departure, he recalled, with
+remarkable precision, all the plants that grew in his native countryside;
+their haunts, their singularities, and the characteristics by which one
+could not fail to recognize them: as well as all the places which they
+chose by preference, where he used to wander as an urchin; the Parnassia
+palustris, "which springs up in the damp meadows, below the beech-wood to
+the west of the village; which bears a superb white flower at the top of a
+slightly twisted stem, having an oval leaf about its middle"; the purple
+digitalis, "whose long spindles of great red flowers, speckled with white
+inside, and shaped like the fingers of a glove," border a certain road; all
+the ferns that grow on the wastes, "amid which it is often no easy task to
+recollect one's whereabouts," and on the arid hills all the heathers, pink,
+white, and bluish, with different foliage, "of which the innumerable
+species do not, however, very greatly differ." Nothing is to be neglected;
+"every plant, whatever it may be, great or little, rare or common, were it
+only a frond of moss, may have its interest." (2/5.)
+
+Never weary of work, he accumulated all these treasures in his little
+museum, in order to study them the better; he collected all the coins
+exhumed from this ancient soil, formerly Roman, "records of humanity more
+eloquent than books," and which revealed to him the only method of learning
+and actually re-living history: for he saw in knowledge not merely a means
+of gaining his bread, but "something nobler; the means of raising the
+spirit in the contemplation of the truth, of isolating it at will from the
+miseries of reality, so to find, in these intellectual regions, the only
+hours of happiness that we may be permitted to taste." (2/6.)
+
+Fabre was so steeped in this passion for knowledge that he wished to evoke
+it in his brother, now teacher at Lapalud, on the Rhône, not far from
+Orange. It seemed to him that he would delight in his wealth still better
+could he share it with another. (2/7.) He stimulated him, pricked him on,
+and sought to encourage the remarkable aptitude for mathematics with which
+he believed him endowed. He employed his whole strength in breathing into
+the other's mind "that taste for the true and the beautiful" which
+possessed his own nature; he wished to share with him those stores of
+learning "which he had for some years so painfully amassed"; he would
+profit by the vacation to place them at his disposal; they would work
+together "and the light would come." Above all his brother must not allow
+his intelligence to slumber, must beware of "extinguishing that divine
+light without which one can, it is true, attend to one's business, but
+which alone can make a man honourable and respected."
+
+Let him, on the contrary, cultivate his mind incessantly, "the only
+patrimony on which either of us can count"; the reward would be his moral
+well-being, and, he hoped, his physical welfare also.
+
+Once more he reinforced his advice by that excellent counsel which was
+always his own lodestar:
+
+"Science, Frédéric, knowledge is everything...You are too good a thinker
+not to say with me that no one can better employ his time than by acquiring
+fresh knowledge...Work, then, when you have the opportunity...an
+opportunity that very few may possess, and for which you ought to be only
+too thankful. But I will stop, for I feel my enthusiasm is going to my
+head, and my reasons are so good already that I have no need of still more
+triumphant reasons to convince you." (2/8.)
+
+He had only one passion: shooting; more especially the shooting of larks.
+This sport delighted him, "with the mirror darting its intermittent beams
+under the rays of the morning sun amid the general scintillation of the
+dewdrops and crystals of hoarfrost hanging on every blade of grass." (2/9.)
+
+His sight was admirably sure, and he rarely missed his aim. His passion for
+shooting was always sustained by the same motive: the desire to acquire
+fresh knowledge; to examine unknown creatures close at hand; to discover
+what they ate and how they lived.
+
+Later, when he again took up his gun, it was still because of his love of
+life: it was to enable him to enumerate, inventory, and interrogate his new
+compatriots, his feathered fellow-citizens of Sérignan; to inform himself
+of their diet, to reveal the contents of their crops and gizzards.
+
+At one time he suddenly ceased to employ this distraction; he seems to have
+sacrificed it easily, under the stress of present necessities and cruel
+anxieties as to his uncertain future. "When we do not know where we shall
+be tomorrow nothing can distract us." (2/10.)
+
+His responsibilities were increasing. He had lately married. On the 30th
+October, 1844, he was wedded to a young girl of Carpentras, Marie Villard,
+and already a child was born. His parents, always unlucky, met nowhere with
+any success. By dint of many wanderings they had finally become stranded at
+Pierrelatte, the chief town of the canton of La Drôme, sheltered by the
+great rock which has given the place its name; and there again, of course,
+they kept a café, situated on the Place d'Armes.
+
+The whole family was now assembled in the same district, a few miles only
+one from another: but Henri was really its head. Having heard that a
+quarrel had arisen between his brother and his mother, he wrote to Frédéric
+in reprimand; gently scolding him and begging him to set matters right,
+"even if all the wrongs were not on his side."
+
+"My father, in one of his letters, complains that in spite of your nearness
+you have not yet been to see them. I know very well there is some reason
+for sulking; but what matter? Give it up: forget everything; do your best
+to put an end to all these petty and ugly estrangements. You will do so,
+won't you? I count on it, for the happiness of all." (2/11.)
+
+He was their arbitrator, their adviser, their oracle, their bond of union.
+
+With all this, he was ready to attempt the two examinations which were to
+decide his future. Very shortly, at Montpellier, he passed almost
+successively, at an interval of only a few months the examinations for both
+his baccalauréats; and then the two licentiate examinations in mathematics
+and physical science.
+
+While he was ardently studying for these examinations, sorrow for the first
+time knocked at his door. His first-born fell suddenly ill, and in a few
+days died. On this occasion all his ardent spirituality asserted itself,
+though in stricken accents, in the letter which he wrote to his brother to
+announce his loss:
+
+"After a few days of a marked improvement, which made me think he was
+saved, two large teeth were cut...and in three days a dreadful fever took
+him, not from us, who will follow him, but from this miserable world. Ah,
+poor child, I shall always see you as you were during those last moments,
+turning those wide, wandering eyes toward heaven, seeking the way to your
+new country. With a heart full of tears, I shall often let my thoughts go
+straying after you; but alas! with the eyes of the body I shall never see
+you again. I shall see you no more: yet only a few days ago I was making
+the finest plans for you. I used to work for you only; in my studies I
+thought only of you. Grow up, I used to say, and I will pour into your mind
+all the knowledge which has cost me so dear, which I am hoarding little by
+little...But reflection leads me to higher thoughts. I choke back the tears
+in my heart, and I congratulate him that Heaven has mercifully spared him
+this life of trials...My poor child...you will never, like your father,
+have to struggle against poverty and misfortune; you will never know the
+bitterness of life, and the difficulties of creating a position at a time
+when there are so many paths that lead to failure...I weep for you because
+we have lost you, but I rejoice because you are happy...You are happy, and
+this is not the mad hope of a father broken by sorrow; no, your last glance
+told me so, too eloquently for me to doubt it. Oh, how beautiful you were
+in your mortal pallor; the last sigh on your lips, your gaze upon heaven,
+and your soul ready to fly into the bosom of God! Your last day was the
+most beautiful!" (2/12.)
+
+Although study was his refuge, although he was thereby able to live through
+these evil days without too greatly feeling their weight, his position was
+hateful, and he lived a wretched life "from one day to another, like a
+beggar."
+
+In those troublous times, when education was of no account, it often
+happened that his teacher's salary was several months in arrears, and the
+city of Carpentras, "not being in funds," paid it only by instalments, and
+even so kept him a long time waiting. "One has to besiege the paymaster's
+door merely to obtain a trifle on account. I am ashamed of the whole
+business, and I would gladly abandon my claim if I knew where to raise any
+money." (2/13.)
+
+The genius of Balzac has recorded some unforgettable types of those poor
+and notable lives, at once so humble and so lofty. He has described the
+village curé and the country doctor. But how we should have loved to
+encounter in his gallery, among so many living portraits, a picture of the
+university life of fifty years ago; and above all a picture of the small
+schoolmaster of other days, living a life so narrow, so slavish, so
+painful, and yet so full of worth, so imbued with the sense of duty, and
+withal so resigned; a portrait for which Fabre might have served as model
+and prototype, and for which he himself has drawn an unforgettable sketch.
+
+He awaited impatiently the news of his removal, very modestly limiting his
+ambitions to the hope of entering some lycée as professor of the sciences.
+His rector was not unnaturally astonished that a young man of such unusual
+worth, already twice a licentiate, should be so little appreciated by those
+in high places and allowed to stagnate so long in an inferior post, and one
+unworthy of him.
+
+In the end, however, after much patient waiting, he became indignant; as
+always, he could see nothing ahead. The chair of mathematics at Tournon
+escaped him. Another position, at Avignon, also "slipped through his
+fingers"; why or how he never knew. He "began to see clearly what life is,
+and how difficult it is to make one's mark amid all this army of schemers,
+beggars and imbeciles who besiege every vacant post."
+
+But his heart was "none the less hot with indignation"; he had had enough
+of "Carpentras, that accursed little hole"; and when the vacations came
+round once more he "plainly considered the question" and declared "that he
+would never again set foot inside a communal school." (2/14.)
+
+He wrote to the rector: "If instead of crushing me into the narrow round of
+a primary school they would give me some employment of the kind for which
+my studies and ideas fit me, they would know then what is hatching in my
+head and what untirable activity there is in me." (2/15.)
+
+He resigned himself nevertheless; he cursed and swore and stormed at his
+fate; but he had once more to put up with it "for want of a better." All
+the same "the injustice was too unheard-of, and no one had ever seen or
+would ever see the like: to give him two licentiate's diplomas, and to make
+him conjugate verbs for a pack of brats! It was too much!" (2/16.)
+
+
+CHAPTER 3. CORSICA.
+
+At last the chair of physics fell vacant at the college of Ajaccio, the
+salary being 72 pounds sterling, and he left for Corsica. His stay there
+was well calculated to impress him. There the intense impressionability
+which the little peasant of Aveyron received at birth could only be
+confirmed and increased. He felt that this superb and luxuriant nature was
+made for him, and that he was born for it; to understand and interpret it.
+He would lose himself in a delicious intoxication, amid the deep woodlands,
+the mountains rich with scented flowers, wandering through the maquis, the
+myrtle scrub, through jungles of lentisk and arbutus; barely containing his
+emotion when he passed beneath the great secular chestnut-trees of
+Bastelica, with their enormous trunks and leafy boughs, whose sombre
+majesty inspired in him a sort of melancholy at once poetic and religious.
+Before the sea, with its infinite distances, he lingered in ecstasy,
+listening to the song of the waves, and gathering the marvellous shells
+which the snow-white breakers left upon the beach, and whose unfamiliar
+forms filled him with delight.
+
+He was soon so accustomed to his new life in peaceful Ajaccio, whose
+surroundings, decked in eternal verdure, are so captivating and so
+beautiful, that in spite of a vague desire for change he now dreaded to
+leave it. He never wearied of admiring and exalting the beautiful and
+majestic aspects of his new home. How he longed to share his enthusiasm
+with his father or his brother, as he rambled through the neighbouring
+maquis!
+
+"The infinite, glittering sea at my feet, the dreadful masses of granite
+overhead, the white, dainty town seated beside the water, the endless
+jungles of myrtle, which yield intoxicating perfumes, the wastes of
+brushwood which the ploughshare has never turned, which cover the mountains
+from base to summit; the fishing-boats that plough the gulf: all this forms
+a prospect so magnificent, so striking, that whosoever has beheld it must
+always long to see it again." (3/1.)
+
+"What is their rock of Pierrelatte, that enormous block of stone which
+overhangs the place where they dwell, a reef which rises from the surface
+of the ancient sea of alluvium, compared with these blocks of uprooted
+granite which lie upon the hillsides here?"
+
+And what were the Aubrac hills which traversed his native country; what was
+the Ventoux even, that famous Alp, "beside the peaks which rise about the
+gulf of Ajaccio, always crowned with clouds and whitened with snow, even
+when the soil of the plains is scorching and rings like a fired brick?"
+
+Time did nothing to abate these first impressions, and after more than a
+year on the island he was still full of wonder "at the sight of these
+granite crests, corroded by the severities of the climate, jagged,
+overthrown by the lightning, shattered by the slow but sure action of the
+snows, and these vertiginous gulfs through which the four winds of heaven
+go roaring; these vast inclined planes on which snow-drifts form thirty,
+sixty, and ninety feet in depth, and across which flow winding watercourses
+which go to fill, drop by drop, the yawning craters, there to form lakes,
+black as ink when seen in the shadow, but blue as heaven in the light...
+
+"But it would be impossible for me to give you the least idea of this dizzy
+spectacle, this chaos of rocks, heaped in frightful disorder. When, closing
+my eyes, I contemplate these results of the convulsion of the soil in my
+mind's eye, when I hear the screaming of the eagles, which go wheeling
+through the bottomless abysses, whose inky shadows the eye dares hardly
+plumb, vertigo seizes me, and I open my eyes to reassure myself by the
+reality."
+
+And he sends with his letter a few leaves of the snow immortelle--the
+edelweiss--plucked on the highest summits, amid the eternal snows; "you
+will put this in some book, and when, as you turn the leaves, the
+immortelle meets your eyes, it will give you an excuse for dreaming of the
+beautiful horrors of its native place." (3/2.)
+
+What a misfortune for him, what regret he would feel, "if he had now to go
+to some trivial country of plains, where he would die of boredom!"
+
+For him everything was unfamiliar: not only the flora, but the maritime
+wealth of this singular country. He would set out of a morning, visiting
+the coves and creeks, roving along the beaches of this magnificent gulf, a
+lump of bread in his pocket, quenching his thirst with sea-water in default
+of fresh!
+
+They were mornings full of rosy illusions, whose smiling hopes were
+revealed in his admirable letters to his brother. Already he meditated a
+conchology of Corsica, a colossal history of all the molluscs which live
+upon its soil or in its waters. (3/3.) He collected all the shells he could
+procure. He analysed, described, classed, and co-ordinated not only the
+marine species, but the terrestrial and freshwater shells also, extant or
+fossil. He asked his brother to collect for him all the shells he could
+find in the marshes of Lapalud, in the brooks and ditches of the
+neighbourhood of Orange. In his enthusiasm he tried to convince him of the
+immense interest of these researches, which might perhaps seem ridiculous
+or futile to him; but let him only think of geology; the humblest shell
+picked up might throw a sudden light upon the formation of this or that
+stratum. None are to be disdained: for men have considered, with reason,
+that they were honouring the memory of their eminent fellows by giving
+their names to the rarest and most beautiful. Witness the magnificent Helix
+dedicated to Raspail, which is found only in the caverns where the
+strawberry-tree grows amid the high mountains of Corsica. (3/4.)
+
+Moreover, he said, "the infinitesimal calculus of Leibnitz will show you
+that the architecture of the Louvre is less learned than that of a snail:
+the eternal geometer has unrolled his transcendent spirals on the shell of
+the mollusc that you, like the vulgar profane, know only seasoned with
+spinach and Dutch cheese." (3/5.)
+
+For all that, he did not neglect his mathematics, in which, on the
+contrary, he found abundant and suggestive recreation. The properties of a
+figure or a curve which he had newly discovered prevented his sleep for
+several nights.
+
+"All this morning I have been busy with star-shaped polygons, and have
+proceeded from surprise to surprise...perceiving in the distance, as I
+advanced, unforeseen and marvellous consequences."
+
+Here, among others, is one question which suddenly presented itself to his
+mind "in the midst of the spikes" of his polygons: what would be the period
+of the rotation of the sun on its own centre if its atmosphere reached as
+far as the earth? And this question gave rise to another, "without which
+the sequence stops then and there; number, space, movement, and order form
+a single chain, the first link of which sets all the rest in motion."
+(3/6.) And the hours went by quickly, so quickly with "x," the plants and
+the shells, that "literally there was no time to eat."
+
+For Fabre was born a poet, and mathematics borders upon poetry; he saw in
+algebra "the most magnificent flights," and the figures of analytical
+geometry unrolled themselves in his imagination "in superb strophes"; the
+Ellipse, "the trajectory of the planets, with its two related foci, sending
+from one to the other a constant sum of vector radii"; the Hyperbole, "with
+repulsive foci, the desperate curve which plunges into space in infinite
+tentacles, approaching closer and closer to a straight line, the asymptote,
+without ever finally attaining it"; the Parabola, "which seeks fruitlessly
+in the infinite for its second, lost centre: it is the trajectory of the
+bomb: it is the path of certain comets which come one day to visit our sun,
+then flee into the depths whence they never return." (3/7.)
+
+And one fine morning we behold him mounting, thrilled by a lyric passion,
+to the lofty regions in which Number, "irresistible, omnipotent, keystone
+of the vault of the universe, rules at once Time and Space." He ascends, he
+rushes forward, farther than the chariot--
+
+"Beyond the Husbandman who ploughs in space
+And sows the suns in furrows of the skies."
+
+He ascends those tracks of flame, where on high
+
+    "in those lists inane
+Wise regulator, Number holds the reins
+  Of those indomitable steeds;
+Number has set a bit i' the foaming mouths
+Of these Leviathans, and with nervous hand
+  Controls them in their tracks;
+
+Their smoking flanks beneath the yoke in vain
+Quiver; their nostrils vainly void as foam
+Dense tides of lava; and in vain they rear;
+For Number on their mettled haunches poised
+Holds them, or duly with the rein controls,
+Or in their flanks buries his spur divine." (3/8.)
+
+Later he confessed all that he owed, as a writer, to geometry, whose severe
+discipline forms and exercises the mind, gives it the salutary habit of
+precision and lucidity, and puts it on its guard against terms which are
+incorrect or unduly vague, giving it qualities far superior to all the
+"tropes of rhetoric."
+
+It was then that he became the pupil of Requien of Avignon, the retired
+botanist, a lofty but somewhat limited mind, who was hardly capable of
+opening up other horizons to him. But Requien did at least enrich his
+memory by a prodigious quantity of names of plants with which he had not
+been acquainted. He revealed to him the immense flora of Corsica, which he
+himself had come to study, and for which Fabre was to gather such a vast
+amount of material.
+
+Fabre found in Requien more especially a friend "proof against anything";
+and when the latter died almost suddenly at Bonifacio, Fabre was
+overwhelmed by the sad news. On that very day he had on the table before
+him a parcel of plants gathered for the dead botanist. "I cannot let my
+eyes rest upon it," he wrote at the time, "without feeling my heart wrung
+and my sight dim with tears." (3/9.)
+
+But the most admirably fruitful encounter, as it exercised the profoundest
+influence upon his destiny, was his meeting with Moquin-Tandon, a Toulouse
+professor who followed Requien to Corsica, to complete the work which the
+latter had left unfinished: the complete inventory of the prodigious wealth
+of vegetation, of the innumerable species and varieties which Fabre and he
+collected together, on the slopes and summits of Monte Renoso, often
+botanizing "up in the clouds, mantle on back and numb with cold." (3/10.)
+
+Moquin-Tandon was not merely a skilful naturalist; he was one of the most
+eloquent and scholarly scientists of his time. Fabre owed to him, not his
+genius, to be sure, but the definite indication of the path he was finally
+to take, and from which he was never again to stray.
+
+Moquin-Tandon, a brilliant writer and "an ingenious poet in his
+Montpellerian dialect," (3/11.) taught Fabre never to forget the value of
+style and the importance of form, even in the exposition of a purely
+descriptive science such as botany. He did even more, by one day suddenly
+showing Fabre, between the fruit and the cheese, "in a plate of water," the
+anatomy of the snail. This was his first introduction to his true destiny
+before the final revelation of which I shall presently speak. Fabre
+understood then and there that he could do decidedly better than to stick
+to mathematics, though his whole career would feel the effects of that
+study.
+
+"Geometers are made; naturalists are born ready-made," he wrote to his
+brother, still excited by this incident, "and you know better than any one
+whether natural history is not my favourite science." (3/12.)
+
+>From that time forward he began to collect not only dead, inert, or
+dessicated forms, mere material for study, with the aim of satisfying his
+curiosity; he began to dissect with ardour, a thing he had never done
+before. He housed his tiny guests in his cupboard; and occupied himself, as
+he was always to do in the future, with the smaller living creatures only.
+
+"I am dissecting the infinitely little; my scalpels are tiny daggers which
+I make myself out of fine needles; my marble slab is the bottom of a
+saucer; my prisoners are lodged by the dozen in old match-boxes; maxime
+miranda in minimis." (3/13.)
+
+Roaming at night along the marshy beaches, he contracted fever, and several
+terrible attacks, accompanied by alarming tremors, left him so bloodless
+and feeble that, much against his will, he had to beg for relief, and even
+insist upon his prompt return to the mainland. in the meantime he obtained
+sick-leave, and returned to Provence after a terrible crossing which lasted
+no less than three days and two nights, on a sea so furious that he gave
+himself up for lost. (3/14.)
+
+Slowly he recovered his health, and after a second but brief stay at
+Ajaccio he received the news of his appointment to the lycée of Avignon.
+(3/15.)
+
+He returned with his imagination enriched and his mind expanded, with
+settled ideas, and thoroughly ripe for his task.
+
+
+CHAPTER 4. AT AVIGNON.
+
+The resolute worker resumed his indefatigable labours with an ardour
+greater than ever, for now he was haunted by a noble ambition, that of
+becoming a teacher of the superior grade, and of "talking plants and
+animals" in a chair of the faculty. With this end in view he added to his
+two diplomas--those of mathematics and physics--a third certificate, that
+of natural sciences. His success was triumphant.
+
+Already tenacious and fearless in affirming what he believed to be the
+truth, he astonished and bewildered the professors of Toulouse. Among the
+subjects touched upon by the examiners was the famous question of
+spontaneous generation, which was then so vital, and which gave rise to so
+many impassioned discussions. The examiner, as it chanced, was one of the
+leading apostles of this doctrine. The future adversary of Darwin, at the
+risk of failure, did not scruple to argue with him, and to put forward his
+personal convictions and his own arguments. He decided the vexed question
+in his own way, on his own responsibility. A personality already so
+striking was regarded with admiration; a candidate so far out of the
+ordinary was welcomed with enthusiasm, and but for the insufficiency of the
+budget which so scantily met the needs of public instruction his
+examination fees would have been returned. (4/1.)
+
+Why, after this brilliant success, was Fabre not tempted to enter himself
+for a fellowship, which would later in his career have averted so many
+disappointments? It was doubtless because he felt, obscurely, that his
+ideal future lay along other lines, and that he would have been taking a
+wrong turning. Despite all the solicitations which were addressed to him he
+would think of nothing but "his beloved studies in natural history" (4/2.);
+he feared to lose precious time in preparing himself for a competitive
+examination; "to compromise by such labour, which he felt would be
+fruitless" (4/3.), the studies which he had already commenced, and the
+inquiries already carried out in Corsica. He was busy with his first
+original labours, the theses which he was preparing with a view to his
+doctorate in natural science, "which might one day open the doors of a
+faculty for him, far more easily than would a fellowship and its
+mathematics." (4/4.)
+
+At heart he was utterly careless of dignities and degrees. He worked only
+to learn, not to attain and follow up a settled calling. What he hoped
+above all was to succeed in devoting all his leisure to those marvellous
+natural sciences in which he could vaguely foresee studies full of
+interest; something animated and vital; a thousand fascinating themes, and
+an atmosphere of poetry.
+
+His genius, as yet invisible, was ripening in obscurity, but was ready to
+come forth; he lacked only the propitious circumstance which would allow
+him to unfold his wings.
+
+He was seeking them in vain when a volume by Léon Dufour, the famous
+entomologist, who then lived in the depths of the Landes, fell by chance
+into his hands, and lit the first spark of that beacon which was presently
+to decide the definite trend of his ideas.
+
+It was this incident which then and there developed the germs already
+latent within him. These had only awaited such an occasion as that which so
+fortunately came to pass one evening of the winter of 1854.
+
+Fabre offers yet another example of the part so often played by chance in
+the manifestations of talent. How many have suddenly felt the unexpected
+awakening of gifts which they did not suspect, as a result of some unusual
+circumstance!
+
+Was it not simply as a result of having read a note by the Russian chemist
+Mitscherlich on the comparison of the specific characteristics of certain
+crystals that Pasteur so enthusiastically took up his researches into
+molecular asymmetry which were the starting-point of so many wonderful
+discoveries?
+
+Again, we need only recall the case of Brother Huber, the celebrated
+observer of the bee, who, having out of simple curiosity undertaken to
+verify certain experiments of Réaumur's, was so completely and immediately
+fascinated by the subject that it became the object of the rest of his
+life.
+
+Again, we may ask what Claude Bernard would have been had he not met
+Magendie? Similarly Léon Dufour's little work was to Fabre the road to
+Damascus, the electric impulse which decided his vocation.
+
+It dealt with a very singular fact concerning the manners of one of the
+hymenoptera, a wasp, a Cerceris, in whose nest Dufour had found small
+coleoptera of the genus Buprestis, which, under all the appearances of
+death, retained intact for an incredible time their sumptuous costume,
+gleaming with gold, copper, and emerald, while the tissues remained
+perfectly fresh. In a word, the victims of Cerceris, far from being
+desiccated or putrefied, were found in a state of integrity which was
+altogether paradoxical.
+
+Dufour merely believed that the Buprestes were dead, and he gave an
+attempted explanation of the phenomenon.
+
+Fabre, his curiosity and interest aroused, wished to observe the facts for
+himself; and, to his great surprise, he discovered how incomplete and
+insufficiently verified were the observations of the man who was at that
+time known as "the patriarch of entomologists."
+
+>From that moment he saw his way ahead; he suspected that there was still
+much to discover and much to revise in this vast department of nature, and
+conceived the idea of resuming the work so splendidly outlined by Réaumur
+and the two Hubers, but almost completely neglected since the days of those
+illustrious masters. He divined that here were fresh pastures, a vast
+unexplored country to be opened up, an entire unimagined science to be
+founded, wonderful secrets to be discovered, magnificent problems to be
+solved, and he dreamed of consecrating himself unreservedly, of employing
+his whole life in the pursuit of this object; that long life whose fruitful
+activity was to extend over nearly ninety years, and which was to be so
+"representative" by the dignity of the man, the probity of the expert, the
+genius of the observer, and the originality of the writer.
+
+The year 1855 saw the first appearance, in the "Annales des sciences
+naturelles," of the famous memoir which marked the beginning of his fame:
+the history, which might well be called marvellous and incredible, of the
+great Cerceris, a giant wasp and "the finest of the Hymenoptera which hunt
+for booty at the foot of Mont Ventoux." (4/5.)
+
+Fabre was now thirty-two years old, and his situation as assistant-
+professor of physics was somewhat precarious. From the 72 pounds sterling
+which he drew at Ajaccio, an overseas post, his salary was reduced, on his
+return to the mainland, to 64 pounds sterling, and during the whole of his
+stay at Avignon he obtained neither promotion nor the smallest increase of
+pay, excepting a few additional profits which were unconnected with his
+habitual duties. When he left the university after twenty well-filled
+years, he left as he had entered, with the same title, rank, and salary of
+a mere assistant-professor.
+
+Yet all about him "everywhere and for every one, all was black indeed": his
+family had increased and therewith his expenses; there were now seven at
+table every day. Very shortly his modest salary would no longer suffice; he
+was obliged to supplement it by all sorts of hack-work--classes,
+"repetitions," private lessons; tasks which repelled him, for they absorbed
+all his available time; they prevented him from giving himself up to his
+favourite studies, to his silent and solitary observations. Nevertheless,
+he acquitted himself of these duties patiently and conscientiously, for at
+heart he loved his profession, and was rather a fellow-disciple than a
+master to his pupils. For this reason all those about him worked with
+praiseworthy assiduity; even the worst elements, the black sheep, the "bad
+eggs" of other classes, with him were suddenly transformed and as attentive
+as the rest. Although he knew how to keep order, how to make himself
+respected, and could on occasion deal severely and speak sternly, so that
+very few dared to forget themselves before him, he knew also how to be
+merry with his pupils, chatting with them familiarly, putting himself in
+their place, entering into their ideas, and making himself their rival. If
+life was laborious under his ferula, it was also merry. The best proof of
+this is the fact that of all his colleagues at the lycée he was the only
+one who had no nickname, a rarity in scholastic annals.
+
+He did not therefore object to these lessons; but while at Carpentras he
+was made much of and praised by the principal, was a general favourite, and
+had perfect liberty to follow his inspiration during his partly gratuitous
+classes, here the hours and the programme tied him down, which was
+precisely what he found insupportable.
+
+Everything made things difficult for him here: his external self; his
+character, ever so little shy and unsocial; his temperament, which was made
+for solitude.
+
+In the thick of this hierarchical society of university professors he
+remained independent; he knew nothing of what was said or what was
+happening in the college, and his colleagues were always better informed
+than he. (4/6.) As he was not a fellow, he was made to feel the fact and
+was treated as a subordinate; the others, who prided themselves on the
+title, and who were incapable of recognizing his merit, which was a little
+beyond them, were jealous of him, all the more inasmuch as his name was
+momentarily noised abroad, and they revenged themselves by calling him "the
+fly" among themselves, by way of allusion to his favourite subject. (4/7.)
+
+Indifferent to distinctions, as well as to those who bore them,
+contemptuous of etiquette, and incapable of putting constraint upon his
+nature, he remained an "outsider," and refused to comply with a host of
+factitious or worldly obligations which he regarded as useless or
+disgusting. Thus even at Ajaccio he managed to escape the customary
+ceremonies of New Year's Day.
+
+"Good society I avoid as much as possible; I prefer my own company. So I
+have seen no one; I did not respond to the principal's invitation to make
+the official round of visits." (4/8.)
+
+When obliged to accept some invitation, apart from occasions of too great
+solemnity, when he was really constrained to dress himself in the complete
+livery of circumstance and ceremony, he remained faithful to his black felt
+hat, which made a blot among all the carefully polished "toppers" of his
+colleagues. He was called to order; he was reprimanded; he obeyed
+unwillingly, or worse, he resisted; he revolted, and threatened to send in
+his resignation. To pay court to people, to endeavour to make himself
+pleasant, to grovel before a superior, were to him impossibilities. He
+could neither solicit, nor sail with the wind, nor force himself on others,
+nor even make use of his relations.
+
+However, when he went to Paris to take his doctor's degree in natural
+sciences, he did not forget Moquin-Tandon, who had formerly, in Corsica,
+revealed to him the nature of biology, and whom he himself had received and
+entertained in his humble home.
+
+The ex-professor of Toulouse, who was now eminent in his speciality,
+occupied the chair of natural history in the faculty of medicine in Paris.
+What better occasion could he wish of introducing himself to a highly
+placed official? Fabre had formerly been his host; he could recall the
+happy hours they had spent together; he could explain his plans, and ask
+for the professor's assistance! Fate pointed to him as a protector. But if
+Fabre had been capable of climbing the professor's stairs with some such
+ambitious desires, he would quickly have been disabused.
+
+The "dear master" had long ago forgotten the little professor of Ajaccio,
+and his welcome was by no means such as Fabre had the right to expect. Far
+from insisting, he was disheartened, perhaps a little humiliated, and
+hastened to take his leave.
+
+The theses which Fabre brought with him, and which, he had thought, ought
+to lead him one day to a university professorship, did not, as a matter of
+fact, contain anything very essentially original.
+
+He had been attracted, indeed fascinated, by all the singularities
+presented by the strange family of the orchids; the asymmetry of their
+blossoms, the unusual structure of their pollen, and their innumerable
+seeds; but as for the curious rounded and duplicated tubercles which many
+of them bore at their base, what precisely were they? The greatest
+botanists--de Candolle, A. de Jussieu--had perceived in them nothing more
+than roots. Fabre demonstrated in his thesis that these singular organs are
+in reality merely buds, true branches or shoots, modified and disguised,
+analogous to the metamorphosed tubercle of the potato. (4/9.)
+
+He added also a curious memoir on the phosphorescence of the agaric of the
+olive-tree, a phenomenon to which he was to return at a later date.
+
+In the field of zoology his scalpel revealed the complicated structure of
+the reproductive organs of the Centipedes (Millepedes), hitherto so
+confused and misunderstood; as also certain peculiarities of the
+development of these curious creatures, so interesting from the point of
+view of the zoological philosopher (4/10.), for he had become expert in
+handling not only the magnifying glass, which was always with him, but also
+the microscope, which discovers so many infinite wonders in the lowest
+creatures, yet which was not of particular service in any of the beautiful
+observations upon which his fame is built.
+
+Returning to Avignon, in the possession of his new degree, he commenced an
+important task which took him nearly twenty years to complete: a
+painstaking treatise on the Sphaeriaceae of Vaucluse, that singular family
+of fungi which cover fallen leaves and dead twigs with their blackish
+fructifications; a remarkable piece of work, full of the most valuable
+documentation, as were the theses whose subjects I have just detailed; but
+without belittling the fame of their author, one may say that another, in
+his place, might have acquitted himself as well.
+
+Although he continued to undertake researches of limited interest and
+importance, although he persisted in dissecting plants, and, although he
+disliked it, in "disembowelling animals," the fact was that apart from
+Thursdays and Sundays it was scarcely possible for him to escape from his
+week's work; hardly possible to snatch sufficient leisure to undertake the
+studies toward which he felt himself more particularly drawn. Tied down by
+his duties, which held him bound to a discipline that only left him brief
+moments, and by the forced hack-work imposed upon him by the necessity of
+earning his daily bread, he had scarcely any time for observation excepting
+vacations and holidays.
+
+Then he would hasten to Carpentras, happy to hold the key to the meadows,
+and wander across country and along the sunken lanes, collecting his
+beautiful insects, breathing the free air, the scent of the vines and
+olives, and gazing upon Mont Ventoux, close at hand, whose silver summit
+would now be hidden in the clouds and now would glitter in the rays of the
+sun.
+
+Carpentras was not merely the country in which his wife's parents dwelt: it
+was, above all, a unique and privileged home for insects; not on account of
+its flora, but because of the soil, a kind of limestone mingled with sand
+and clay, a soft marl, in which the burrowing hymenoptera could easily
+establish their burrows and their nests. Certain of them, indeed, lived
+only there, or at least it would have been extremely difficult to find them
+elsewhere; such was the famous Cerceris; such again, was the yellow-winged
+Sphex, that other wasp which so artistically stabs and paralyses the
+cricket, "the brown violinist of the clods."
+
+At Carpentras too the Anthophorae lived in abundance; those wild bees with
+whom the vexed and enigmatic history of the Sitaris and the Meloë is bound
+up; those little beetles, cousins of the Cantharides, whose complex
+metamorphoses and astonishing and peculiar habits have been revealed by
+Fabre. This memoir marked the second stage of his scientific career, and
+followed, at an interval of two years, the magnificent observations on the
+Cerceris.
+
+These two studies, true masterpieces of science, already constituted two
+excellent titles to fame, and would by themselves have sufficed to fill a
+naturalist's whole lifetime and to make his name illustrious.
+
+>From that time forward he had no peer. The Institute awarded him one of its
+Montyon prizes (4/11.), "an honour of which, needless to say, he had never
+dreamed." (4/12.) Darwin, in his celebrated work on the "Origin of
+Species," which appeared precisely at this moment, speaks of Fabre
+somewhere as "the inimitable observer." (4/13.)
+
+Exploring the immediate surroundings of Avignon, he very soon discovered
+fresh localities frequented almost exclusively by other insects, whose
+habits in their turn absorbed his whole attention.
+
+First of these was the sandy plateau of the Angles, where every spring, in
+the sunlit pastures so beloved of the sheep, the Scarabaeus sacer, with his
+incurved feet and clumsy legs, commences to roll his everlasting pellet,
+"to the ancients the image of the world." His history, since the time of
+the Pharaohs, had been nothing but a tissue of legends; but stripping it of
+the embroidery of fiction, and referring it to the facts of nature, Fabre
+demonstrated that the true story is even more marvellous than all the tales
+of ancient Egypt. He narrated its actual life, the object of its task, and
+its comical and exhilarating performances. But such is the subtlety of
+these delicate and difficult researches that nearly forty years were
+required to complete the study of its habits and to solve the mystery of
+its cradle. (4/14.)
+
+On the right bank of the Rhône, facing the embouchure of the Durance, is a
+small wood of oak-trees, the wood of Des Issarts. This again, for many
+reasons, was one of his favourite spots. There, "lying flat on the ground,
+his head in the shadow of some rabbit's burrow," or sheltered from the sun
+by a great umbrella, "while the blue-winged locusts frisked for joy," he
+would follow the rapid and sibilant flight of the elegant Bembex, carrying
+their daily ration of diptera to her larvae, at the bottom of her burrow,
+deep in the fine sand." (4/15.)
+
+He did not always go thither alone: sometimes, on Sundays, he would take
+his pupils with him, to spend a morning in the fields, "at the ineffable
+festival of the awakening of life in the spring." (4/16.)
+
+Those most dear to him, those who in the subsequent years have remained the
+object of a special affection, were Devillario, Bordone, and Vayssières
+(4/17.), "young people with warm hearts and smiling imaginations,
+overflowing with that springtime sap of life which makes us so expansive
+and so eager to know.
+
+Among them he was "the eldest, their master, but still more their companion
+and friend"; lighting in them his own sacred fire, and amazing them by the
+deftness of his fingers and the acuteness of his lynx-like eyes. Furnished
+with a notebook and all the tools of the naturalist--lens, net, and little
+boxes of sawdust steeped in anaesthetic for the capture of rare specimens--
+they would wander "along the paths bordered with hawthorn and hyaebla,
+simple and childlike folk," probing the bushes, scratching up the sand,
+raising stones, running the net along hedge and meadow, with explosions of
+delight when they made some splendid capture or discovered some unrecorded
+marvel of the entomological world.
+
+It was not only on the banks of the Rhône or the sandy plateau of Avignon
+that they sought adventure thus, "discussing things and other things," but
+as far as the slopes of Mont Ventoux, for which Fabre had always felt an
+inexplicable and invincible attraction, and whose ascent he accomplished
+more than twenty times, so that at last he knew all its secrets, all the
+gamut of its vegetation, the wealth of the varied flora which climb its
+flanks from base to summit, and which range "from the scarlet flowers of
+the pomegranate to the violet of Mont Cenis and the Alpine forget-me-not"
+(4/18.), as well as the antediluvian fauna revealed amid its entrails, a
+vast ossuary rich in fossils.
+
+His disciples, all of whom, without exception, regarded him with absolute
+worship, have retained the memory of his wit, his enthusiasm, his geniality
+and his infectious gaiety, and also of the singular uncertainty of his
+temperament; for on some days he would not speak a word from the beginning
+to the end of his walk.
+
+Even his temper, ordinarily gentle and easy, would suddenly become hasty
+and violent, and would break out into terrible explosions when a sudden
+annoyance set him beside himself; for instance, when he was the butt of
+some ill-natured trick, or when, in spite of the lucidity of his
+explanations, he felt that he had not been properly understood. Perhaps he
+inherited this from his mother, a rebellious, crotchety, somewhat fantastic
+person, by whose temper he himself had suffered.
+
+But the young people who surrounded him were far from being upset by these
+contrasts of temperament, in which they themselves saw nothing but natural
+annoyance, and the corollary, as it were, of his abounding vitality.
+(4/19.)
+
+It was because he was the only university teacher in Avignon to occupy
+himself with entomology that Pasteur visited him in 1865. The illustrious
+chemist had been striving to check the plague that was devastating the
+silkworm nurseries, and as he knew nothing of the subject which he proposed
+to study, not even understanding the constitution of the cocoon or the
+evolution of the silkworm, he sought out Fabre in order to obtain from his
+store of entomological wisdom the elementary ideas which he would find
+indispensable. Fabre has told us, in a moving page (4/20), with what a
+total lack of comprehension of "poverty in a black coat" the great
+scientist gazed at his poor home. Preoccupied by another problem, that of
+the amelioration of wines by means of heat, Pasteur asked him point-blank--
+him, the humble proletarian of the university caste, who drank only the
+cheapest wine of the country--to show him his cellar. "My cellar! Why not
+my vaults, my dusty bottles, labelled according to age and vintage! But
+Pasteur insisted. Then, pointing with my finger, I showed him, in a corner
+of the kitchen, a chair with all the straw gone, and on this chair a two-
+gallon demijohn: 'There is my cave, monsieur!'"
+
+If the country professor was embarrassed by the chilliness of the other, he
+was none the less shocked by his attitude. It would seem, from what Fabre
+has said, that Pasteur treated him with a hauteur which was slightly
+disdainful. The ignorant genius questioned his humble colleague, distantly
+giving him his orders, explaining his plans and his ideas, and informing
+him in what directions he required assistance.
+
+After this, we cannot be surprised if the naturalist was silent. How could
+sympathetic relations have survived this first meeting? Fabre could not
+forgive it. His own character was too independent to accommodate itself to
+Pasteur's. Yet never, perhaps, were two men made for a better
+understanding. They were equally expert in exercising their admirable
+powers of vision in the vast field of nature, equally critical of self,
+equally careful never to depart from the strict limits of the facts; and
+they were, one may say, equally eminent in the domain of invention,
+different though their fortunes may have been; for the sublimity of
+scientific discoveries, however full of genius they may be, is often
+measured only by the immediate consequences drawn therefrom and the
+practical importance of their results.
+
+In reality, were they not two rivals, worthy of being placed side by side
+in the paradise of sages? Both of them, the one by demolishing the theory
+of spontaneous generation, the other by refuting the mechanical theory of
+the origin of instincts, have brought into due prominence the great unknown
+and mysterious forces which seem destined to hold eternally in suspense the
+profound enigma of life.
+
+Now he was anxious not to leave the Vaucluse district, the scene of his
+first success, and a place so fruitful in subjects of study. He wished to
+remain close to his insects, and also near the precious library and the
+rich collections which Requien had left by will to the town of Avignon. In
+spite of the meagreness of his salary, he asked for nothing more; and, what
+is more, by an inconsequence which is by no means incomprehensible, he
+avoided everything that might have resulted in a more profitable position
+elsewhere, and evaded all proposals of further promotion. Twice, at
+Poitiers and Marseilles, he refused a post as assistant professor, not
+regarding the advantages sufficient to balance the expenses of removal.
+(4/21.)
+
+It is true that his modest position was slightly improved; at the lycée he
+had just been appointed drawing-master, thanks to his knowledge of design,
+for he could draw--indeed, what could he not do? The city, on the other
+hand, appointed him conservator of the Requien Museum, and presently
+municipal lecturer, so that his earnings were increased by 48 pounds
+sterling per annum, and he was at last able to abandon "those abominable
+private lessons" (4/22.), which the insufficiency of his income had
+hitherto forced him to accept. These new duties, which naturally demanded
+much time and much labour, kept him almost as badly tied as he had been
+before.
+
+To be rich enough to set himself free; to be master of all his time, to be
+able to devote himself entirely to his chosen work: this was his dream, his
+constant preoccupation: it haunted him; it was a fixed idea.
+
+Such was the principal motive of his inquiry into the properties of madder,
+the colouring principle of which he succeeded in extracting directly, by a
+perfectly simple method, which for a time very advantageously replaced the
+extremely primitive methods of the old dyers, who used a simple extract of
+madder; a crude preparation which necessitated long and expensive
+manipulations. (4/23.)
+
+He had been working at this for eight years when Victor Duruy, Minister of
+Public Instruction and Grand Master of the University, came to surprise him
+in his laboratory at Saint-Martial, in the full fever of research. Whatever
+was Duruy's idea in entering into relations with him, it seems that from
+their first meeting the two men were really taken with one another: there
+were, between them, so many close affinities of taste and character. Duruy
+found in Fabre a man of his own temper; for his, like Fabre's, was a modest
+and simple nature. Both came of the people, and the principal motive of
+each was the same ideal of work, emancipation, and progress.
+
+A little later Duruy summoned the modest sage of Avignon to Paris, with
+particular insistence; he was full of attentions and of forethought, and
+made him there and then a chevalier of the Legion of Honour; a distinction
+of which Fabre was far from being proud, and which he was careful never to
+obtrude; but he nevertheless always thought of it with a certain
+tenderness, as a beloved "relic" in memory of this illustrious friend.
+
+On the following day the naturalist was conveyed to the Tuileries to be
+presented to the Emperor. You must not suppose that he was in the least
+disturbed at the idea of finding himself face to face with royalty. In the
+presence of all these bedizened folk, in his coat of a cut which was
+doubtless already superannuated, he cared little for the impression he
+might produce. As good an observer of men as of beasts, he gazed quietly
+about him; he exchanged a few words with the Emperor, who was "quite
+simple," almost suppressed, his eyes always half-closed; he watched the
+coming and going of "the chamberlains with short breeches and silver-
+buckled shoes, great scarabaei, clad with café au lait wing-cases, moving
+with a formal gait." Already he sighed regretfully; he was bored; he was on
+the rack, and for nothing in the world would he have repeated the
+experience. He did not even feel the least desire to visit the vaunted
+collections of the Museum. He longed to return; to find himself once more
+among his dear insects; to see his grey olive-trees, full of the frolicsome
+cicadae, his wastes and commons, which smelt so sweet of thyme and cypress;
+above all, to return to his furnace and retorts, in order to complete his
+discovery as quickly as possible.
+
+But others profited by his happy conceptions. Like the cicada, the Cigale
+of his fable (See "Social Life in the Insect World," by Jean-Henri Fabre
+(T. Fisher Unwin, 1912).), which makes a "honeyed reek" flow from--
+
+    "the bark
+Tender and juicy, of the bough,"
+
+on which it is quickly supplanted by
+
+"Fly, drone, wasp, beetle too with hornèd head" (4/24.),
+
+who
+
+"Now lick their honey'd lips, and feed at leisure,"
+
+so, after he had painfully laboured for twelve years in his well, he saw
+others, more cunning than he, come to his perch, who by dint of "stamping
+on his toe," succeeded in ousting him. Pending the appearance of artificial
+alizarine, which was presently to turn the whole madder industry upside
+down, these more sophisticated persons were able to benefit at leisure by
+the ingenious processes discovered by Fabre, so that the practical result
+of so much assiduity, so much patient research, was absolutely nil, and he
+found himself as poor as ever.
+
+So faded his dream: and, if we except his domestic griefs, this was
+certainly the deepest and cruellest disappointment he had ever experienced.
+
+Thenceforth he saw his salvation only in the writing of textbooks, which
+were at last to throw open the door of freedom. Already he had set to work,
+under the powerful stimulus of Duruy, preoccupied as he always was by his
+incessant desire for freedom. The first rudiments of his "Agricultural
+Chemistry," which sounded so fresh a note in the matter of teaching, had
+given an instance and a measure of his capabilities.
+
+But he did not seriously devote himself to this project until after the
+industrial failure and the distressing miscarriage of his madder process;
+and not until he had been previously assured of the co-operation of Charles
+Delagrave, a young publisher, whose fortunate intervention contributed in
+no small degree to his deliverance. Confident in his vast powers of work,
+and divining his incomparable talent as POPULARIZER, Delagrave felt that he
+could promise Fabre that he would never leave him without work; and this
+promise was all the more comforting, in that the University, despite his
+twenty-eight years of assiduous service, would not accord him the smallest
+pension.
+
+Victor Duruy was the great restorer of education in France, from elementary
+and primary education, which should date, from his great ministry, the era
+of its deliverance, to the secondary education which he himself created in
+every part. He was also the real initiator of secular instruction in
+France, and the Third Republic has done little but resume his work, develop
+his ideas, and extend his programme. Finally, by instituting classes for
+adults, the evening classes which enabled workmen, peasants, bourgeois, and
+young women to fill the gaps in their education, he gave reality to the
+generous and fruitful idea that it is possible for all to divide life into
+two parts, one having for its object our material needs and our daily
+bread, and the other consecrated to the spiritual life and the delights of
+the Ideal.
+
+At the same time he emancipated the young women of France, formerly under
+the exclusive tutelage of the clergy, and opened to them for the first time
+the golden gates of knowledge; an audacious innovation, and formidable
+withal, for it shrewdly touched the interests of the Church, struck a blow
+at her ever-increasing influence, and clashed with her consecrated
+privileges and age-long prejudices. (4/25.)
+
+At Avignon Fabre was instructed to give his personal services. He gave them
+with all his heart; and it was then that he undertook, in the ancient Abbey
+of Saint-Martial, those famous free lectures which have remained celebrated
+in the memory of that generation. There, under the ancient Gothic vault,
+among the pupils of the primary Normal College, an eager crowd of listeners
+pressed to hear him; and among the most assiduous was Roumanille, the
+friend of Mistral, he who so exquisitely wove into his harmonies "the
+laughter of young maidens and the flowers of springtime." No one expounded
+a fact better than Fabre; no one explained it so fully and so clearly. No
+one could teach as he did, in a fashion so simple, so animated, so
+picturesque, and by methods so original.
+
+He was indeed convinced that even in early childhood it was possible for
+both boys and girls to learn and to love many subjects which had hitherto
+never been proposed; and in particular that Natural History which to him
+was a book in which all the world might read, but that university methods
+had reduced it to a tedious and useless study in which the letter "killed
+the life."
+
+He knew the secret of communicating his conviction, his profound faith, to
+his hearers: that sacred fire which animated him, that passion for all the
+creatures of nature.
+
+These lectures took place in the evening, twice a week, alternately with
+the municipal lectures, to which Fabre brought no less application and
+ardour. In the intention of those who instituted them these latter were
+above all to be practical and scientific, dealing with science applied to
+agriculture, the arts, and industry.
+
+But might he not also expect auditors of another quality, in love only with
+the ideal, "who, without troubling about the possible applications of
+scientific theory, desired above all to be initiated into the action of the
+forces which rule nature, and thereby to open to their minds more wondrous
+horizons"?
+
+Such were the noble scruples which troubled his conscience, and which
+appeared in the letter which he addressed to the administration of the
+city, when he was entrusted by the latter with what he regarded as a lofty
+and most important mission.
+
+"...Is it to be understood that every purely scientific aspect, incapable
+of immediate application, is to be rigorously banished from these lessons?
+Is it to be understood that, confined to an impassable circle, the value of
+every truth must be reckoned at so much per hundred, and that I must
+silently pass over all that aims only at satisfying a laudable desire of
+knowledge? No, gentlemen, for then these lectures would lack a very
+essential thing: the spirit which gives life!" (4/26.)
+
+Physically, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, he was
+already as an admirable photograph represents him twenty years later: he
+wore a large black felt hat; his face was shaven, the chin strong and
+wilful, the eyes vigilant, deep-set and penetrating; he hardly changed, and
+it was thus I saw him later, at a more advanced age.
+
+The ancient Abbey of Saint-Martial, where these lectures were given, was
+occupied also by the Requien Museum, of which Fabre had charge. It was here
+that he one day met John Stuart Mill.
+
+The celebrated philosopher and economist had just lost his wife: "the most
+precious friendship of his life" was ended. (4/27.) It was only after long
+waiting that he had been able to marry her. Subjected at an early age by a
+father devoid of tenderness and formidably severe to the harshest of
+disciplines, he had learned in childhood "what is usually learned only by a
+man." Scarcely out of his long clothes, he was construing Herodotus and the
+dialogues of Plato, and the whole of his dreary youth was spent in covering
+the vast field of the moral and mathematical sciences. His heart, always
+suppressed, never really expanded until he met Mrs. Harriett Taylor.
+
+This was one of those privileged beings such as seem as a rule to exist
+only in poetry and literature; a woman as beautiful as she was
+astonishingly gifted with the rarest faculties; combining with the most
+searching intelligence and the most persuasive eloquence so exquisite a
+sensitiveness that she seemed often to divine events in advance.
+
+Mill possessed her at last for a few years only, and he had resigned his
+post in the offices of the East India Company to enjoy a studious retreat
+in the enchanted atmosphere of southern Europe when suddenly at Avignon
+Harriett Mill was carried off by a violent illness. (Mill retired in 1858,
+when the government of India passed to the Crown. He had married Mrs. John
+Taylor in 1851. [Tr.])
+
+>From that time the philosopher's horizon was suddenly contracted to the
+limit of those places whence had vanished the adored companion and the
+beneficent genius who had been the sole charm of his entire existence.
+Overwhelmed with grief, he acquired a small country house in one of the
+least frequented parts of the suburbs of Avignon, close to the cemetery
+where the beloved dead was laid to rest for ever. A silent alley of planes
+and mulberry-trees led to the threshold, which was shaded by the delicate
+foliage of a myrtle. All about he had planted a dense hedge of hawthorn,
+cypress, and arborvitae, above which, from the vantage of a small terrace,
+built, under his orders, at the level of the first floor, he could see, day
+by day and at all hours, the white tomb of his wife, and a little ease his
+grief.
+
+Thus he cloistered himself, "living in memory," having no companion but the
+daughter of his wife; trying to console himself by work, recapitulating his
+life, the story of which he has told in his remarkable "Memoirs." (4/28.)
+
+Fabre paid a few visits to this Thebaïd. A solitary such as Mill had become
+could be attracted only by a man of his temper, in whom he found, if not an
+affinity of nature, at least tastes like his own, and immense learning, as
+great as his. For Mill also was versed in all the branches of human
+knowledge: not only had he meditated on the high problems of history and
+political economy, but he had also probed all branches of science:
+mathematics, physics, and natural history. It was above all botany which
+served them as a bond of union, and they were often seen to set forth on a
+botanizing expedition through the countryside.
+
+This friendship, which was not without profit for Fabre (4/29.), was still
+more precious to Mill, who found, in the society of the naturalist, a
+certain relief from his sorrow. The substance of their conversation was far
+from being such as one might have imagined it. Mill was not highly sensible
+to the festival of nature or the poetry of the fields. He was hardly
+interested in botany, except from the somewhat abstract point of view of
+classification and the systematic arrangement of species. Always
+melancholy, cold, and distant, he spoke little; but Fabre felt under this
+apparent sensibility a rigorous integrity of character, a great capacity
+for devotion, and a rare goodness of heart.
+
+So the two wandered across country, each thinking his own thoughts, and
+each self-contained as though they were walking on parallel but distant
+paths.
+
+However, Fabre was not at the end of his troubles; and secret ill-feeling
+began to surround him. The free lectures at Saint-Martial offended the
+devout, angered the sectaries, and excited the intolerance of the pedants,
+"whose feeble eyelids blink at the daylight," and he was far from
+receiving, from his colleagues at the lycée, the sympathy and encouragement
+which were, at this moment especially, so necessary to him. Some even went
+so far as to denounce him publicly, and he was mentioned one day from the
+height of the pulpit, to the indignation of the pupils of the upper Normal
+College, as a man at once dangerous and subversive.
+
+Some found it objectionable that this "irregular person, this man of
+solitary study," should, by his work and by the magic of his teaching,
+assume a position so unique and so disproportionate. Others regarded the
+novelty of placing the sciences at the disposal of young girls as a heresy
+and a scandal.
+
+Their bickering, their cabals, their secret manoeuvres, were in the long
+run to triumph. Duruy had just succumbed under the incessant attacks of the
+clericals. In him Fabre lost a friend, a protector, and his only support.
+Embittered, defeated, he was now only waiting for a pretext, an incident, a
+mere nothing, to throw up everything.
+
+One fine morning his landladies, devout and aged spinsters, made themselves
+the instruments of the spite of his enemies, and abruptly gave him notice
+to quit. he had to leave before the end of the month, for, simple and
+confident as usual, he had obtained neither a lease nor the least written
+agreement.
+
+At this moment he was so poor that he had not even the money to meet the
+expenses of his removal. The times were troublous: the great war had
+commenced, and Paris being invested he could no longer obtain the small
+earnings which his textbooks were beginning to yield him, and which had for
+some time been increasing his modest earnings. On the other hand, having
+always lived far from all society, he had not at Avignon a single relation
+who could assist him, and he could neither obtain credit nor find any one
+to extricate him from his embarrassments and save him from the extremity of
+need with which he was threatened. He thought of Mill, and in this
+difficult juncture it was Mill who saved him. The philosopher was then in
+England; he was for the time being a member of the House of Commons, and he
+used to vary his life at Avignon by a few weeks' sojourn in London. His
+reply, however, was not long in coming: almost immediately he sent help; a
+sum of some 120 pounds sterling, which fell like manna into the hands of
+Fabre; and he did not, in exchange, demand the slightest security for this
+advance.
+
+Then, filled with disgust, the "irregular person" shook off the yoke and
+retired to Orange. At first he took shelter where he could, anxious only to
+avoid as far as possible any contact with his fellow-men; then, having
+finally discovered a dwelling altogether in conformity with his tastes, he
+moved to the outskirts of the city, and settled at the edge of the fields,
+in the middle of a great meadow, in an isolated house, pleasant and
+commodious, connected with the road to Camaret by a superb avenue of tall
+and handsome plane-trees. This hermitage in some respects recalled that of
+Mill in the outskirts of Avignon; and thence his eyes, embracing a vast
+horizon, from the pediment of the ancient theatre to the hills of Sérignan,
+could already distinguish the promised land.
+
+
+CHAPTER 5. A GREAT TEACHER.
+
+It was in 1871. Fabre had lived twenty years at Avignon. This date
+constitutes an important landmark in his career, since it marks the precise
+moment of his final rupture with the University.
+
+At this time the preoccupations of material life were more pressing than
+ever, and it was then that he devoted himself entirely and with
+perseverance to the writing of those admirable works of introduction and
+initiation, in which he applied himself to rendering science accessible to
+the youngest minds, and employed all his profound knowledge to the thorough
+teaching of its elements and its eternal laws.
+
+To this ungrateful task--ungrateful, but in reality pleasurable, so
+strongly had he the vocation, the feeling, and the genius of the teacher--
+Fabre applied himself thenceforth with all his heart, and for nine years
+never lifted his hand.
+
+How insipid, how forbidding were the usual classbooks, the second-rate
+natural histories above all, stuffed with dry statements, with raw
+knowledge, which brought nothing but the memory into play! How many
+youthful faces had grown pale above them!
+
+What a contrast and a deliverance in these little books of Fabre's, so
+clear, so luminous, so simple, which for the first time spoke to the heart
+and the understanding; for "work which one does not understand disgusts
+one." (5/1.)
+
+To initiate others into science or art, it is not enough to have understood
+them oneself; it is not enough even that one should be an artist or a
+scientist. Scientists of the highest flight are sometimes very unskilful
+teachers, and very indifferent hands at explaining the alphabet. It is not
+given to the first comer to educate the young; to understand how to
+identify his understanding with theirs, to measure their powers. It is a
+matter of instinct and good sense rather than of memory or erudition, and
+Fabre, who had never in his life been the pupil of any one, could better
+than any remember the phases through which his mind had passed, could
+recollect by what detours of the mind, by what secret labours of thought,
+by what intuitive methods he had succeeded in conquering, one by one, all
+the difficulties in his path, and in gradually attaining to knowledge.
+
+It is wonderful to watch the mastery with which he conducts his
+demonstrations, the simplest as well as the most involved, singling out the
+essential, little by little evoking the sense of things, ingeniously
+seeking familiar examples, finding comparisons, and employing picturesque
+and striking images, which throw a dazzling light upon the obscurest
+question or the most difficult problem. How in such matters can one
+dispense with figurative speech, when one is reduced, as a rule, to an
+inability to show the things themselves, but only their images and their
+symbols?
+
+Follow him, for example, in the "The Sky" (5/2.), which seems to thrill
+with the ardent and comprehensive genius of a Humboldt, and admire the ease
+with which he surmounts all the difficulties and smooths the way for the
+vast voyage on which he conducts you, past the infinity of the suns and the
+stars in their millions, scintillating in the cold air of night, to descend
+once more to our humble "Earth" (5/3.); first an ocean of fire, rolling its
+heavy waves of molten porphyry and granite, then "slowly hardening into
+strange floes and bergs, hotter than the red iron in the fire of the
+forge," rounding its back, all covered with gaping pustules, eruptive
+mountains and craters, and the first folds of its calcined crust, until the
+day when the vast mist of densest vapours, heaped up on every hand and of
+immeasurable depth, begins gradually to show rifts, giving rise at last to
+an infinite storm, a stupendous deluge, and forming the strange universal
+sea, "a mineral sludge, veiled by a chaos of smoke," whence at length the
+primitive soil emerges, "and at last the green grass."
+
+And although "a little animal proteid, capable of pleasure and pain,
+surpasses in interest the whole immense creation of dead matter," he does
+not forget to show us the spectacle of life flowing through matter itself;
+and he animates even the simple elementary bodies, celebrating the
+marvellous activities of the air, the violence of Chlorine, the
+metamorphoses of Carbon, the miraculous bridals of Phosphorus, and "the
+splendours which accompany the birth of a drop of water." (5/4.)
+
+A man must indeed love knowledge deeply before he can make others love it,
+or render it easy and attractive, revealing only the smiling highways; and
+Fabre, above all things the impassioned professor, was the very man to lead
+his disciples "between the hedges of hawthorn and sloe," whether to show
+them the sap, "that fruitful current, that flowing flesh, that vegetable
+blood," or how the plant, by a mysterious transubstantiation, makes its
+wood, "and the delicate bundle of swaddling-bands of its buds," or how
+"from a putrid ordure it extracts the flavour and the fragrance of its
+fruits"; or whether he seeks to evoke the murderous plants that live as
+parasites at the cost of others; the white Clandestinus, "which strangles
+the roots of the alders beside the rivers," the Cuscuta, "which knows
+nothing of labour," the wicked Orobanche, plump, powerful and brazen, the
+skin covered with ugly scales, "with sombre flowers that wear the livery of
+death, which leaps at the throat of the clover, stifling it, devouring it,
+sucking its blood." (5/5.)
+
+Botany, by this genial treatment, becomes a most interesting study, and I
+know of no more captivating reading than "The Plant" and "The Story of the
+Log," the jewels of this incomparable series.
+
+Employ Fabre's method if you wish to learn by yourself, or to evoke in your
+children a love of science, and, according to the phrase of the gentle
+Jean-Jacques, to help them "to buy at the best possible of prices." Give
+them as sole guides these exquisite manuals, which touch upon everything,
+initiating them into everything, and bringing within the reach of all, for
+their instruction or amusement, the heavens and the earth, the planets and
+their moons, the mechanism of the great natural forces and the laws which
+govern them, life and its materials, agriculture and its applications. For
+more than a quarter of a century these catechisms of science, models of
+lucidity and good sense, effected the education of generations of
+Frenchmen. Abridgments of all knowledge, veritable codes of rural wisdom,
+these perfect breviaries have never been surpassed.
+
+It was after reading these little books, it is said, that Duruy conceived
+the idea of confiding to this admirable teacher the education of the
+Imperial heir; and it is very probable that this was, in reality, the
+secret motive which would explain why he had so expressly summoned Fabre to
+Paris. What an ideal tutor he had thought of, and how proud might others
+have been of such a choice! But the man was too zealous of his
+independence, too difficult to tame, to bear with the environment of a
+court, and God knows whether he was made for such refulgence! We need not
+be surprised that Fabre never heard of it; it must have sufficed the
+minister to speak with him for a few minutes to realize that the most
+tempting offers and all the powers of seduction would never overcome his
+insurmountable dislike of life in a capital, nor prevail against his
+inborn, passionate, exclusive love of the open.
+
+For these volumes Fabre was at first rather wretchedly paid; at all events,
+until public education had definitely received a fresh impulse; and for a
+long time his life at Orange was literally a hand-to-mouth existence.
+
+As soon as he was able to realize a few advances, he had nothing so much at
+heart as the repayment of Mill, and he hastened to call on the philosopher;
+all the more filled with gratitude for his generosity in that the loan,
+although of the comparatively large amount of three thousand francs, was
+made without security, practically from hand to hand, with no other
+warranty than his probity.
+
+For this reason this episode was always engraven on his memory. Thirty
+years later he would relate the affair even to the most insignificant
+details. How many times has he not reminded me of the transaction,
+insisting that I should make a note of it, so anxious was he that this
+incident in his career should not be lost in oblivion! How often has he not
+recalled the infinite delicacy of Mill, and his excessive scrupulousness,
+which went so far that he wished to give a written acknowledgment of the
+repayment of the debt, of which there was no record whatever save in the
+conscience of the debtor!
+
+Scarcely two years later Mill died suddenly at Avignon. Grief finally
+killed him; for this unexpected death seemed to have been only the ultimate
+climax of the secret malady which had so long been undermining him.
+
+It was in the outskirts of Orange that Fabre for the last time met him and
+accompanied him upon a botanizing expedition. He was struck by his weakness
+and his rapid decline. Mill could hardly drag himself along, and when he
+stooped to gather a specimen he had the greatest difficulty in rising. They
+were never to meet again.
+
+A few days later--on the 8th May, 1873--Fabre was invited to lunch with the
+philosopher. Before going to the little house by the cemetery he halted, as
+was his custom, at the Libraire Saint-Just. It was there that he learned,
+with amazement, of the tragic and sudden event which set a so unexpected
+term to a friendship which was doubtless a little remote, but which was, on
+both sides, a singularly lofty and beautiful attachment.
+
+His class-books were now bringing in scarcely anything; their preparation,
+moreover, involved an excessive expenditure of time, and gave him a great
+deal of trouble; it is impossible to imagine what scrupulous care, what
+zeal and self-respect Fabre brought to the execution of the programme which
+he had to fulfil.
+
+To begin with, he considered that he could not enjoy a more splendid
+opportunity to give children a taste for science and to stimulate their
+curiosity than by finding a means to interest them, from their earliest
+infancy, in their simple playthings, even the crudest and most inexpensive;
+so true is it that "in the smallest mechanical device or engine, even in
+its simplest form, as conceived by the industry of a child, there is often
+the germ of important truths, and, better than books, the school of the
+playroom, if gently disciplined, will open for the child the windows of the
+universe."
+
+"The humble teetotum, made of a crust of rye-bread transfixed by a twig,
+silently spinning on the cover of a school-book, will give a correct enough
+image of the earth, which retains unmoved its original impulse, and travels
+along a great circle, at the same time turning on itself. Gummed on its
+disc, scraps of paper properly coloured will tell us of white light,
+decomposable into various coloured rays...
+
+"There will be the pop-gun, with its ramrod and its two plugs of tow, the
+hinder one expelling the foremost by the elasticity of the compressed air.
+Thus we get a glimpse of the ballistics of gunpowder, and the pressure of
+steam in engines..."
+
+The little hydraulic fountain made of an apricot stone, patiently hollowed
+and pierced with a hole at either side, into which two straws are fitted,
+one dipping into a cup of water and the other duly capped, "expelling a
+slender thread of water in which the sunlight flickers," will introduce us
+to the true syphon of physics.
+
+"What amusing and useful lessons" a well-balanced scheme of education might
+extract from this "academy of childish ingenuity"! (5/6.)
+
+At this time he was undertaking the education of his own children. His
+chemistry lessons especially had a great success. (5/7.) With apparatus of
+his own devising and of the simplest kind, he could perform a host of
+elementary experiments, the apparatus as a rule consisting of the most
+ordinary materials, such as a common flask or bottle, an old mustard-pot, a
+tumbler, a goose-quill or a pipe-stem.
+
+A series of astonishing phenomena amazed their wondering eyes. He made them
+see, touch, taste, handle, and smell, and always "the hand assisted the
+word," always "the example accompanied the precept," for no one more fully
+valued the profound maxim, so neglected and misunderstood, that "to see is
+to know."
+
+He exerted himself to arouse their curiosity, to provoke their questions,
+to discover their mistakes, to set their ideas in order; he accustomed them
+to rectify their errors themselves, and from all this he obtained excellent
+material for his books.
+
+For those more especially intended for the education of girls he took
+counsel with his daughter Antonia, inviting her collaboration, begging her
+to suggest every aspect of the matter that occurred to her; for instance,
+in respect of the chemistry of the household, "where exact science should
+shed its light upon a host of facts relating to domestic economy" (5/8.),
+from the washing of clothes to the making of a stew.
+
+Even now, to his despair, although freed from the cares of school life, he
+was always almost wholly without leisure to devote himself to his chosen
+subjects.
+
+It was at this period above all that he felt so "lonely, abandoned,
+struggling against misfortune; and before one can philosophize one has to
+live." (5/9.)
+
+And his incessant labour was aggravated by a bitter disappointment. In the
+year of Mill's death Fabre was dismissed from his post as conservator of
+the Requien Museum, which he had held in spite of his departure from
+Avignon, going thither regularly twice a week to acquit himself of his
+duties. The municipality, working in the dark, suddenly dismissed him
+without explanation. To Fabre this dismissal was infinitely bitter; "a
+sweeper-boy would have been treated with as much ceremony." (5/10.) What
+afflicted him most was not the undeserved slight of the dismissal, but his
+unspeakable regret at quitting those beloved vegetable collections,
+"amassed with such love" by Requien, who was his friend and master, and by
+Mill and himself; and the thought that he would henceforth perhaps be
+unable to save these precious but perishable things from oblivion, or
+terminate the botanical geography of Vaucluse, on which he had been thirty
+years at work!
+
+For this reason, when there was some talk of establishing an agronomic
+station at Avignon, and of appointing him director, he was at first warmly
+in favour of the idea. (5/11.) Already he foresaw a host of fascinating
+experiments, of the highest practical value, conducted in the peace and
+leisure and security of a fixed appointment. It is indeed probable that in
+so vast a field he would have demonstrated many valuable truths, fruitful
+in practical results; he was certainly meant for such a task, and he would
+have performed it with genuine personal satisfaction. He had already
+exerted his ingenuity by trying to develop, among the children of the
+countryside, a taste for agriculture, which he rightly considered the
+logical complement of the primary school, and which is based upon all the
+sciences which he himself had studied, probed, taught, and popularized.
+
+It will be remembered how patiently he devoted himself for twelve years to
+the study of madder, multiplying his researches, and applying himself not
+only to extracting the colouring principle, but also to indicating means
+whereby adulteration and fraud might be detected.
+
+He had published memoirs of great importance dealing with entomology in its
+relations to agriculture. Impressed with the importance of this little
+world, he suggested valuable remedies, means of preservation; which were
+all the more logical in that the destruction of insects, if it is to be
+efficacious, must be based not upon a gross empiricism, but on a previous
+study of their social life and their habits.
+
+With what patience he observed the terribly destructive weevils, and those
+formidable moths with downy wings, which fly without sound of a night, and
+whose depredations have often been valued at millions of francs! How
+meticulously he has recorded the conditions which favour or check the
+development of those parasitic fungi whose mortal blemishes are seen on
+buds and flowers, on the green shoots and clusters that promise a
+prosperous vintage!
+
+But then he became anxious. Was it all worth the sacrifice of his liberty?
+"Would he not suffer a thousand annoyances from pretentious nobodies?" for
+as things were, all ideas of again "enregimenting" himself "filled him with
+horror." (5/12.)
+
+Slowly, however, the first instalment of the work which he had spent nearly
+twenty-five years in planning, creating, and polishing, began to take
+shape. At the end of the year 1878 he was able to assemble a sufficient
+number of studies to form material for what was to be the first volume of
+his "Souvenirs entomologiques." (A selection of which forms "Social Life in
+the Insect World" (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912).)
+
+Let us stop for a moment to consider this first book, whose publication
+constitutes a truly historical date, not only in the career of Fabre, but
+in the annals of universal science. It was at once the foundation and the
+keystone of the marvellous edifice which we shall watch unfolding and
+increasing, but to which the future was in reality to add nothing
+essential. The cardinal ideas as to instinct and evolution, the necessity
+of experimenting in the psychology of animals, and the harmonic laws of the
+conservation of the individual, are here already expounded in their final
+and definite form. This fruitful and decisive year brought Fabre a great
+grief. He lost his son Jules, that one of all his children whom he seems
+most ardently to have loved.
+
+He was a youth of great promise, "all fire, all flame"; of a serious
+nature; an exquisite being, of a precocious intelligence, whose rare
+aptitudes both for science and literature were truly extraordinary. Such
+too was the subtlety of his senses that by handling no matter what plant,
+with his eyes closed, he could recognize and define it merely by the sense
+of touch. This delightful companion of his father's studies had scarcely
+passed his fifteenth year when death removed him. A terrible void was left
+in his heart, which was never filled. Thirty years later the least allusion
+to this child, however tactful, which recalled this dear memory to his
+mind, would still wring his heart, and his whole body would be shaken by
+his sobs. As always, work was his refuge and consolation; but this terrible
+blow shattered his health, until then so robust. In the midst of this
+disastrous winter he fell seriously ill. He was stricken with pneumonia,
+which all but carried him off, and every one gave him up for lost. However,
+he recovered, and issued from his convalescence as though regenerated, and
+with strength renewed he attacked the next stage of his labours.
+
+But what are the most fruitful resolutions, and what poor playthings are we
+in the hands of the unexpected! A vulgar incident of every-day life had
+sufficed to make Fabre decide to break openly with the University, and to
+leave Avignon. The secret motive of his departure from Orange was scarcely
+more solid. His new landlord concluded one day, either from cupidity or
+stupidity, to lop most ferociously the two magnificent rows of plane-trees
+which formed a shady avenue before his house, in which the birds piped and
+warbled in the spring, and the cicadae chorused in the summer. Fabre could
+not endure this massacre, this barbarous mutilation, this crime against
+nature. Hungry for peace and quiet, the enjoyment of a dwelling-place could
+no longer content him; at all costs he must own his own home.
+
+So, having won the modest ransom of his deliverance, he waited no longer,
+but quitted the cities for ever; retiring to Sérignan, to the peaceful
+obscurity of a tiny hamlet, and this quiet corner of the earth had
+henceforth all his heart and soul in keeping.
+
+
+CHAPTER 6. THE HERMITAGE.
+
+Goethe has somewhere written: Whosoever would understand the poet and his
+work should visit the poet's country.
+
+Let us, then, the latest of many, make the pilgrimage which all those who
+are fascinated by the enigma of nature will accomplish later, with the same
+piety that has led so many and so fervent admirers to the dwelling of
+Mistral at Maillane.
+
+Starting from Orange and crossing the Aygues, a torrent whose muddy waters
+are lost in the Rhône, but whose bed is dried by the July and August suns,
+leaving only a desert of pebbles, where the Mason-bee builds her pretty
+turrets of rock-work, we come presently to the Sérignaise country; an arid,
+stony tract, planted with vines and olives, coloured a rusty red, or
+touched here and there with almost a hue of blood; and here and there a
+grove of cypress makes a sombre blot. To the north runs a long black line
+of hills, covered with box and ilex and the giant heather of the south. Far
+in the distance, to the east, the immense plain is closed in by the wall of
+Saint-Amant and the ridge of the Dentelle, behind which the lofty Ventoux
+rears its rocky, cloven bosom abruptly to the clouds. At the end of a few
+miles of dusty road, swept by the powerful breath of the mistral, we
+suddenly reach a little village. It is a curious little community, with its
+central street adorned by a double row of plane-trees, its leaping
+fountains, and its almost Italian air. The houses are lime-washed, with
+flat roofs; and sometimes, at the side of some small or decrepit dwelling,
+we see the unexpected curves of a loggia. At a distance the facade of the
+church has the harmonious lines of a little antique temple; close at hand
+is the graceful campanile, an old octagonal tower surmounted by a narrow
+mitre wrought in hammered iron, in the midst of which are seen the black
+profiles of the bells.
+
+I shall never forget my first visit. It was in the month of August; and the
+whole countryside was ringing with the song of the cicadae. I had applied
+to a job-master of Orange, counting on him to take me thither; but he had
+never driven any one to Sérignan, had hardly heard of Fabre, and did not
+know where his house was. At length, however, we contrived to find it. At
+the entrance of the little market-town, in a solitary corner, in the centre
+of an enclosure of lofty walls, which were taller than the crests of the
+pines and cypresses, his dwelling was hidden away. No sound proceeded from
+it; but for the baying of the faithful Tom I do not think I should have
+dared to knock on the great door, which turned slowly on its hinges. A pink
+house with green shutters, half-hidden amid the sombre foliage, appears at
+the end of an alley of lilacs, "which sway in the spring under the weight
+of their balmy thyrsi." Before the house are the shady plane-trees, where
+during the burning hours of August the cicada of the flowering ash, the
+deafening cacan, concealed beneath the leaves, fills the hot atmosphere
+with its eager cries, the only sound that disturbs the profound silence of
+this solitude.
+
+Before us, beyond a little wall of a height to lean upon, on an isolated
+lawn, beneath the shade of great trees with interwoven boughs, a circular
+basin displays its still surface, across which the skating Hydrometra
+traces its wide circles. Then, suddenly, we see an opening into the most
+extraordinary and unexpected of gardens; a wild park, full of strenuous
+vegetation, which hides the pebbly soil in all directions; a chaos of
+plants and bushes, created throughout especially to attract the insects of
+the neighbourhood.
+
+Thickets of wild laurel and dense clumps of lavender encroach upon the
+paths, alternating with great bushes of coronilla, which bar the flight of
+the butterfly with their yellow-winged flowers, and whose searching
+fragrance embalms all the air about them.
+
+It is as though the neighbouring mountain had one day departed, leaving
+here its thistles, its dogberry-trees, its brooms, its rushes, its juniper-
+bushes, its laburnums, and its spurges. There too grows the "strawberry
+tree," whose red fruits wear so familiar an appearance; and tall pines, the
+giants of this "pigmy forest." There the Japanese privet ripens its black
+berries, mingled with the Paulownia and the Cratoegus with their tender
+green foliage. Coltsfoot mingles with violets; clumps of sage and thyme mix
+their fragrance with the scent of rosemary and a host of balsamic plants.
+Amid the cacti, their fleshy leaves bristling with prickles, the periwinkle
+opens its scattered blossoms, while in a corner the serpent arum raises its
+cornucopia, in which those insects that love putrescence fall engulfed,
+deceived by the horrible savour of its exhalations.
+
+It is in the spring above all that one should see this torrent of verdure,
+when the whole enclosure awakens in its festival attire, decked with all
+the flowers of May, and the warm air, full of the hum of insects, is
+perfumed with a thousand intoxicating scents. It is in the spring that one
+should see the "Harmas," the open-air observatory, "the laboratory of
+living entomology" (6/1.); a name and a spot which Fabre has made famous
+throughout the world.
+
+I enter the dining-room, whose wide, half-closed shutters allow only a
+half-light to enter between the printed curtains. Rush-bottomed chairs, a
+great table, about which seven persons daily take their places, a few poor
+pieces of furniture, and a simple bookcase; such are all the contents. On
+the mantel, a clock in black marble, a precious souvenir, the only present
+which Fabre received at the time of his exodus from Avignon; it was given
+by his old pupils, the young girls who used to attend the free lectures at
+Saint-Martial's.
+
+There, every afternoon, half lying on a little sofa, the naturalist has the
+habit of taking a short siesta. This light repose, even without sleep, was
+of old enough to restore his energies, exhausted by hours of labour.
+Thenceforth he was once more alert, and ready for the remainder of the day.
+
+But already he is on his feet, bareheaded, in his waistcoat, his silk
+necktie carelessly fastened under the soft turned-down collar of his half-
+open shirt, his gesture, in the shadowy chamber, full of welcome.
+
+François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has
+succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this rugged,
+shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face, stamped with
+originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence; touched with geniality
+and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of energy. Sicard has fixed for
+ever this strange mask; the thin cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the
+strained nose, the pendent wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled
+lips, with an indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth.
+The hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a high,
+rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what chisel, what
+graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of that gaze, eclipsed
+from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the eyelids! What Holbein, what
+Chardin could render the almost extraordinary brilliance of those black
+eyes, those dilated pupils: the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide
+and deeply set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as
+though made expressly to scrutinize Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above
+the orbits, two short, bristling eyebrows seem set there to guide the
+vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the magnifying-glass, has
+retained an indelible fold of continual attention; the other, on the
+contrary, always updrawn, has the look of defying the interlocutor, of
+foreseeing his objections, of waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust.
+Such is this striking physiognomy, which one who has seen it cannot forget.
+
+There, in this "hermit's retreat," as he himself has defined it, the sage
+is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only
+on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that
+even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was
+he to go round instead of through it on his way to the neighbouring
+mountain, where he would often spend whole days alone with wild nature.
+
+It is in this silent Thebaïd, so far from the atmosphere of cities, the
+vain agitations and storms of the world, that his life has been passed, in
+unchanging uniformity; and here he has been able to pursue, with resolute
+labour and incredible patience, that prodigious series of marvellous
+observations which for nearly fifty years he has never ceased to
+accumulate.
+
+Let us indeed remember how much time has been required and what effort has
+been expended to complete the long and patient inquiries which he had
+hitherto accomplished; obliged, as he was, to allow himself to be
+interrupted at any moment, and to postpone his observations often at the
+most interesting moment, in order to undertake some enervating labour, or
+the disagreeable and mechanical duties of his profession. Remember that his
+first labours already dated from twenty-five years earlier, and at the
+moment when we observe him in his solitude at Sérignan he had only just
+painfully gathered together the material for his first book. What a
+contrast to the thirty fruitful years that were to follow! Now nearly ten
+volumes, no less overflowing with the richest material, were to succeed one
+another at almost regular intervals--about one in every three years.
+
+To be sure, he would have gathered his harvest in no matter what corner of
+the world, provided he had found within his reach, in whatever sphere of
+life he had been placed, any subject of inquiry whatever; such was
+Rousseau, botanizing over the bunch of chickweed provided for his canary;
+such was Bernardin Saint-Pierre, discovering a world in a strawberry-plant
+which had sprouted by chance at the corner of his window. (6/2.) But the
+field in which he had hitherto been able to glean was indeed barren. That
+he was able, later on, to narrate the wonderful history of the Pelopaeus,
+whose habits he had observed at Avignon, was due to the fact that this
+curious insect had come to lodge with him, having chosen Fabre's chamber
+for its dwelling. None the less he threw himself eagerly upon all such
+scraps of information as happened to come under his notice; witness the
+observations which he embodied in a memoir touching the phosphorescence of
+certain earth-worms which, abounding in a little courtyard near his
+dwelling, were so rare elsewhere that he was never again able to find them.
+(6/3.) It was therefore fortunate, if not for himself, at least for his
+genius, that he did not become, as he had wished, a professor in a faculty;
+there, to be sure, he would have found a theatre worthy of his efforts, in
+which he might even have demonstrated, in all its magnificence, his
+incomparable gift of teaching; but it is probable too that he would have
+been stranded in shoal waters; that in the official atmosphere of a city
+his still more marvellous gifts of observation would scarcely have found
+employment.
+
+It was only by belonging fully to himself that he could fruitfully exercise
+his talents. Necessary to every scholar, to every inquirer, to an open-air
+observer like Fabre liberty and leisure were more than usually essential;
+failing these he might never have accomplished his mission. How many lives
+are wasted, how many minds expended in sheer loss, in default of this
+sufficiency of leisure! How many scholars tied to the soil, how many
+physicians absorbed by an exigent practice, who perhaps had somewhat to
+say, have succeeded only in devising plans, for ever postponing their
+realization to some miraculous tomorrow, which always recedes!
+
+But we must not fall into illusions. How many might be tempted to imitate
+him, hoping to see some unknown talent awaken or expand within them, only
+to find themselves incapable of producing anything, and to consume
+themselves in an insurmountable and barren ennui! One must be rich in one's
+own nature, rich in will and in ability, to live apart and seek new paths
+in solitude, and it is not without reason that the majority prefer the
+turmoil of cities and the murmur of men to the silence of the country.
+
+The atmosphere of a great capital, for instance, is singularly conducive to
+work. Living constantly within the circle of light shed by the masters,
+within reach of the laboratories and the great libraries, we are less
+likely to go astray; we are stimulated by the contact of others; we profit
+by their advice and experience; and it is easy to borrow ideas if we lack
+them. Then there is the stimulant of self-respect, the sense of rivalry,
+the eager desire to advance, to distinguish oneself, to shine, to attract
+attention, to become in one's turn an arbiter, an object of wonder and
+envy, without which stimulus many would merely have existed, and would
+never have become what they are.
+
+On the other hand, a man needs an intrinsic radio-activity, and a real
+talent; and the aid, moreover, of exceptional circumstances, if fame is to
+consent to come to him and take him by the hand in the depths of some
+unknown Maillane, some obscure Sérignan; even, as in the case of Fabre, at
+the end only of a long life.
+
+But he, by a kind of fatality inherent in his nature, loved "to
+circumscribe himself," according to the happy expression of Rousseau; and
+he profited, rather than otherwise, by living entirely to himself; for he
+had long been, indeed he always was, the man who, at twenty-five, writing
+to his brother, had said, in speaking of his native countryside:
+
+"For a impassioned botanist, it is a delightful country, in which I could
+pass a month, two months, three months, a year even, alone, quite alone,
+with no other companion than the crows and the jays which gossip among the
+oak-trees; without being weary for a moment; there would be so many
+beautiful fungi, orange, rosy, and white, among the mosses, and so many
+flowers in the fields." (6/4.)
+
+His work having brought him at last just enough to enable him to give
+himself the pleasure of becoming, in his turn, a proprietor, he had
+acquired, for a modest sum, this dilapidated dwelling and this deserted
+spot of ground; barren land, given over to couch-grass, thistles, and
+brambles; a sort of "accursed spot, to which no one would have confided
+even a pinch of turnip-seed." A piece of water in front of the house
+attracted all the frogs in the neighbourhood; the screech-owl mewed from
+the tops of the plane-trees, and numerous birds, no longer disturbed by the
+presence of man, had domiciled themselves in the lilacs and the cypresses.
+A host of insects had seized upon the dwelling, which had long been
+deserted.
+
+He restored the house, and to some extent reduced confusion to order. In
+the uncultivated and pebbly plain where the plough had been long a stranger
+he established plants of a thousand varieties, and, the better to hide
+himself, he had walls built to shut himself in.
+
+Why was he drawn by preference to this village of Sérignan?--for he did not
+go thither without making some inquiries as to the possibility of obtaining
+shelter elsewhere, and the Carpentras cemetery had tempted him also; but
+what had particularly seduced and drawn him thither was the nearness of the
+mountain with its Mediterranean flora, so rich that it recalled the
+Corsican maquis; full of beautiful fungi and varied insects, where, under
+the flat stones exposed to the burning sun, the centipede burrowed and the
+scorpion slept; where a special fauna abounded--of curious dung-beetles,
+scarabaei, the Copris, the Minotaur, etc.--which only a little farther
+north grow rapidly scarcer and then altogether disappear.
+
+He had thus at last arrived in port; he had found his "Eden."
+
+He had realized, "after forty years of desperate struggles," the dearest,
+the most ardent, the longest cherished of all his desires. He could observe
+at leisure "every day, every hour," his beloved insects; "under the blue
+sky, to the music of the cigales." He had only to open his eyes and to see;
+to lend an ear and hear; to enjoy the great blessing of leisure to his
+heart's content.
+
+Doffing the professor's frock-coat for the peasant's blouse, planting a
+root of sweet basil in his "topper," and finally kicking it to pieces, he
+snapped his fingers at his past life.
+
+Liberated at last, far from all that could irritate or disturb him or make
+him feel dependent, satisfied with his modest earnings, reassured by the
+ever-increasing popularity of his little books, he had obtained entire
+possession of his own body and mind, and could give himself without reserve
+to his favourite subjects.
+
+So, with Nature and her inexhaustible book before him, he truly commenced a
+new life.
+
+But would this life have been possible without the support and comfort of
+those intimate feelings which are at the root of human nature? Man is
+seldom the master of these feelings, and they, with reason or despite
+reason, force themselves on his notice as the question of questions.
+
+This delicate problem Fabre had to resolve after suffering a fresh grief.
+Hardly had he commenced to enjoy the benefits of this profound peace, when
+he lost his wife. At this moment his children were already grown up; some
+were married and some ready to leave him; and he could not hope much longer
+to keep his old father, the ex-café-keeper of Pierrelatte, who had come to
+rejoin him; and who might be seen, even in his extreme old age, going forth
+in all weathers and dragging his aged limbs along all the roads of
+Sérignan. (6/5.) The son, moreover, had inherited from his father his
+profound inaptitude for the practical business of life, and was equally
+incapable of managing his interests and the economics of the house. This is
+why, after two years of widowerhood, having already passed his sixtieth
+year, although still physically quite youthful, he remarried. Careless of
+opinion, obeying only the dictates of his own heart and mind, and following
+also the intuitions of unerring instinct, which was superior to the
+understanding of those who thought it their duty to oppose him, he married,
+as Boaz married Ruth, a young woman, industrious, full of freshness and
+life, already completely devoted to his service, and admirably fitted to
+satisfy that craving for order, peace, quiet, and moral tranquillity, which
+to him were above all things indispensable.
+
+His new companion, moreover, was in all things faithful to her mission, and
+it was thanks to the benefits of this union, as the future was to show,
+that Fabre was in a position to pursue his long-delayed inquiries.
+
+Three children, a son and two daughters, were born in swift succession, and
+reconstituted "the family," which was very soon increased by the youngest
+of his daughters by his first wife, who had not married; this was that
+Aglaë, who so often helped her father with her childlike attentions, and,
+"her cheek blooming with animation," collaborated in some of his most
+famous observations (6/6.); an unobtrusive figure, a soul full of devotion
+and resignation, heroic and tender. Having in vain ventured into the world,
+she had returned to the beloved roof at Sérignan, unable to part from the
+father she so admired and adored.
+
+Later, when the shadow of age grew denser and heavier, the young wife and
+the younger children of the famous poet-entomologist took part in his
+labours also; they gave him their material assistance, their hands, their
+eyes, their hearing, their feet; he in the midst of them was the
+conceiving, reasoning, interpreting, and directing brain.
+
+>From this time forward the biography of Fabre becomes simplified, and
+remains a statement of his inner life. For thirty years he never emerged
+from his horizon of mountains and his garden of shingle; he lived wholly
+absorbed in domestic affections and the tasks of a naturalist. None the
+less, he still exercised his vocation as teacher, for neither pure science
+nor poetry was sufficient to nourish his mind, and he was still Professor
+Fabre, untiringly pursuing his programme of education, although no longer
+applying himself thereto exclusively.
+
+This long active period was also the most silent period of his life,
+although not an hour, not a minute of his many days was left unoccupied.
+
+In the first few months at his new home he resumed his hymn to labour.
+
+"You will learn in your turn," he writes to his son Émile, "you will learn,
+I hope, that we are never so happy as when work does not leave us a
+moment's repose. To act is to live." (6/7.)
+
+The better to belong to himself, he eluded all invitations, even those from
+his nearest or most intimate friends; he hated to go away even for a few
+hours, preferring to enjoy in his own house their presence amidst his
+habitual and delightful surroundings. Everything in this still unexplored
+country was new to him. What would he do elsewhere, even in his beloved
+Carpentras, whither his faithful friend and pupil Devillario, who had
+formerly followed him in his walks around Avignon, would endeavour from
+time to time to draw him? Devillario was a magistrate, a collector and
+palaeontologist; his simple tastes, his wide culture, and his passion for
+natural history would surely have decided Fabre to accept his invitations,
+but that he forbade himself the pleasure. "I am afraid the hospitable
+cutlet that awaits me at your table will have time to grow cold; I am up to
+the neck in my work (6/8.)...But you, when you can, escape from your
+courts, and we will philosophize at random, as is our custom when we can
+manage to pass a few hours together. As for me, it is very doubtful whether
+the temptation will seize me to come to Carpentras. A hermit of the Thebaïd
+was no more diligent in his cell than I in my village home." (6/9.)
+
+
+CHAPTER 7. THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.
+
+Was there not indeed a sufficiency of captivating matters all about him,
+and beneath his very feet?
+
+In his deep, sunny garden a thousand insects fly, creep, crawl, and hum,
+and each relates its history to him. A golden gardener-beetle trots along
+the path. Rose-beetles pass, in snoring flight, on every hand, the gold and
+emerald of their elytra gleaming; now and again one of them alights for a
+moment on the flowering head of a thistle; he seizes it carefully with the
+tips of his nervous, pointed fingers, seems to caress it, speaks to it, and
+then suddenly restores it to freedom.
+
+Wasps are pillaging the centauries. On the blossoms of the camomile the
+larvae of the Meloë are waiting for the Anthophorae to carry them off to
+their cells, while around them roam the Cicindelae, their green bodies
+"spotted with points of amaranth." At the bottom of the walls "the chilly
+Psyche creeps slowly along under her cloak of tiny twigs." In the dead
+bough of a lilac-tree the dark-hued Xylocopa, the wood-boring bee, is busy
+tunnelling her gallery. In the shade of the rushes the Praying Mantis,
+rustling the floating robe of her long tender green wings, "gazes alertly,
+on the watch, her arms folded on her breast, her appearance that of one
+praying," and paralyses the great grey locust, nailed to its place by fear.
+
+Nothing here is insignificant; what the world would smile at or deride will
+provide the sage with food for thought and reflection. "Nothing is trivial
+in the majestic problem of nature; our laboratory acquaria are of less
+value than the imprint which the shoe of a mule has left in the clay, when
+the rain has filled the primitive basin, and life has peopled it with
+marvels"; and the least fact offered us by chance on the most thoroughly
+beaten track may possibly open prospects as vast as all the starry sky.
+
+Tell yourself that everything in nature is a symbol of something like a
+specimen of an abstruse cryptogram, all the characters of which conceal
+some meaning. But when we have succeeded in deciphering these living texts,
+and have grasped the allusion; when, beside the symbol, we have succeeded
+in finding the commentary, then the most desolate corner of the earth
+appears to the solitary seeker as a gallery full of the masterpieces of an
+unsuspected art. Fabre puts into our hands the golden key which opens the
+doors of this marvellous museum.
+
+Let us consider the terebinth louse; it is just a little yellow mite; but
+is it nothing else? Its genealogical history teaches us "by what amazing
+essays of passion and variety the universal law which rules the
+transmission of life is evolved. Here is neither father nor eggs; all these
+mites are mothers; and the young are born living, just like their mothers."
+To this end "almost the whole of the maternal substance is disintegrated
+and renewed and conglobated to form the ovarium...the whole creature has
+become an egg, which has, for its shell, the dry skin of the tiny creature,
+and the microscope will show a whole world in formation...a nebulosity as
+of white of egg, in which fresh centres of life are forming, as the suns
+are condensed in the nebulae of the heavens." (7/1.)
+
+What is this fleck of foam, like a drop of saliva, which we see in
+springtime on the weeds of the meadows; among others on the spurge, when
+its stems begin to shoot, and its sombre flowers open in the sunlight? "It
+is the work of an insect. It is the shelter in which the Cicadellina
+deposits her eggs. What a miraculous chemist! Her stiletto excels the
+finest craft of the botanical anatomist" by its sovereign art of separating
+the acrid poison which flows with the sap in the veins of the most venomous
+plants, and extracting therefrom only an inoffensive fluid. (7/2.)
+
+At every step the insects set us problems equally varied. The other
+creatures are nearer to us; they resemble us in many respects. But insects,
+almost the first-born of creation, form a world apart, and contain, in
+their tiny bodies, as Réaumur has admirably said, "more parts than the most
+gigantic animals." They have senses and faculties of their own, which
+enable them to accomplish actions, which are doubtless very simply related
+in reality, but which seem, to our minds, as extraordinary as the habits of
+the inhabitants of Mars might, if by chance they were to descend in our
+midst. We do not know how they hear, nor how they see through their
+compound eyes, and our ignorance concerning the majority of their senses
+still further increases the difficulty, which so often arrests us, of
+interpreting their actions.
+
+The tubercled Cerceris "finds by the hundred" and almost immediately a
+species of weevil, the Cleona ophthalmica, on which it feeds its larvae,
+and which the human eye, though it searches for hours, can scarcely find
+anywhere. The eyes of the Cerceris are like magnifying glasses, veritable
+microscopes, which immediately distinguish, in the vast field of nature, an
+object that human vision is powerless to discover. (7/3.)
+
+How does the Ammophila, hovering over the turf and investigating it far and
+wide, in its search for a grey grub, contrive to discern the precise point
+in the depth of the subsoil where the larva is slumbering in immobility?
+"Neither touch nor sight can come into play, for the grub is sealed up in
+its burrow at a depth of several inches; nor the scent, since it is
+absolutely inodorous; nor the hearing, since its immobility is absolute
+during the daytime." (7/4.)
+
+The Processional caterpillar of the pine-trees, "endowed with an exquisite
+hygrometric sensibility," is a barometer more infallible than that of the
+physicists. "It foresees the tempests preparing afar, at enormous
+distances, almost in the other hemisphere," and announces them several days
+before the least sign of them appears on the horizon. (7/5.)
+
+A wild bee, the Chalicodoma, and a wasp, the Cerceris, carried in the dark
+far from their familiar pastures, to a distance of several miles, and
+released in spots which they have never seen, cross vast and unknown spaces
+with absolute certainty, and regain their nests; even after long absence,
+and in spite of contrary winds and the most unexpected obstacles. It is not
+memory that guides them, but a special faculty whose astonishing results we
+must admit without attempting to explain them, so far removed are they from
+our own psychology. (7/6.) But here is another example:
+
+The Greater Peacock moths cross hills and valleys in the darkness, with a
+heavy flight of wings spotted with inexplicable hieroglyphics. They hasten
+from the remotest depths of the horizon to find their "sleeping beauties,"
+drawn thereto by unknown odours, inappreciable by our senses, yet so
+penetrating that the branch of almond on which the female has perched, and
+which she has impregnated with her effluvium, exerts the same extraordinary
+attraction. (7/7.)
+
+Considering these creatures, we end by discovering more things than are
+contained in all the philosophies...if we know how to look for them.
+
+Among so many unimaginable phenomena, which bewilder us, "because there is
+nothing analogous in us," we succeed in perceiving, here and there, a few
+glimpses of day, which suddenly throw a singular light upon this black
+labyrinth, in which the least secret we can surprise "enters perhaps more
+directly into the profound enigma of our ends and our origins than the
+secret of the most urgent and most closely studied of our passions." (7/8.)
+
+Fabre explains by hypnosis one of those curious facts which have hitherto
+been so poorly interpreted. When surprised by abnormal conditions, we see
+insects suddenly fall over, drop to the ground, and lie as though struck by
+lightning, gathering their limbs under their bodies. A shock, an unexpected
+odour, a loud noise, plunges them instantly into a sort of lethargy, more
+or less prolonged. The insect "feigns death," not because it simulates
+death, but in reality because this MAGNETIC condition resembles that of
+death. (7/9.) Now the Odynerus, the Anthidium, the Eucera, the Ammophila,
+and all the hymenoptera which Fabre has observed sleeping at the fall of
+night, "suspended in space solely by the strength of their mandibles, their
+bodies tense, their limbs retracted, without exhaustion or collapse"; and
+the larva of the Empusa, "which for some ten months hangs to a twig by its
+limbs, head downwards": do not these present a surprising analogy with
+those hypnotized persons who possess the faculty of remaining fixed in the
+most painful poses, and of supporting the most unusual attitudes, for an
+extremely long time; for instance, with one arm extended, or one foot
+raised from the ground, without appearing to experience the least fatigue,
+and with a persevering and unfaltering energy? (7/10.)
+
+That the ex-schoolmaster was able to penetrate so far into this new world,
+and that he has been able to interest us in so many fascinating problems,
+was due to the fact that he had also "taken a wide bird's-eye view through
+all the windows of creation." His universal capabilities, his immense
+culture and almost encyclopaedic science have enabled him to utilize,
+thanks to his studies, all the knowledge allied to his subject. He is not
+one of those who understand only their speciality and who, knowing nothing
+outside their own province and their particular labours, refuse to grasp at
+anything beyond the narrow limits within which they stand installed.
+
+All plants are to him so familiar that the flowers, for him, assume the
+airs of living persons. But without a profound knowledge of botany, who
+would hope to grasp the profound, perpetual, and intimate relations of the
+plant and the insect?
+
+He has turned over strata and interrogated the schistous deposits, whose
+archives preserve the forms of vanished organizations, but "keep silence as
+to the origin of the instincts." Bending over his reagents, he has sought
+to discover, according to the phrase of a philosopher, those secret
+retreats in which Nature is seated before her furnaces, in the depths of
+her laboratory; following up the metamorphoses of matter even to the wings
+of the Scarabaei, and observing how life, returning to her crucible the
+debris and ashes of the organism, combines the elements anew, and from the
+elements of the urine can derive, for example, by a simple displacement of
+molecules, "all this dazzling magic of colours of innumerable shades: the
+amethystine violet of Geotrupes, the emerald of the rose-beetle, the gilded
+green of the Cantharides, the metallic lustre of the gardener-beetles, and
+all the pomp of the Buprestes and the dung-beetles." (7/11.)
+
+His books are steeped in all the ideas of modern physics. The highest
+mathematical knowledge has been referred to with profit in his marvellous
+description of the hunting-net of the Epeïra. Whose "terribly scientific"
+combinations realize "the spiral logarithm of the geometers, so curious in
+its properties" (7/12.); a splendid observation, in which Fabre makes us
+admire, in the humble web of a spider, a masterpiece as astonishing and
+incomprehensible as and even more sublime than the honeycomb.
+
+This explains why Fabre has always energetically denied that he is properly
+speaking an entomologist; and indeed the term appears often wrongly to
+describe him. He loves, on the contrary, to call himself a naturalist; that
+is, a biologist; biology being, by definition, the study of living
+creatures considered as a whole and from every point of view. And as
+nothing in life is isolated, as all things hold together, and as each part,
+in all its relations, presents itself to the gaze of the observer under
+innumerable aspects, one cannot be a true naturalist without being at the
+same time a philosopher.
+
+But it is not enough to know and to observe.
+
+To be admitted to the spectacle of these tiny creatures, to become familiar
+with their habits, to grasp the mysterious threads which connect them one
+with another and with the vast universe: for this the cold and deliberate
+vision of the specialist would often be insufficient. There is an art of
+observation, and the gift of observation is a true function of that
+constantly alert intelligence, continually dominated by the need of delving
+untiringly down to the ultimate truth accessible, "allowing ourselves to
+pass over nothing without seeking its reason, and habitually following up
+every response with another question, until we come to the granite wall of
+the Unknowable." Above all we need an ardent and interested sympathy, for
+"we penetrate farther into the secret of things by the heart than by the
+reason," as Toussenel has said; and "it is only by intuition that we can
+know what life truly is," adds Bergson profoundly. (7/13.) Now Fabre loves
+these little peoples and knows how to make us love them. How tenderly he
+speaks of them; with what solicitude he observes them; with what love he
+follows the progress of their nurslings; the young grubs wriggling in his
+test-tubes, with doddering heads, are happy; and he himself is happy to see
+them "well-fed and shining with health." He pities the bee stabbed by the
+Philanthus "in the holy joys of labour." He sympathizes with the sufferings
+of these little creatures and their hard labours. If, in his search for
+ideas, he has to overturn their dwellings, "he repents of subjecting
+maternal love to such tribulations," and if he is constrained to put them
+to the question, to torment them in order to extract their secrets, he is
+grieved to have provoked "such miseries!" (7/14.) Having provided for their
+needs, and satisfied with the secrets which they have revealed to him, it
+is not without regret and difficulty that he parts from them and restores
+them "to the delights of liberty."
+
+He is thoroughly convinced, moreover, that all the creatures that share the
+face of the earth with us are accomplishing an august and appointed task.
+He welcomes the swallows to his dwelling, even surrendering his workroom to
+them, at the risk of jeopardizing his notes and books. He pleads for the
+frog, and applies himself to setting forth his unknown qualities; he
+rehabilitates the bat, the hedgehog, and the screech-owl, persecuted,
+defamed, crushed, stoned, and crucified! (7/15.)
+
+So intimate is the life which he leads among them all that he makes himself
+truly their companion, and relates his own history in narrating theirs;
+pleased to discover in their joys and sorrows his own trials and delights;
+mingling in their annals his memories and his impressions; delightful
+fragments of a childlike autobiography, encrusted in his learned work;
+moving and delightful pages in which all the ingenuity of this noble mind
+reveals itself with a touching sincerity, in which all the freshness of
+this charming and so profoundly unworldly nature is seen as through a pure
+crystal.
+
+There is no real communion with nature without sentiment, without an
+illuminating passion: often the sole and effectual grace which enables its
+true meaning to appear. Neither taste, nor intelligence, nor logic, nor all
+the science of the schools can suffice alone. To see further there is
+needed something like a gift of correspondence, surpassing the limits of
+observation and experience, which enables us to foresee and to divine the
+profound secrets of life which lie beneath appearances. Those who are so
+gifted have often only to open their eyes in order to grasp matters in
+their true light.
+
+A great observer is in reality a poet who imagines and creates. The
+microscope, the magnifying glass, the scalpel, are as it were the strings
+of a lyre. "The felicitous and fruitful hypothesis which constitutes
+scientific invention is a gift of sentiment" in the words of Claude
+Bernard; and of this king of physiology, who commenced by proving himself
+in works of pure imagination, and whose genius finally took for its theme
+the manifold variations of living flesh, of him too may we not say that he
+has explored the labyrinths of life with "the torch of poetry in his hand"?
+
+Similarly, do not the harmonious sequences which run through all the
+admirable discoveries of Pasteur give us the sensation of a veritable and
+gigantic poem?
+
+In Fabre also it seems that the passion which he brings to all his patient
+observations is in itself truly creative: "his heart beats with emotion,
+the sweat drips from his brow to the soil, making mortar of the dust"; he
+forgets food and drink, and "thus passes hours of oblivion in the happiness
+of learning." I have seen him in his laboratory studying the spawning of
+the bluebottle, when I, at his side, could scarcely support the horrible
+stench which rose from the putrefying adders and lumps of meat; he,
+however, was oblivious of the frightful odour, and his face was inundated
+with smiles of delight.
+
+Intelligence, then, must here be the servant of feeling and intuition; a
+kind of primitive faculty, mysterious and instinctive, which alone makes a
+great naturalist like Fabre, a great historian like Michelet, a great
+physician like Boherhaave or Bretonneau.
+
+These last are not always the most scholarly nor the most learned nor the
+most patient, but they are those who possess in a high degree that special
+vision, that gift, properly speaking poetic, which is known as the clinical
+eye, which at the first glance perceives and confirms the diagnosis in all
+its detail.
+
+Fabre has a mind propitious to such processes; and if, by chance,
+circumstances had directed his attention to medicine, that science which is
+based upon an abundant provision of facts, but in which good sense and a
+kind of divination play a still wider part, there is no doubt that he would
+have been capable of becoming a shining light in this new arena.
+
+He was full of admiration for that other illustrious Vauclusian, François
+Raspail (7/16.), whose medical genius anticipated Pasteur and all the
+conceptions of modern medicine. It would seem that he found in him his own
+temper, his own fashion of seeing and representing things. He loved
+Raspail's books and his prescriptions, full of reason and a most judicious
+good sense, distrusting for himself and for his family the complicated
+formulae and cunning remedies of an art too considered and still unproved.
+At Carpentras, while his first-born, Émile, was hovering between life and
+death, and the physician who came to see him, "being at the end of his
+resources," did nothing more for him and soon ceased to come, thinking that
+the child would not last till the morrow, Fabre flew to the works of
+Raspail.
+
+"I searched to discover what his malady was. I found it, and he was treated
+day and night accordingly. To-day he is convalescent; and his appetite has
+returned. I believe he is saved, and I shall say, like Ambroise Paré, 'I
+have nursed him; God has cured him.'" (7/17.)
+
+The episode which he relates, when, at the primary school of Avignon, a
+retort had just burst, "spurting in all directions its contents of
+vitriol," right in the midst of the suddenly interrupted chemistry lesson,
+and when, thanks to his prompt action, he saved the sight of one of his
+comrades, does honour to his initiative and presence of mind. (7/18.)
+
+While "all physicians should bow before the facts which he excels in
+discovering" (7/19.), he has also been able to make direct application of
+the marvels of entomology to some of the problems of hygiene and medicine.
+He has shown that the irritant poison secreted by certain caterpillars,
+"which sets the fingers which handle them on fire," is nothing but a waste
+product of the organism, a derivative of uric acid; he does not hesitate to
+perform painful experiments on himself in order to furnish the proof of his
+theory; and he explains thus the curious cases of dermatitis which are
+often observed among silkworm-breeders. (7/20.) He proves the uselessness
+of our meat-safes of metallic gauze, intended to preserve meat against
+contamination, and the efficacy of a mere envelope of paper, not only to
+preserve meat from flies, but also our garments from the clothes-moth.
+(7/21.) He recommends the curious Provençal recipe, which consists in
+boiling suspected mushrooms in salt and water before eating them. Finally
+he suggests to members of the medical profession that they might perhaps
+extract heroic remedies from these treacherous vegetables. (7/22.)
+
+He had need of that indefinite leisure which had hitherto been so wholly
+lacking, for the events of ephemeral lives occur at indeterminate hours, at
+unexpected moments, and are of brief duration.
+
+So, attentive to their least movements, Fabre goes forth to observe them at
+the earliest break of day, in the red dawn, when the bee "pops her head out
+of her attic window to see what the weather is," and the spiders of the
+thickets lie in wait under the whorls of their nets, "which the tears of
+night have changed into chaplets of dewdrops, whose magic jewellery,
+sparkling in the sun," is already attracting moths and midges.
+
+Seated for hours before a sprig of terebinth, his eye, armed with the
+magnifying glass, follows the slow manoeuvres of the terebinth louse, whose
+proboscis "cunningly distils the venom which causes the leaf to swell and
+produces those enormous tumours, those misshapen and monstrous galls, in
+which the young pass their period of slumber."
+
+He watches at night, by the dim light of a lantern, to copy the Scolopendra
+at her task, seeking to surprise the secret of her eggs (7/23.); to observe
+the Cione constructing her capsule of goldbeater's skin, or the
+Processional caterpillars travelling head to tail along their satin trail,
+extinguishing his candle only when sleep at last sets his eyelids blinking.
+He will wake early to witness the fairy-like resurrection of the silkworm
+moth (7/24.); "in order not to lose the moment when the nymph bursts her
+swaddling-bands," or when the wing of the locust issues from its sheath and
+"commences to sprout"; no spectacle in the world is more wonderful than the
+sight of "this extraordinary anatomy in process of formation," the
+unrolling of these "bundles of tissue, cunningly folded and reduced to the
+smallest possible compass" in the insignificant alar stumps, which
+gradually unfold "like an immense set of sails," like the "body-linen of
+the princess" of the fairy-tale, which was contained in one single hemp-
+seed. (7/25.)
+
+In his Harmas he is like a stranger discovering an unknown world; "like a
+kindly giant from Sirius, holding a magnifying glass to his eye, retaining
+his breath, lest it should overturn and sweep away the pigmies which he is
+observing."
+
+His passion for interrogating the Sphinx of life, everywhere and at all
+moments, sufficed to fill his days from one end of the year to the other.
+When some distant subject interested him, even on the most scorching days,
+he would put "his lunch in his pocket, an apple and a crust of bread," and
+sit out in the hot sunlight, accompanied by his dog, Vasco, Tom, or Rabbit;
+fearing only that some importunate third person might come between nature
+and himself.
+
+When he walked in his garden he would let nothing escape him; witness those
+precise notes of an eclipse of the sun, and of the effects which that
+phenomenon produces upon animal life as a whole.
+
+While his children followed the progress of the moon across the sun through
+a pane of smoked glass, he attentively observed all that occurred in the
+countryside.
+
+"It is four; the day grows pale; the temperature is fresher; the cocks
+crow, surprised by this kind of twilight which comes before the hour. A few
+dogs are baying...The swallows, numerous before, have all disappeared...a
+couple have taken refuge in my study, one window of which is open...when
+the normal light returns they will come outdoors once more...The
+nightingale, which had so long importuned me by his interminable song, is
+silent at last (7/26.); the black-capped skylarks, which were warbling
+continually, are suddenly still...only the young house-sparrows under the
+tiles of the roof are mournfully chirping...Peace and silence, the daylight
+more than half gone...In the Harmas I can no longer see the insects flying;
+I find only one bee pillaging the rosemary; all life has disappeared.
+
+"Only a weevil, the Lixus," which he is observing in a cage, "continues,
+step by step, without the slightest emotion, his amorous by-play, as though
+nothing unusual were happening...The nightingale and the skylark may be
+silent, oppressed by fear; the bee may re-enter her hive; but is a weevil
+to be upset because the sun threatens to go out?" (7/27.)
+
+He was no less curious concerning the resurrection of the sun, and every
+time he made an excursion to the Ventoux he was careful not to miss this
+spectacle; setting out at an early hour from the foot of the mountain, so
+that he might see the dawn grow bright from the summit of its rocky mass;
+then the sun, suddenly rising in the morning breeze, and setting fire,
+little by little, to the Alps of Dauphiné and the hills of Comtat; and the
+Rhône, far below, slender as a silver thread.
+
+He took infinite pleasure too in drinking his fill of the sublime terrors
+of the thunderstorm, which he regarded as one of the most magnificent
+spectacles which nature can offer; not content with observing it through
+glass, he would open wide the windows at night the better to enjoy the
+phosphorescence of the atmosphere, the conflagration of the clouds, the
+bursts of thunder, and all the solemn pomp with which the great purifying
+phenomenon manifests itself.
+
+But pure observation, as practised by his predecessors, Réaumur and Huber,
+is often insufficient, or "furnishes only a glimpse of matters."
+
+He had recourse, therefore, to artificial observation of the kind known as
+experimentation, and we may say that Fabre was really the first to employ
+the experimental method in the study of the minds of animals.
+
+Near the field of observation, therefore, is the naturalist's workshop,
+"the animal laboratory," in which such inductions as may be suggested by
+the doings and the movements of the insects "which roam at liberty amidst
+the thyme and lavender" are subjected to the test of experiment. It is a
+great, silent, isolated room, brilliantly lighted by two windows facing
+south, upon the garden, one at least of which is always kept open that the
+insects may come and go at liberty.
+
+In the glass-topped boxes of pine which occupy almost the entire height of
+the whitewashed walls are carefully arranged the collections so patiently
+amassed; all the entomological fauna of the South of France, and the sea-
+shells of the Mediterranean; an abundant wealth also of divers rarities;
+numismatical treasures and fragments of pottery and other prehistorical
+documents, of which the numerous ossuaries in the neighbourhood of
+Sérignan, scattered here and there upon the hills, contain many specimens.
+
+At the top, crowning the facade of glass-topped cases like an immense
+frieze, is the colossal herbarium, the first volumes of which go back to
+the early youth of their owner; all the flora, both of the Midi and the
+North, those of the plains and those of the mountains, and all the algae of
+fresh and salt water.
+
+But it must not be supposed that Fabre attaches any great value to these
+collections, enormous though the sum of labour which they represent. To him
+they have been a means of education, a means of organizing and arranging
+his knowledge, and not of satisfying an idle curiosity; not the amusement
+of one content with the rind of things. In order to identify at first sight
+such specimens as one encounters and proposes to examine, one must first of
+all learn to observe and to see thoroughly, and to school the eyes in the
+colours and forms peculiar to each individual species.
+
+One may fairly complain of Réaumur, for example, that his knowledge was
+uncertain and incomplete. Too often he leaves his readers undecided as to
+the nature of the species whose habits he describes. Fabre himself, by dint
+of criticizing with so much humour the abuse of classifications, has
+sometimes allowed himself to fall into the same fault. (7/28.) He has taken
+good care, however, not to neglect the systematic study of species; witness
+his "Flora of the Vaucluse" and that careful catalogue of Avignon which he
+has not disdained to republish. (7/29.) The truth is that "if we do not
+know their names the knowledge of the things escapes us" (7/30.), and he
+was profoundly conscious of the truth of this precept of the great
+Linnaeus.
+
+The middle of the room is entirely occupied by a great table of walnut-
+wood, on which are arranged bottles, test-tubes, and old sardine-boxes,
+which Fabre employs in order to watch the evolution of a thousand nameless
+or doubtful eggs, to observe the labours of their larvae, the creation and
+the hatching of cocoons, and the little miracles of metamorphosis, "after a
+germination more wonderful than that of the acorn which makes the oak."
+
+Covers of metallic gauze resting on earthenware saucers full of sand, a few
+carboys and flower-pots or sweetmeat jars closed with a square of glass;
+these serve as observation or experimental cages in which the progress and
+the actions of "these tiny living machines" can be examined.
+
+Fabre has revealed himself as a psychologist without rival, of a consummate
+skill in the difficult and delicate art of experimentation; the art of
+making the insect speak, of putting questions to it, of forcing it to
+betray its secrets; for experiment is "the only method which can throw any
+light upon the nature of instincts."
+
+His resources being slender and his mind inventive, he has ingeniously
+supplemented the poverty of his equipment, and has discovered less costly
+and less complex means of conducting his experiments; knowing the secret of
+extracting the sublimest truth from clumsy combinations of "trivial,
+peasant-made articles."
+
+He has succeeded, in his rustic laboratory, in applying the rigorous rules
+of investigation and experimentation established by the great biologists.
+He has therefore been able to establish his beautiful observations in a
+manner so indisputable that those who come after him and are tempted to
+study the same things can but arrive at the same results, and derive
+inspiration from his researches.
+
+To note with care all the details of a phenomenon is the first essential,
+so that others may afterwards refer to them and profit by them; the
+difficult thing is to interpret them, to discover the circumstances, the
+whys and wherefores, the consequences, and the connecting links.
+
+But a single fact observed by chance at the wayside, and which would not
+even attract the attention of another, will be instantly luminous to this
+searching understanding, it will suggest questions unforeseen, and will
+evoke, by anticipation, preconceived ideas and sudden flashes of intuition,
+which will necessitate the test of experiment.
+
+Why, for example, does the Philanthus, that slender wasp, which captures
+the honey-bee upon the blossoms in order to feed her larvae; why, before
+she carries her prey to her offspring, does she "outrage the dying insect,"
+by squeezing its crop in order to empty it of honey, in which she appears
+to delight, and does indeed actually delight?
+
+"The bandit greedily takes in her mouth the extended and sugared tongue of
+the dead insect; then once more she presses the neck and the thorax, and
+once more applies the pressure of her abdomen to the honey-sac of the bee.
+The honey oozes forth and is instantly licked up. Thus the bee is gradually
+compelled to disgorge the contents of the crop. This atrocious meal lasts
+often half an hour and longer, until the last trace of honey has
+disappeared."
+
+The detailed answer is obtained by experiment, which perfectly explains
+this "odious feast," the excuse for which is simply maternity. The
+Philanthus knows, instinctively, without having learned it, that honey,
+which is her ordinary fare, is, by a very singular "inversion," a mortal
+poison to her larvae. (7/31.)
+
+As an accomplished physiologist, Fabre conducts all kinds of experiments.
+Behind the wires of his cages, he provokes the moving spectacle of the
+scorpion at grip with the whole entomological fauna, in order to test the
+effects of its terrible venom upon various species; and thus he discovers
+the strange immunity of larvae; the virus, "the reagent of a transcendent
+chemistry, distinguishes the flesh of the larva from that of the adult; it
+is harmless to the former, but mortal to the latter"; a fresh proof that
+"metamorphosis modifies the substance of the organism to the point of
+changing its most intimate properties." (7/32.)
+
+You may judge from this that he knows through and through the history of
+the creatures which form the subjects of his faithful narratives. He is
+informed of the smallest events of their lives. He possesses a calendar of
+their births; he records their chronology and the succession of
+generations; he has noted their methods of work, examined their diet, and
+recorded their meals. He discovers the motives which dictate their
+peculiarities of choice; why the Cerceris, for instance, among all the
+victims at its disposal, never selects anything but the Buprestis and the
+weevils. He is familiar too with their tactics of warfare and their methods
+of conflict.
+
+His gaze has penetrated even the most hidden dwellings; those in which the
+Halictus "varnishes her cells and makes the round loaf which is to receive
+the egg"; in which, under the cover of cocoons, murderous grubs devour
+slumbering nymphs; even the depths of the soil are not hidden from him, for
+there, thanks to his artifices, he has surprised the astonishing secret of
+the Minotaur.
+
+He sifts all doubtful stories; anecdotes, statements of supposed habits;
+all that is incoherent, or ill observed, or misinterpreted; all the cliches
+which the makers of books pass from hand to hand.
+
+In place of repetition he gives us laws, constant facts, fixed rules.
+
+With incomparable skill, he repeats and tests the ancient experiments of
+Réaumur.
+
+He is not content to show us that Erasmus Darwin is mistaken; he points out
+how it is that he has fallen into error. (7/33.)
+
+He sets himself to decipher the meaning of old tales, skilfully disengaging
+the little parcel of truth which usually lies beneath a mass of incorrect
+or even false statements. He criticises La Fontaine, and questions the
+statements of Horus Apollo and Pliny. From a mass of undigested knowledge
+he has created the living science of entomology, which had received from
+Réaumur a first breath of vitality, in such wise that each individual
+creature is presented in his work with its precise expression and the
+absolute truth of its character and attitudes; the inhabitants of the woods
+and fields, whether those which feed upon the crops or those which live in
+the crevices of the rocks, or the obscure workers that crawl upon the
+earth; all those which have a secret to tell or something to teach us; the
+Cigale, so different from the insect of the Fable; and above all that
+beetle whose name had hitherto been encountered arrayed in the most
+fantastic legends, the famous Scarabaeus sacer of the tombs, which Fabre
+preferred to place at the head of his epic as an agreeable prologue,
+although the inquiry relative to his amazing feats belongs chronologically
+to a comparatively recent period of his career.
+
+How moderate he is in such suppositions as he ventures; how cautious when
+his persistent patience has at last struck against "the inaccessible wall
+of the Unknowable"! Then, with admirable frankness, tranquil and sincere,
+he simply owns that "he does not know," unlike so many others, whose
+uncritical minds are contented with a fragmentary vision, and run so far
+ahead of the facts that they can only promote indefinite illusion and
+error.
+
+One is surprised indeed to remark how few even of the most learned and
+well-informed of men have a real aptitude for observation, and a highly
+instructive book might be written concerning the discrepancies and the weak
+points in our knowledge. If they were subjected to a sufficiently severe
+test, how threadbare would appear many of those problems which nature and
+the world present, and which are regarded as resolved!
+
+How long, for instance, was needed to destroy the legend of the cuckoo,
+incessantly repeated down to the days of Xavier Raspail, and to us so
+familiar; to elucidate its history, and to set it in its true light!
+(7/34.)
+
+It is by means of such data as these that a science is founded, for
+theories decay, and only well-observed facts remain irrefragable. With
+stones such as these, which are hewn by the great artisan, the structures
+of the future will be built, and our own science, perhaps, will one day be
+refashioned.
+
+For this reason Fabre's books are an education for all those who wish to
+devote themselves to observation; a manual of mental discipline, a true
+"essay upon method," which should be read by every naturalist, and the most
+interesting, instructive, familiar and delightful course of training that
+has ever been known.
+
+On the other hand, it is impossible to conceive what labour this delicate
+work demands; what perseverance Fabre has required painfully to extract one
+grain of gold; to glean and unite the definite factors, the positive
+documents, which served as foundations for each of his essays; lucid,
+limpid, and captivating as the most delightful of fairy-tales. We are
+charmed, fascinated, and astonished; we see nothing of the groping advance,
+the checks, and all the toil and the patience demanded. We do not suspect
+the long waiting, the hesitation, the desperate length of the inquiries.
+For example, to establish the curious relations which exist between the
+wasps and the Volucellae, what long and repeated experiments were needful!
+His notebooks, in which he records, from day to day, all that he sees, are
+evidence of this. What watches in the alley of lilacs, year after year, to
+decipher the mechanism and the mode of construction of the hunting-net of
+the Epeïra! Some of these histories, like that of the hyper-metamorphosis
+of the Meloë, were only completed as the result of twenty-five years of
+assiduous inquiry, while forty years were required to complete that of the
+Scarabaeus sacer, for his observation of it was always partial; it is
+almost always impossible to divine what one cannot see from the little that
+one does see; and as a rule one must return to the same point over and over
+again in order to fill up lacunae.
+
+The majority of the insects which Fabre has studied are solitary, and are
+only to be encountered singly, scattered over wide areas of country. Some
+live only in determined spots, and not elsewhere, such as the famous
+Cerceris, or the yellow-winged Sphex, of which no trace is to be found
+beyond the limits of the Carpentras countryside.
+
+The proper season must be watched for; one must be ready at any moment to
+profit by a lucky chance, and resign oneself to interminable watches at the
+bottom of a ravine, or keep on the alert for hours under a fiery sun. Often
+the chance goes by, or the trail followed proves false; but the season is
+over, and one must wait for the return of another spring. The trade of
+observer in many cases resembles the exhausting labours of the Sisyphus
+beetle, painfully pushing his pellet up a rough and stony path; so that the
+team halts and staggers at every moment, the load spills over and rolls
+away, and all has to be commenced over again.
+
+We can now cast back, in order to consider at leisure the immortal study
+which marked the beginning of his fame, with the greater interest and
+profit in that Fabre has been able, during his retirement, to generalize
+and extend his discovery. (7/35.)
+
+Let us first of all note how the observation which Dufour had made of the
+nest of the Cerceris was transformed in his hands, and what developments he
+was able to evolve therefrom.
+
+Since they have been definitely established by Fabre these curious facts
+have been well-known. They form perhaps the greatest prodigy presented by
+entomology, that science so full of marvels.
+
+These wasps nourish themselves only on the nectar of flowers; but their
+larvae, which they will never behold, must have fresh and succulent flesh
+still palpitating with life.
+
+The insect digs a tunnel in the soil, in which she places her eggs, and
+having provisioned the cell with selected game--cricket, spider,
+caterpillar, or beetle--she finally closes the entrance, which she does not
+again cross.
+
+Like nearly all insects, the young wasp is born in the larval state, and
+from the moment of its hatching to the end of its growth--that is to say,
+for a period of many days--the grub enclosed in its cell can look for no
+help from without.
+
+Here then is a fascinating problem: either the victims deposited by the
+mother are dead, and desiccation or putrefaction attacks them promptly, or
+else they are living, as indeed the larvae require; but then "what will
+become of this fragile creature, which a mere nothing will destroy, shut in
+the narrow chamber of the burrow among vigorous beetles, for weeks on end
+working their long spurred legs; or at grips with a monstrous caterpillar
+making play with its flanks and mandibles, rolling and unrolling its
+tortuous folds?"
+
+Such is the thrilling mystery of which Fabre discovered the key.
+
+With inconceivable ingenuity, the victim is seized and thrown to the
+ground, and the wasp plunges her sting, not at random into the body, which
+would involve the risk of death, but at determined points, exactly into the
+seat of those invisible nervous ganglions whose mechanism commands the
+various movements of the creature.
+
+Immediately after these subtle wounds the prey is paralysed throughout its
+body; its members appear to be disarticulated, "as though all the springs
+were broken"; the true corpse is not more motionless.
+
+But the wound is not mortal; not only does the insect continue to live, but
+it has acquired the strange prerogative of being able to live for a very
+long period without taking any nourishment, thanks precisely to the
+condition of immobility, in some sort vegetative, which paralysis confers
+upon it.
+
+When the hour strikes the hungry larva will find its favourite meat served
+to its liking; and it will attack this defenceless prey with all the
+circumspection of a refined eater; "with an exquisitely delicate art,
+nibbling the viscera of its victim little by little, with an infallible
+method; the less essential parts first of all, and only in the last
+instance those which are necessary to life. Here then is an
+incomprehensible spectacle; the spectacle of an animal which, eaten alive,
+mouthful by mouthful, during nearly a fortnight, is hollowed out, grows
+less and less, and finally collapses," while retaining to the end its
+succulence and its freshness.
+
+The fact is that the mother has taken care to deposit her egg "at a point
+always the same" in the region which her sting has rendered insensible, so
+that the first mouthfuls are only feebly resented. But as the enemy goes
+deeper and deeper "it sometimes happens that the cricket, bitten to the
+quick, attempts to retaliate; but it only succeeds in opening and closing
+the pincers of its mandibles on the empty air, or in uselessly waving its
+antennae." Vain efforts: "for now the voracious beast has bitten deep into
+the spot, and can with impunity ransack the entrails." What a slow and
+horrible agony for the paralysed victim, should some glimmer of
+consciousness still linger in its puny brain! What a terrible nightmare for
+the little field-cricket, suddenly plunged into the den of the Sphex, so
+far from the sunlit tuft of thyme which sheltered its retreat!
+
+To paralyse without killing, "to deliver the prey to the larvae inert but
+living": that is the end to be attained; only the method varies according
+to the species of the hunter and the structure of the prey; thus the
+Cerceris, which attacks the coleoptera, and the Scolia, which preys upon
+the larvae of the rose-beetle, sting them only once and in a single place,
+because there is concentrated the mass of the motor ganglions.
+
+The Pompilus, which selects a spider for its victim, no less than the
+redoubtable Tarantula, knows that its quarry "has two nervous centres which
+animate respectively the movements of the limbs and those of the terrible
+fangs; hence the two stabs of the sting." (7/36.)
+
+The Sphex plunges her dagger three times into the breast of the cricket,
+because she knows, by an intuition that we cannot comprehend, that the
+locomotor innervation of the cricket is actuated by three nervous centres,
+which lie wide apart. (7/37.)
+
+Finally, the Ammophila, "the highest manifestation of the logic of
+instinct, whose profound knowledge leaves us confounded, stabs the
+caterpillar in nine places, because the body of the victim with which it
+feeds its larvae is a series of rings, set end to end, each of which
+possesses its little independent nervous centre." (7/38.)
+
+This is not all; the genius of the Sphex is not yet at the end of its
+foresight. You have doubtless heard of the comatose state into which the
+wounded fall when, after a fracture of the skull, the brain is compressed
+by a violent haemorrhage or a bony splinter. The physiologists imitate this
+process of nature when they wish, for example, to obtain, in animals under
+experiment, a state of complete immobility. But did the first surgeon who
+thought of trepanning the skull in order to exert on the brain, by means of
+a sponge, a certain degree of compression, ever imagine that an analogous
+procedure had long been employed in the insect world, and that these clumsy
+methods were merely child's play beside the astonishing feats of the
+Unconscious?
+
+For the stab in the thoracic ganglions, however efficacious, is often
+insufficient. Although the six limbs are paralysed, although the victim
+cannot move, its mandibles, "pointed, sharp, serrated, which close like a
+pair of scissors, still remain a menace to the tyrant; they might at least,
+by gripping the surrounding grasses, oppose a more or less effectual
+resistance to the process of carrying off." So the preceding manoeuvres are
+consummated by a kind of garrotting; that is, the insect "takes care to
+compress the brain of its victim, but so as to avoid wounding it; producing
+only a stupor, a simple torpor, a passing lethargy." Is not the ingenious
+observer justified in concluding that "this is alarmingly scientific"?
+
+Between the dry statements of Dufour, which served Fabre as his original
+theme, and the unaccustomed wealth of this vast physiological poetry, what
+a distance has been covered!
+
+How far have we outstripped this barren matter, these shapeless sketches!
+Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the
+Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an
+inventory of the nest of a Cerceris.
+
+For him the Buprestes were dead, and their state of preservation was
+explained simply as a kind of embalming, due to some special action of the
+venom of the Hymenoptera.
+
+These facts, therefore, were stated as simple curiosities.
+
+Fabre proved that these victims possessed all the attributes of life
+excepting movement, by provoking contractions in their members under the
+influence of various stimulants, and by keeping them alive artificially for
+an indefinite period.
+
+On the other hand, he demonstrated the comparative innocuousness of the
+venom of these wasps, some of which, like the great Cerceris or the
+beautiful and formidable Scolia, alarm by their enormous size and their
+terrifying aspect; so that the conservation of the prey could not be due to
+any occult quality, to some more or less active antiseptic virtue of the
+venomous fluid, but simply to the precision of the stab and the miraculous
+deftness of the "surgeon."
+
+He also pointed out the fact that the sting of the insect is able
+immediately to dissociate the nervous system of the vegetative life from
+that of the correlative life, sparing the former, and taking care not to
+wound the abdomen, which contains the ganglions of the great sympathetic
+nerve, while it annihilates the latter, which is more or less concentrated
+along the ventral face of the thoracic region.
+
+He completed this splendid demonstration, not only by provoking under his
+own eyes the "murderous manoeuvres, the intimate and passionate drama," but
+also by reproducing experimentally all these astonishing phenomena;
+expounding their mechanism and their variations with a logic and lucidity,
+an art and sagacity which raise this marvellous observation, one of the
+most beautiful known to science, to the height of the most immortal
+discoveries of physiology. Claude Bernard, in his celebrated experiments,
+certainly exhibited no greater invention, no truer genius.
+
+
+CHAPTER 8. THE MIRACLE OF INSTINCT.
+
+"The Spirit Bloweth Whither it Listeth."
+
+What is this instinct, which guides the insect to such marvellous results?
+Is it merely a degree of intelligence, or some absolutely different form of
+activity?
+
+Is it possible, by studying the habits of animals, to discover some of
+those elementary springs of action whose knowledge would enable us to dive
+more deeply into our own natures?
+
+Fabre has presented us to his Sphex, the "infallible paralyser." Are we to
+credit her not only with memory, but also with the faculty of associating
+ideas, of judgment, and of pursuing a train of reasoning in respect of her
+astonishingly co-ordinated actions?
+
+Put to the question by the malice of the operator, the "transcendent"
+anatomist trips over a mere trifle, and the slightest novelty confounds
+her.
+
+Without the circle of her ordinary habits, what stupidity, "what darkness
+wraps her round"! She retreats; she refuses to understand; "she washes her
+eyes, first passing her hands across her mouth; she assumes a dreamy,
+meditative air." What can she be pondering? Under what form of thought,
+illusion, or mirage does the unfamiliar problem which has obtruded itself
+into her customary life present itself behind those faceted eyes? (8/1.)
+
+How can we tell? We can only attain to knowledge of ourselves by direct
+intuition. It is only the idea of our ego which enables us to conjecture
+what is passing in the brains of our fellows. Between the insect and
+ourselves no understanding is possible, so remote are the analogies between
+its organization and our own; and we can only form idle hypotheses as to
+its states of consciousness and the real motive of its actions.
+
+Consider only that unknown and mysterious energy which the insects display
+in their operations and their labours, as it is in itself, and let us
+content ourselves, first of all, with comparing it to our own intelligence,
+such as we conceive it to be.
+
+In seeking to appreciate whereby it differs perhaps we shall gain more than
+by vainly seeking points of resemblance. We shall discover, in fact, behind
+the insect and its prodigious instincts, a vast and remote horizon, a
+region at once more profound, more extensive, and more fruitful than that
+of the intelligence; and if Fabre is able to help us to decipher a few
+pages of "the most difficult of all volumes, the book of ourselves," it is
+precisely, as a philosopher told him, because "man has remained instinctive
+in process of becoming intelligent." (8/2.)
+
+The work of Fabre is from this point of view an invaluable treasury of
+observations and experiments, and the richest contribution which has ever
+been made to the study of these fascinating problems.
+
+"The function of the intelligence is to reflect, to be conscious; that is,
+to relate the effect to its cause, to add a "because" to a "why"; to remedy
+the accidental; to adapt a new course of conduct to new circumstances."
+
+In relation to the human intelligence thus defined Fabre has considered
+these nervous aptitudes, so well adjusted, according to the evolutionists,
+by ancient habit, that they have finally become impulsive and unconscious,
+and, properly speaking, innate. He has demonstrated, with an abundance of
+proof and a power of argument that we must admire, the blind mechanism
+which determines all the manifestations, even the most extraordinary, of
+that which we call instinct, and which heredity has fixed in a species of
+unchangeable automatism, like the rhythm of the heart and the lungs. (8/3.)
+
+Let us, from this wealth of material, from among the most suggestive
+examples, select some of his most striking demonstrations, which are
+classics of their kind.
+
+Fabre has not attempted to define instinct, for it is indefinable; nor to
+probe its essential nature, which is impenetrable. But to recognize the
+order of nature is in itself a sufficiently fascinating study, without
+striving to crack an unbreakable bone or wasting time in pondering
+insoluble enigmas. The important matter is to avoid the introduction of
+illusions, to beware of exceeding the data of observation and experiment,
+of substituting our own inferences for the facts, of outstripping reality
+and amplifying the marvellous.
+
+Let us listen to the scrupulous analysis whose lessons, scattered through
+four thousand pages, teach us more concerning instinct and its innumerable
+variations than all the most learned treatises and speculations of the
+philosophers.
+
+Nothing in the world perplexes the mind of the observer like the spectacle
+of the birth and growth of the instincts.
+
+At precisely the right moment, just as failure or disaster seems
+foreordained by the previously established circumstances, Fabre shows us
+his insects as suddenly mastered by an irresistible force.
+
+"At the right moment" they invincibly obey some sort of mysterious and
+inflexible prescription. Without apprenticeship, they perform the very
+actions required, and blindly accomplish their destiny.
+
+Then, the moment having passed, the instincts "disappear and do not
+reawaken. A few days more or less modify the talents, and what the young
+insect knew the adult has often forgotten." (8/4.)
+
+Among the Lycosae, at the moment of exodus, a sudden instinct is evolved
+which a few hours later disappears never to return. It is the climbing
+instinct, unknown to the adult spider, and soon forgotten by the
+emancipated young, who are destined to roam upon the face of the earth. But
+the young Lycosae, anxious to leave the maternal home and to travel, become
+suddenly ardent climbers and aeronauts, each releasing a long, light thread
+which serves it as parachute. The voyage accomplished, no trace of this
+ingenuity is left. Suddenly acquired, the climbing instinct no less
+suddenly disappears. (8/5.)
+
+The great historiographer of instinct has thrown a wonderful light, by his
+beautiful experiments relating to the nidification of the mason-bee, upon
+the indissoluble succession of its different phases; the lineal
+concatenation, the inevitable and necessary order which presides over each
+of these nervous discharges of which the total series constitutes, properly
+speaking, a mode of action.
+
+The mason-bee continues to build upon the ready-completed nest presented to
+her. She obstinately insists upon provisioning a cell already duly filled
+with the quantity of honey required by the larva, because, in this case as
+in the other, the impulse which incites her to build or to provision the
+nest has not yet been exhausted.
+
+On the other hand, if we empty the little cup of its contents when she has
+filled it she will not recommence her labours. "The process of provisioning
+being complete, the secret impulse which urged her to collect her honey is
+no longer active. The insect therefore ceases to store her honey, and, in
+spite of this accident, lays her egg in the empty cell, thus leaving the
+future nursling without nourishment." (8/6.)
+
+In the case of the Pelopaeus, Fabre calls our attention to one of the most
+instructive physiological spectacles that can be imagined.
+
+While the mason-bee does not notice that her cell has been emptied, the
+Pelopaeus cannot perceive that the tricks of the experimenter have resulted
+in the disappearance of her progeny; and she "continues to store away
+spiders for a germ that no longer exists; she perseveres untiringly in her
+useless hunting, as though the future of her larva depended on it; she
+amasses provisions which will feed no one; more, she pushes aberration to
+the extent of plastering even the place where her nest was if we remove it,
+giving the last strokes of the trowel to an imaginary building, and putting
+her seals upon empty nothing." (8/7.)
+
+>From these facts, and others, no less celebrated, which show "the inability
+of insects to escape from the routine of their customs and their habitual
+labours," Fabre derives so many proofs of their lack of intelligence.
+
+The Epeïra fasciata is incapable of replacing a single radial thread in the
+geometrical structure of its web, when broken; it recommences the entire
+web every evening, and weaves it at one stretch with the most beautiful
+mastery, as though merely amusing itself.
+
+The caterpillar of the Greater Peacock moth teaches us the same lesson;
+when occupied in weaving its cocoon it does not know how to repair an
+artificial rent; and "in spite of the certainty of its death, or rather
+that of the future butterfly, it quietly continues to spin, without
+troubling to cover the rent; devoting itself to a superfluous task, and
+ignoring the treacherous breach, which leaves the cocoon and its inhabitant
+at the mercy of the first thief that finds it." (8/8.)
+
+Thus "because one action has just been performed, another must inevitably
+be performed to complete the first; what is done is done, and is never
+repeated. Like the watercourse, which cannot climb the hills and return to
+its source, the insect does not retrace its steps or repeat its actions,
+which follow one another invariably, and are inevitably connected in a
+necessary order, like a series of echoes, one of which awakens
+another...The insect knows nothing of its marvellous talents, just as the
+stomach knows nothing of its cunning chemistry. It builds like a
+bricklayer, weaves, hunts, stabs, and paralyses, as it secretes the venom
+of its weapons, the silk of its cocoon, the wax of its comb, or the threads
+of its web; always without the slightest knowledge of the means and the
+end." (8/9.)
+
+Thus instinct is one thing and intelligence is another; and for Fabre there
+is no transition which can transform the one into the other.
+
+But how profound and abundant, how infinite is the source from which this
+manifold activity derives, distributed as it is throughout the entire
+animal kingdom; and which in ourselves commands the profoundest part of our
+nature; unconscious, or even in opposition to our wonderful intelligence,
+which it often silences or altogether overwhelms.
+
+Although the insect "has no need of lessons from its elders" in order to
+accomplish its beautiful masterpieces, the comprehensive concept of the
+genius which rises spontaneously and at a single step to the loftiest
+conceptions is not always a product of pure reason.
+
+Compare the sublime logic of animal maternity, the impeccable dictates of
+instinct, with the hesitations, the gropings, the uncertainties, the errors
+and tragic failures of human maternity, when it seeks to replace the
+unerring commands of instinct by the clumsy efforts of the intelligence!
+
+If all is darkness to the animal, apart from its habitual paths, how feeble
+and hesitating, how faltering and unequal is reason when it seeks to oppose
+its laborious inductions to the infallible wisdom of the unconscious!
+
+It is, in fact, to this concatenation of actions, narrowly connected by a
+mutual dependence, that we owe this inexhaustible series of cunning
+industries and wonderful arts. To Fabre they are so many feats of a learned
+unconsciousness.
+
+"See the nest, the accustomed masterpiece of mothers; it is more often than
+otherwise an animal fruit, a coffer full of germs, containing eggs in place
+of seeds."
+
+The satin bag of the Epeïra fasciata, in which her eggs are enclosed,
+"breaks at the caress of the sun, like the skin of an over-ripe
+pomegranate."
+
+The Dorthesia, the louse inhabiting the euphorbia, "trebles the length of
+her body, prolonging its hinder part into a pouch, comparable to that of
+the opossum, into which the eggs are dropped, and in which the young are
+hatched, to leave it afterwards at will." (8/10.)
+
+The Chermes of the ilex "hardens into a rampart of ebony, whence an
+innumerable legion of vermin bursts forth one day without changing their
+place."
+
+The capsule of gold-beater's skin, in which the grubs of the Cione are
+enclosed, divides itself, at the moment of liberation, into two hemispheres
+"of a regularity so perfect that they recall exactly the bursting of the
+pyxidium when the seed is distributed." (8/11.)
+
+Here and there, however, we catch a glimpse of a rudiment of what we
+understand by consciousness, in the shape of a "vague discrimination."
+
+Each plant has its lover, drawn to it by a kind of elective affinity and
+invariable tendency. The Larra makes for the thistle, the Vanessa for the
+nettle, the Clytus for the ilex, and the Crioceris for the lily. "The
+weevil knows nothing but its peas and beans, the golden Rhynchites only the
+sloe, and the Balaninus only the nut or acorn."
+
+But the Pieris, which haunts the cabbage, frequents the nasturtium also,
+and the golden rose-beetle, which "intoxicates itself at the clusters of
+the hawthorn," is no less addicted to the nectar of the rose.
+
+The Xylocopa, which burrows in the trunks of trees and old rafters, forming
+little round corridors in which to lodge her offspring, "will utilize
+artificial galleries which she has not herself bored."
+
+The Chalicodoma "also is aware of the economic advantages of an old
+abandoned nest"; the Anthophora is careful to establish her family "at the
+least expense," and profits on occasion by galleries which have been mined
+by previous generations; adapting herself to these new conditions, she
+repairs the tunnels which she did not construct "and economizes her
+forces." (8/12.)
+
+It would seem, therefore, that these tiny minds are created and shaped by
+means of experience; they recognize "that which is most fitting"; they
+learn, they compare; may we not also say that they judge?
+
+Does not the Mason-bee, "which rakes the roads for a dry powdery dust and
+mixes it with saliva to convert it into a hard cement," foresee that this
+mud will harden?
+
+Is the Pelopaeus devoid of judgment when she seeks the interior of
+dwelling-houses in order to shelter her nest of dried clay, which the least
+drop of rain would reduce to its original state of mud?
+
+Is it without knowledge of the effects that the sloe-weevil builds a
+ventilating chimney to prevent the asphyxiation of her larva? that the
+Scarabaeus sacer contrives a filter at the smaller end of its pear-shaped
+ball, by means of which the grub is able to breathe? or that Arachne
+labyrintha "introduces in her silk-work a rampart of compressed earth to
+protect her eggs from the probe of the Ichneumon"?
+
+May we not also see a masterpiece of the highest logic in the house of the
+trap-door spider, Arachne clotho, which is furnished with a door, a true
+door "which she throws open with a push of the leg, and carefully bolts
+behind her on returning by means of a little silk"? (8/13.)
+
+What a miracle of invention too is the prodigious nest of the Eumenes,
+"with its egg suspended by a thread from the roof, like a pendulum,
+oscillating at the lightest breath in order to save it from contact with
+the caterpillars, which, incompletely paralysed, are wriggling and writhing
+below"! Later, when the egg is hatched, "the filament is transformed into a
+tube, a place of refuge, up which the grub clambers backwards. At the least
+sign of danger from the mass of caterpillars the larva retreats into its
+sheath and ascends to the roof, where the wriggling swarm cannot reach it."
+(8/14.)
+
+Let us refer also to the remarkable history of the Copris. We cannot deny
+that the valiant dung-beetle is capable of "evading the accidental" (which
+to Fabre constitutes one of the distinctive characteristics of the
+intelligence), since it immediately intervenes if with the point of a
+penknife we open the roof of its nest and lay bare its egg. "The fragments
+raised by the knife are immediately brought together and soldered, so that
+no trace is left of the injury, and all is once more in order." We may read
+also with what incredible address the mother Copris was able to use and to
+profit by the ready-made pellets of cow-dung which it occurred to Fabre to
+offer her. (8/15.)
+
+But their scope is limited, and encroaches very little, in the eyes of the
+great observer, on the domain of intelligence. This he demonstrates to
+satiety, and his astonishing Necrophori, which adapt themselves so
+admirably to circumstances and triumph over the experimental difficulties
+to which he subjects them, seem scarcely to exceed the limits of those
+actions which at bottom are merely unconscious. (8/16.)
+
+With the spawning of the Osmia, Fabre throws a fresh and unexpected light
+on the intuitive knowledge of instinct.
+
+We are still groping our way among the causes which rule the determination
+of the sexes. Biology has only been able to throw a few scattered lights on
+the subject, and we possess only a few approximate data; which nevertheless
+are turned to account by the breeders of insects. We are still in the
+region of illusion and imperfect prognostics.
+
+But the Osmia knows what we do not. She is deeply versed in all
+physiological and anatomical knowledge, and in the faculty of creating
+children of either sex at will.
+
+These pretty bees, "with coppery skin and fleece of ruddy velvet," which
+establish their progeny in the hollow of a bramble stump, the cavity of a
+reed, or the winding staircase of an empty snail-shell, know the fixed and
+immutable genetic laws which we can only guess at, and are never mistaken.
+
+This marvellous prerogative the Osmia shares with a host of apiaries, in
+which the unequal development of the males and females requires an unequal
+provision of space and of nourishment for the future larvae. For the
+females, who exceed in point of size, huge cells and abundant provision;
+for the more puny males, narrow cells and a smaller ration of pollen and
+honey.
+
+Now the circumstances which are encountered by the Osmia, when, pressed by
+the necessities of spawning, she searches for a dwelling, are often
+fortuitous and incapable of modification; and in order to give each set of
+larvae the necessary space "she lays at will a male or a female egg,
+according to the conditions of space."
+
+In this marvellous study, which constitutes, with the history of the
+Cerceris, the finest masterpiece of experimental entomology, Fabre
+brilliantly establishes all the details of that curious law which in the
+Hymenoptera rules both the distribution and the succession of the sexes. In
+his artificial hives, in glass cylinders, he forces the Osmia to commence
+her spawning with the males, instead of beginning with the females as
+nature requires, since the insect is primarily preoccupied with the more
+important sex, that which ensures par excellence the perpetuation of the
+species. He even forces the whole swarm which buzzes about his work-tables,
+his books, his bottles, and apparatus, completely to change the order of
+its spawning. He shows finally that in the heart of the ovaries the egg of
+the Osmia has as yet no determined sex, and that it is only at the precise
+moment when the egg is on the point of emerging from the oviduct that it
+receives, AT THE WILL OF THE MOTHER, the mysterious, final, and inevitable
+imprint.
+
+But whence does the Osmia derive this, "distinct idea of the invisible"?
+Here again is one of those riddles of nature which Fabre declares himself
+quite incapable of solving. (8/17.)
+
+Is this all? No; we are far from having made the tour of this miraculous
+and incommensurable kingdom through which this admirable master leads us,
+and I should never be done were I to attempt to exhaust all the spectacles
+which he offers us. Let us descend yet another step, among creatures yet
+smaller and humbler. We shall find tendencies, impulses, preferences,
+efforts, intentions, "Machiavellic ruses and unheard-of stratagems."
+
+Certain miserable black mites, living specks, the larvae of a beetle, one
+of the Meloidae, the Sitaris, are parasites of the solitary bee, the
+Anthophora. They wait patiently all the winter at the entrance of her
+tunnel, on the slope of a sunny bank, for the springtime emergence of the
+young bees, as yet imprisoned in their cells of clay. A male Anthophora,
+hatched a little earlier than the females, appears in the entrance of the
+tunnel; these mites, which are armed with robust talons, rouse themselves,
+hasten to and fro, hook themselves to his fleece, and accompany him in all
+his peregrinations; but they quickly recognize their error; for these
+animated specks are well aware that the males, occupied all day long in
+scouring the country and pillaging the flowers, live exclusively out of
+doors, and would in no wise serve their end. But the moment comes when the
+Anthophora pays court to the fair sex, and the imperceptible creature
+immediately profits by the amorous encounter to change its winged courser.
+"These pigmies therefore have a memory, an experience of facts" (and how
+one is tempted to add, a glimmering of intelligence!). Grappled now to the
+female bee, the grub of the Sitaris "conceals itself, and allows itself to
+be carried by her" to the end of the gallery in which she is now contriving
+her cradle, "watches the precise moment when the egg is laid, installs
+itself upon it, and allows itself to fall therewith upon the surface of the
+honey, in order to substitute itself for the future offspring of the
+Anthophora, and possess itself of house and victuals." (8/18.)
+
+Another "little gelatinous speck," "a shadow of a creature," the larva of a
+Chalcidian, the Leucopsis, one of the parasites of the Mason-bee, knows
+that in the cell of the mason there is food for one only. Scarcely has it
+entered the tiny dwelling but we see this "nameless shape" for several days
+"anxiously wandering; it visits the top and bottom, the back, the front,
+the sides"; it makes the tour of its domain; "it searches in the darkness,
+palpitating, seemingly with an object in view." What does this "animated
+globule" want? why is this atom so excited? It is searching to discover if
+there is not in some corner hitherto unexplored another larva, a rival,
+that it may exterminate it! (8/19.)
+
+What then intrinsically is instinct? And what intrinsically is
+intelligence?
+
+How can we propose to draw up the inexhaustible inventory of all the
+manifestations of life, and why attempt to include all its species and
+their unknown varieties in narrow classes? Why say that there are only two
+modes of life, instinct on the one hand and intelligence on the other,
+"when we know how subtle and illusive is this Proteus, and that there are
+not two things only, but a thousand dissimilar things" (8/20.): or rather
+is it not always the same thing, everywhere present and acting in living
+matter, and susceptible of infinite degrees, under forms and disguises
+innumerable?
+
+This is why it escapes the "scalpel of the masters" and the apparatus of
+the chemists. We may dissect, we may scrutinize organs under the magnifying
+glass, examine wing-cases, count the nervures of the wings, the number of
+articulations in the limbs; we may reckon every point, like Réaumur
+forgetting not a line, not a hair; we may compare and measure every portion
+of the mouth, and define the class; and we shall not find a single point in
+all this physical architecture which will positively inform us of the
+habits of the insect. Of what account are a few slight differences? It is
+in the physical far more than in the anatomical differences that the
+inviolable demarcation between two species exists. Instincts dominate
+forms; the tool does not make the artisan; "and none of these various
+structures, however well adapted they may appear to us, bears within it its
+reason or its finality."
+
+Thus whatever opinion we may hold as to the nature of instinct, the
+accomplishments and habits of insects are not, properly speaking, connected
+with the external and visible form of their organs, and their acts do not
+necessarily presuppose the instruments which would be appropriate to them.
+
+We know that with most organisms, and particularly with plants, an almost
+imperceptible variation in material circumstances is often enough to modify
+their character and to produce fresh aptitudes. Nevertheless, we can but
+wonder, with Fabre, that physical modifications, which, when they do exist,
+are so slight always as to have escaped the most perfect observation,
+should have sufficed to determine the appearance of profoundly dissimilar
+faculties. Inexplicable abilities, unexpected habits, unforeseen physical
+aptitudes, and unheard-of industries are exercised by means of organs which
+are here and there practically identical. "The same tools are equally good
+for any purpose. Talent alone is able to adapt them to manifold ends."
+
+The Anthidia have two particular industries; "those which felt cotton and
+card the soft down of hairy plants have the same claws, the same mandibles,
+composed of the same portions as those which knead resin and mix it with
+fine gravel." (8/21.)
+
+The sloe-weevil "bores the hard stone of the sloe with the same rostrum as
+that which its congeners, so like it in conformation, employ to roll the
+leaves of the vine and the poplar into tiny cigars."
+
+The implement of the Megachile, the rose-fly, is by no means appropriate to
+its industry; "yet the perfectly circular fragments of leaves have the
+precise perfection of form that a punch would give."
+
+The Xylocopa, in order to pierce wood and to bore its galleries in an old
+rafter, employs "the same utensils which in others are transformed into
+picks and mattocks to attack clay and gravel, and it is only a
+predisposition of talent that holds each worker to his speciality."
+
+Moreover, have not the superior animals the same senses and the same
+structure, yet what inequality there is among them, in the matter of
+aptitudes and degrees of intelligence!
+
+Habits are no more determined by anatomical peculiarities than are
+aptitudes or industries.
+
+The two Goat-moth caterpillars, of similar structure, have entirely
+different stomachic aptitudes; "the exclusive portion of the one is the oak
+and of the other the hawthorn or the cherry-laurel."
+
+"Whence does the Mantis derive its excessive hunger, its pugnacity, its
+cannibalism, and the Empusa its sobriety, its peaceableness, when their
+almost identical organization would seem to indicate an identity of needs,
+instincts, and habits?"
+
+In the same way the black scorpion appears to present none of the
+interesting peculiarities which we observe in the habits of its congener,
+the white scorpion of Languedoc. (8/22.)
+
+Structure, therefore, tells us nothing of aptitude; the organ does not
+explain its function. Let the specialists hypnotize themselves over their
+lenses and microscopes; they may accumulate at leisure masses of details
+relating to this or that family or genus or individual; they may undertake
+the most subtle inquiries, may write thousands and thousands of pages in
+order to detail a few slight variations, without even succeeding in
+exhausting the matter: they will not even have seen what is most wonderful.
+
+When the little insect has for the last time cleaned its claws, the secret
+of the little mind has fled for ever, with all the feelings that animated
+it and gave it life. That which is crystallized in death cannot explain
+what was life. This is the thought which the Provençal singer, with that
+intuition which is the privilege of genius, has expressed in these
+melodious lines:
+
+"Oh! pau de sèn qu'emé l'escaupre
+Furnant la mort, creson de saupre,
+La vertu de l'abiho e lou secrèt doù méu."
+
+(O men of little sense, who seek,
+Scalpel in hand, to make Death tell
+The virtue of the bee, the secret of her cell!) (8/23.)
+
+
+CHAPTER 9. EVOLUTION OR "TRANSFORMISM."
+
+"How did a miserable grub acquire its marvellous knowledge? Are its habits,
+its aptitudes, and its industries the integration of the infinitely little,
+acquired by successive experiences on the limitless path of time?"
+
+It is in these words that Fabre presents the problem of evolution.
+
+Difficult though it may be to follow the sequence of forms which have
+endlessly succeeded and replaced one another on the face of the earth,
+since the beginning of the world, it is certain that all living creatures
+are closely related; and the magnificent and fertile hypothesis of
+evolution, which seeks to explain how extant forms are derived from
+extinct, has the immense advantage of giving a plausible reason for the
+majority of the facts which at least cease to be completely unintelligible.
+
+Otherwise we can certainly never imagine how so many instincts, and these
+so complex and perfect, could have issued suddenly "from the urn of
+hazard."
+
+But Fabre will suppose nothing; he will only record the facts. Instead of
+wandering in the region of probabilities, he prefers to confine himself to
+the reality, and for the rest to reply simply that "we do not know."
+
+This stern, positive, rigorous, independent, and observant mind, nourished
+upon geometry and the exact sciences, which has never been able to content
+itself with approximations and probabilities, could but distrust the
+seductions of hypotheses.
+
+His robust common sense, which was always his protection against
+precipitate conclusions, too clearly comprehends the limits of science and
+the necessity of accumulating facts "upon the thorny path of observation
+and experiment" to indulge in generalization. He feels that life has
+secrets which our minds are powerless to probe, and that "human knowledge
+will be erased from the archives of the world before we know the last word
+concerning the smallest fly."
+
+This is why he was regarded as "suspect" by the company of official
+scientists, to whom he was a dissenter, almost a traitor, especially at a
+moment when the theories of evolution, then in the first flush of their
+novelty, were everywhere the cause of a general elation.
+
+No one as yet was capable of divining the man of the future in this modest
+thinker who would not accept the word of the masters interested, but in
+opposing the theory of transformation, far from being reactionary, Fabre
+revealed himself, at least in the domain of animal psychology, as an
+innovator, a true precursor.
+
+Moreover, his observations, always so direct and personal, often revealed
+the contrary of what was asserted or foreseen by the magic formulae
+suggested by the mind.
+
+To the ingenious mechanism invented by the transformists he preferred to
+oppose, not contrary argument, but the naked undeniable fact, the obvious
+testimony, the certain and irrefragable example. "Is it," he would ask
+them, "to repulse their enemies that certain caterpillars smear themselves
+with a corrosive product? But the larva of the Calosoma sycophanta, which
+feeds on the Processional caterpillar of the oak-tree, pays no heed to it,
+neither does the Dermestes, which feeds on the entrails of the Processional
+caterpillar of the pine-tree."
+
+And consider mimicry. According to the theory of evolution, certain insects
+would utilize their resemblance to certain others in order to conceal
+themselves, and to introduce themselves into the dwellings of the latter as
+parasites living at their expense. Such would be the case with the
+Volucella, a large fly whose costume, striped with brown and yellow bands,
+gives it a rude resemblance to the wasp. Obliged, if not for its own sake
+at least for that of its family, to force itself into the wasp's dwelling
+as a parasite, it deceitfully dresses itself, we are told, in the livery of
+its victim, thus affording the most curious and striking example of
+mimicry; and naturalists insufficiently informed would regard it as one of
+the greatest triumphs of evolution.
+
+Now what does the Volucella do? It is true that it lays its eggs without
+being disturbed in the nest of the wasp. But, as the rigorous observer will
+tell you, it is a precious auxiliary and not an enemy of the community. Its
+grubs, far from disguising or concealing themselves, "come and go openly
+upon the combs, although every stranger is immediately massacred and thrown
+out." Moreover, "they watch the hygiene of the city by clearing the nest of
+its dead and ridding the larvae of the wasps of their excretory products."
+Plunging successively into each chamber of the dormitory the forepart of
+their bodies, "they provoke the emission of that fluid excrement of which
+the larvae, owing to their cloistration, contain an extreme reserve." In a
+word, the grubs of the Volucella "are the nurses of the larvae," performing
+the most intimate duties." (9/1.)
+
+What an astonishing conclusion! What a disconcerting and unexpected reply
+to the "theories in vogue"!
+
+Fabre, however, with his poetic temperament and ardent imagination, seemed
+admirably prepared to grasp all that vast network of relations by which all
+creatures are connected; but what proves the solidity of his imperishable
+work is that all theories, all doctrines, and all systems may resort to it
+in turn and profit by his proofs and arguments.
+
+And he himself, although he boasts with so much reason of putting forward
+no pretensions, no theories, no systems, has he not even so yielded
+somewhat to the suggestions of the prevailing school of thought, and have
+not his verdicts against evolution often been the more excessive in that he
+has paid so notable a tribute to the evolutionary progress of creation?
+
+In the first place, he is far from excluding the undeniable influence of
+environing causes; the immense role of those myriad external circumstances
+on which Lamarck so strongly insisted; but the work of these factors is, in
+his eyes, only accessory and wholly secondary in the economy of nature; and
+in any case it is far from explaining the definite direction and the
+transcendent harmony which characterize evolution, both in its totality and
+in its most infinitesimal details.
+
+In one of his admirable little textbooks, intended to teach and to
+popularize science, he complacently enumerates the happy modifications
+effected by that "sublime magician," selection as understood by Darwin. He
+evokes the metamorphoses of the potato, which, on the mountains of Chili,
+is merely a wretched venomous tubercle, and those of the cabbage, which on
+the rocky face of oceanic precipices is nothing but a weed, "with a tall
+stem and scanty disordered leaves of a crude green, an acrid savour, and a
+rank smell"; he speaks of wheat, formerly a poor unknown grass; the
+primitive pear-tree "an ugly intractable thorny bush, with detestable
+bitter fruit"; the wild celery, which grows beside ponds, "green all over,
+hard, with a repulsive flavour, and which gradually becomes tenderer,
+sweeter, whiter," and "ceases to distil its poison." (9/2.)
+
+With profound exactitude this great biologist has also perceived the degree
+to which size may be modified; may dwindle to dwarfness when a niggardly
+soil refuses to furnish beast and plant alike with a sufficient
+nourishment.
+
+Without any communication with the other scientists who were occupied by
+the same questions, knowing nothing of the results which these
+experimenters had attained in the case of small mammiferous animals, and
+which prove that dwarfness has often no other cause than physiological
+poverty, he confirmed and expanded their ideas from an entomological point
+of view. (9/3.)
+
+Scarcely ever, indeed, was he first inspired by the doings of others in
+this or that direction; he read scarcely anything, and nature was his sole
+teacher. He considered that the knowledge to be obtained from books is but
+so much vapour compared with the realities; he borrowed only from himself,
+and resorted directly to the facts as nature presented them. One has only
+to see his scanty library of odd volumes to be convinced how little he owes
+to others, whether writers or workers.
+
+A true naturalist philosopher, this profound observer has also thrown a
+light upon certain singular anomalies which, in the insect world, seem to
+constitute an exception, at all events in our Europe, to the general rules.
+It is not only to the curiosity and for the amusement of entomologists that
+he proposes these curious anatomical problems, but also, and chiefly, to
+the Darwinian wisdom of the evolutionists.
+
+Why, for example, is the Scarabaeus sacer born and why does it remain
+maimed all its life; that is to say, deprived of all the digits on the
+anterior limbs?
+
+"If it is true that every change in the form of an appendage is only the
+sign of a habit, a special instinct, or a modification in the conditions of
+life, the theory of evolution should endeavour to account for this
+mutilation, for these creatures are, like all others, constructed on the
+same plan and provided with absolutely the same appendages."
+
+The posterior limbs of the Geotrupes stercorarius, "perfectly developed in
+the adult, are atrophied in the larvae, reduced to mere specks."
+
+The general history of the species, of its migrations and its changes, will
+doubtless one day throw light upon these strange infirmities, here
+temporary and there permanent, which may perhaps be explained by unforeseen
+encounters with undiscovered specimens, strayed perhaps into distant
+countries. (9/4.)
+
+What invaluable documents for the entomologist and the historian of the
+evolution of the species are those multiple and fabulous metamorphoses of
+the Sitares and the Meloïdae which this indefatigable inquirer has revealed
+in all their astonishing phases!
+
+One of the finest examples of scientific investigation is the pursuit,
+through a period of twenty-five years, with a sagacity which seems to
+border on divination, of this problem of HYPER-METAMORPHOSIS. The larvae of
+those coleoptera which we have seen introduced, with infernal cunning, into
+the cells of the Anthophora (See Chapter 8 above.), suffer no less than
+four moults before they become nymphs.
+
+These merely external transformations, which involve only the envelope, and
+respect the internal structure, correspond each with a change of
+environment and of diet. Each time the organism adapts itself to its new
+mode of existence, "as perfectly as when it becomes adult"; and we see the
+insect, which was clear-sighted, become blind; it loses its feet, to
+recover them later; its slender body becomes ventripotent; hard, it grows
+soft; its mandibles, at first steely, become hollowed out spoonwise, each
+modification of conformation having its motive in a fresh modification of
+the conditions of the creature's life.
+
+How explain this strange evolution of a fourfold larval existence, these
+successive appearances of organs, which become entirely unlike what they
+were, to serve functions each time different?
+
+What is the reason, the intention, the high law which presides over these
+visible changes, these successive envelopments of creatures one within the
+other, these multiple transfigurations?
+
+By what bygone adaptations has the Sitaris successively acquired these
+diverse extraordinary phases of life, indicating possibly for each
+corresponding age some ancient and remote heredity? (9/5.)
+
+How many other arguments might evolution derive from his books, and what
+illustrations of the Darwinian philosophy has he unconsciously furnished!
+Does he not even allow the admission to escape him that "the spirit of
+cunning and deception is transmitted"? He sees in the persecutions of the
+Dytiscus, the "pirate of the ponds," the origin of the faculty which the
+Phryganea has of refashioning its shield when demanded of it. "To evade the
+assault of the brigand, the Phryganea must hastily abandon its mantle; it
+allows itself to sink to the bottom, and promptly removes itself; necessity
+is the mother of invention." (9/6.)
+
+Returning to the lacunae which it so amazes Fabre to discover in our
+organization, even in the most perfect of us, are they fundamentally very
+real? These mysterious and unknown senses which he has so greatly
+contributed to elucidate in the case of the inferior species: why, he asks,
+have we not inherited them, if we are truly the final term and the supreme
+goal of creation?
+
+But in cultivating our intuition, as Bergson invites us to do, would it be
+impossible to re-awaken, deep within us, these strange faculties, which
+perhaps are only slumbering? What of that species of indefinable memory
+which permits the red ant, the Bembex, the Cerceris, the Pompilus, the
+Chalicodoma and so many others to "find themselves," to orientate
+themselves with infallible certainty and incredible accuracy? Is it not to
+be found, according to travellers, in those men who have remained close to
+nature and accustomed from their remotest origins to listen to the silence
+of the great deserts?
+
+Finally, the evolutionists, who "reconstruct the world in imagination," and
+who see in the relationship of neighbouring species a proof of descent or
+derivation, and a whole ideal series, will not fail to perceive throughout
+his work, in the elementary operations of the Eumenes and the Odynerus,
+cousins of the Cerceris, which sting their prey in places as yet ill
+determined, not indeed so many isolated attempts, but an incomplete process
+of invention, an attempt at procedures still in the fact of formation: in a
+word, the birth of that marvellous instinct which ends in the transcendent
+art of the Sphex and the Ammophila.
+
+Although they have acquired such prodigious deftness, these master
+paralysers are not, in fact, always infallible. Occasionally the Sphex
+blunders and gropes, "operates clumsily"; the cricket revives, gets upon
+its feet, turns round and round, and tries to walk. But, inquires Fabre, do
+you say that having profited by a fortuitous act, which has turned out to
+be favourable to them, they have perfected themselves by contact with their
+elders, "thanks to the imitation of example," and that they have thus
+crystallized their experiences, which have been transmitted by heredity--
+thereby fixed in the race? (9/7.)
+
+How much we should prefer that it were so! How much more comprehensible and
+interesting their life would become!
+
+But "when the hymenopteron breaks its cocoon, where are its masters! Its
+predecessors have long ago disappeared. How then can it receive education
+by example?"
+
+You who "shape the world to your whim," you will reply: "Doubtless there
+are no longer masters to-day; but go back to the first ages of the globe,
+when the world in its newness, as Lucretius has so superbly said, as yet
+knew neither bitter cold nor excessive heat (9/8.); an eternal springtide
+bathed the earth, and the insects, not dying, as to-day, at the first touch
+of frost, two successive generations lived side by side, and the younger
+generation could profit at leisure by the lessons of example." (9/9.)
+
+Let us return to Fabre's laboratory, to the covers of wire-gauze, and note
+what becomes, at the approach of winter, of the survivors of the vespine
+city.
+
+In the mild and comfortable retreat where the wasps are kept under
+observation they die no less, despite their well-being and all the care
+expended on them, when once "the inexorable hour" has struck, and once the
+exact capital of life which seems to have been imparted to them ages ago is
+exhausted. With no apparent cause, we see death busy among them. "Suddenly
+the wasps begin to fall as though struck by lightning; for a few moments
+the abdomen quivers and the legs gesticulate, then finally remain inert,
+like a clockwork machine whose spring has run down to the last coil."
+(9/10.) This law is general; "the insect is born orphaned both of mother
+and father, excepting the social insect, and again excepting the dung-
+beetle, which dies full of days." (9/11.)
+
+Moreover, Fabre is never weary of demonstrating that the insect, perfectly
+unconscious of the motive which makes it act, this thereby incapable of
+profiting by the lessons of experience and of innovation in its habits,
+beyond a very narrow circle. "No apprentices, no masters." In this world
+each obeys "the inner voice" on its own account; each sets itself to
+accomplish its task, not only without troubling as to what its neighbour is
+doing, but without thinking any further as to what it is doing itself;
+instance the Epeïra, turning its back on its work, yet "the latter proceeds
+of itself, so well is the mechanism devised"; and if by ill chance the
+spider acted otherwise it would probably fail.
+
+Darwin knew barely the tenth part of the colossal work of Fabre. He had
+read firstly in the "Annals of Natural Science" of the habits of the
+Cerceris and the fabulous history of the Meloidae. Finally he saw the first
+volume of the "Souvenirs" appear, and was interested in the highest degree
+by the beautiful study on the sense of location and direction in the Mason-
+bees.
+
+This was already more than enough to excite his curiosity and to make him
+wonder whether all his philosophy would not stumble over this obstacle.
+
+After having succeeded in explaining so luminously--and with what a lofty
+purview--the origin of species and the whole concatenation of animal forms,
+would it not be as though he halted midway in his task were the sanctuary
+of the origin of instinct to remain for ever inscrutable?
+
+Fabre had not yet left Orange when Darwin engaged in a curious
+correspondence which lasted until the former had been nearly two years at
+Sérignan, and which showed how passionately interested the great theorist
+of evolution was in all the Frenchman's surprising observations.
+
+It seems that on his side Fabre took a singular interest in the discussion
+on account of the absolute sincerity, the obvious desire to arrive at the
+truth, and also the ardent interest in his own studies, of which Darwin's
+letters were full. He conceived a veritable affection for Darwin, and
+commenced to learn English, the better to understand him and to reply more
+precisely; and a discussion on such a subject between these two great
+minds, who were, apparently, adversaries, but who had conceived an infinite
+respect for one another, promised to be prodigiously interesting.
+
+Unhappily death was soon to put an end to it, and when the solitary of Down
+expired in 1882 the hermit of Sérignan saluted his great shade with real
+emotion. How many times have I heard him render homage to this illustrious
+memory!
+
+But the furrow was traced; thenceforth Fabre never ceased to multiply his
+pin-pricks in "the vast and luminous balloon of transformism (evolution),
+in order to empty it and expose it in all its inanity." (9/12.) By no means
+the least original feature of his work is this passionate and incisive
+argument, in which, with a remarkable power of dialectic, and at times in a
+tone of lively banter, he endeavoured to remove "this comfortable pillow
+from those who have not the courage to inquire into its fundamental
+nature." He attacked these "adventurous syntheses, these superb and
+supposedly philosophic deductions," all the more eagerly because he himself
+had an unshakable faith in the absolute certainty of his own discoveries,
+and because he asserted the reality of things only after he had observed
+and re-observed them to satiety.
+
+This is why he cared so little to engage in argument relating to his own
+works; he did not care for discussion; he was indifferent to the daily
+press; he avoided criticism and controversy, and never replied to the
+attacks which were made upon him; he rather took pains to surround himself
+with silence until the day when he felt that his researches were ripe and
+ready for publicity.
+
+He wrote to his dear friend Devillario, shortly after Darwin's death:
+
+"I have made a rule of never replying to the remarks, whether favourable or
+the reverse, which my writings may evoke. I go my own gait, indifferent
+whether the gallery applauds or hisses. To seek the truth is my only
+preoccupation. If some are dissatisfied with the result of my observations-
+-if their pet theories are damaged thereby--let them do the work
+themselves, to see whether the facts tell another story. My problem cannot
+be solved by polemics; patient study alone can throw a little light on the
+subject. (9/13.)
+
+"I am profoundly indifferent to what the newspapers may say about me," he
+wrote to his brother seventeen years later; "it is enough for me if I am
+pretty well satisfied with my own work." (9/14.)
+
+He read all the letters he received only in a superficial manner,
+neglecting to thank those who praised or congratulated him, and above all
+shrinking from all that idle correspondence in which life is wasted without
+aim or profit.
+
+"I fume and swear when I have to cut into my morning in order to reply to
+so-and-so who sends me, in print or manuscript, his meed of praise; if I
+were not careful I should have no time left for far more important work."
+
+His beloved Frédéric, "the best of his friends," was himself often treated
+no better, and to excuse his silence and the infrequency of his letters,
+Henri, even in the years spent at Carpentras and Ajaccio, could plead only
+the same reasons; his stupendous labours, his exhausting task, "which
+overwhelmed him, and was often too great, not for his courage, but for his
+time and his strength." (9/15.)
+
+Nevertheless, while evading the question of origins, his far-sighted
+intellect was bound to "read from the facts" concerning the genesis of new
+species in process of evolution; and his observations throw a singular
+light on the quite recent theory of sudden mutations.
+
+The nymph of the Onthophagus presents "a strange paraphernalia of horns and
+spurs which the organism has produced in a moment of ardour--a luxurious
+panoply which vanishes in the adult."
+
+The nymph of the Oniticella also decks itself in "a temporary horn, which
+departs when it emerges."
+
+And "as the dung-beetle is recent in the general chronology of creatures,
+as it takes rank among the last comers, as the geological strata are mute
+concerning it, it is possible that these horn-like processes, which always
+degenerate before they reach completion, may be not a reminiscence but a
+promise, a gradual elaboration of new organs, timid attempts which the
+centuries will harden to a complete armour, AND IF THIS WERE SO THE PRESENT
+WOULD TEACH US WHAT THE FUTURE IS TO BE." (9/16.)
+
+Here is a specific transformation, a veritable creation; fortuitous, blind,
+and silent; one of those innumerable attempts which nature is always
+making, for the moment a mere matter of hazard, until some propitious
+circumstance fixes it in future incarnations.
+
+Thus millions of indeterminate creatures are incessantly roughed out in the
+substance of that microcosm which is the initial cell; and it is here that
+Fabre sees the real secret of the law of evolution.
+
+He refutes the great principle of Leibnitz, which was so brilliantly
+adopted by Darwin, that changes occur by degrees, by "fine shades," by slow
+variations, as the result of successive adaptations, and that there is no
+jumping-off place in nature. On the contrary, life often passes suddenly
+from one form to another, by abrupt and capricious leaps, by irregular and
+disorderly steps, and it is in the egg that Fabre sees the first lineaments
+of these mysterious and spontaneous variations.
+
+Species are therefore born as a whole, each at the same time, AT THE SAME
+MOMENT, "bringing into being its new organism, with its individual
+properties and peculiarities, its indelible and innate faculties and
+tendencies, like "so many medals, each struck with a different die, which
+the gnawing tooth of time attacks only sooner or later to annihilate it."
+
+However, Fabre affirms the continuity of progress; he believes in a better
+and more merciful future, a more complete humanity, ruled by more
+harmonious or less brutal laws.
+
+With what profound intelligence and what generous enthusiasm he seeks to
+conjecture what this future might be, in his beautiful observations on the
+young of the Lycosa (9/17.), which can live for weeks and months in
+absolute abstinence, although we can perceive no reserve of nutriment!
+
+We know no other sources of animal activity save the energy derived from
+food. Vegetables draw the materials of their nourishment from the soil and
+the air, and the sunlight is only an intermediary which enables the plant
+to fix its carbon. The animal species in turn borrow the elements
+indispensable to their existence from the vegetable world, or restore their
+flesh and blood with the flesh and blood of other animals.
+
+Now the young Lycosae "are not inert on their mother's back; if they fall
+from the maternal chine they quickly pick themselves up and climb up one of
+her legs, and once back in place they have to preserve the equilibrium of
+the mass. In reality they know no such thing as complete repose. What then
+is the energetic aliment which enables the little Lycosae to struggle?
+Whence is the heat expended in action derived?"
+
+Fabre sees no other source than "the sun."
+
+"Every day, if the sky is clear, the Lycosa, loaded with her little ones,
+crawls to the edge of her well, and for long hours lies in the sun. There,
+on the maternal back, the young ones stretch themselves out, saturate
+themselves in the sunshine, charging themselves with motor reserves,
+steeping themselves in energy, directly converting into movement the
+calorific radiations coming from the sun, the centre of all life."
+
+The Scorpion also is able to live for months without nourishment, restoring
+directly, in the form of movement, "the effluvia emanating from the sun or
+from other ambient energies--heat, electricity, light--which are the soul
+of the world."
+
+Perhaps, among the innumerable worlds of space, there is somewhere,
+gravitating round a fixed star, a planet invisible to us where "the
+sunlight sates the hunger of the blind."
+
+The gentle philosophy of the ingenious dreamer soothes itself with the
+vision, entertained by great and noble minds, of a humanity "whose teeth
+will no longer attack sensible life, nor even the pulp of fruits"; "when
+creatures will devour one another no longer, will no longer feed upon the
+dead; when they will be nourished by the sunlight, without conflict,
+without war, without labour; freed from all care, and assured against all
+needs!"
+
+Thus, in the humblest creatures, he sees the most marvellous perspectives;
+the body of the lowest insect becomes suddenly a transcendent secret,
+lighting up the abyss of the human soul, or giving it a glimpse of the
+stars.
+
+And although his work is in contradiction to the theories of the
+evolutionists, it ends with the same moral conclusion, namely, that all
+creation moves slowly and without intermission on its gradual ascent
+towards progress.
+
+
+CHAPTER 10. THE ANIMAL MIND.
+
+The cunning anatomist has now successively laid bare all the springs of the
+animal intellect; he has shown how the various movements are mutually
+combined and engaged. But so far we have seen only one of the faces of the
+little mind of the animal; let us now consider the other aspect, the moral
+side, the region of feeling, the problem of which is confounded with the
+problem of instinct, and is doubtless fundamentally only another aspect of
+the same elemental power.
+
+After the conflict the insect manifests its delight; it seems sometimes to
+exult in its triumph; "beside the caterpillar which it has just stabbed
+with its sting, and which lies writhing on the ground," the Ammophila
+"stamps, gesticulates, beats her wings," capers about, sounding victory in
+an intoxication of delight.
+
+The sense of property exists in a high degree among the Mason-bees; with
+them right comes before might, and "the intruder is always finally
+dislodged." (10/1.)
+
+But can we find in the insect anything analogous to what we term devotion,
+attachment, affectionate feeling? There are facts which lead us to believe
+we may.
+
+Let us go once more into Fabre's garden and admire the Thomisus: absorbed
+in her maternal function, the little spider lying flat on her nest can
+strive no longer and is wasting away, but persists in living, mere ruin
+that she is, in order to open the door to her family with one last bite.
+Feeling under the silken roof her offspring stamping with impatience, but
+knowing that they have not strength to liberate themselves, she perforates
+the capsule, making a sort of practicable skylight. This duty accomplished,
+she quietly surrenders to death, still grappled to her nest.
+
+The Psyche, dominated by a kind of unconscious necessity, protects her
+nursery by means of her body, anchors herself upon the threshold, and
+perishes there, devoted to her family even in death.
+
+However, Fabre will show us with infallible logic that all these instances
+of foresight and maternal tenderness have, as a rule, no other motive than
+pleasure and the blind impulse which urges the insect to follow only the
+fatal path of its instincts.
+
+In many species the material fact of maternity is reduced to its simplest
+expression.
+
+The Pieris limits herself to depositing her eggs on the leaves of the
+cabbage, "on which the young must themselves find food and shelter."
+
+"From the height of the topmost clusters of the centaury the Clythris
+negligently lets her eggs fall to the ground, one by one, here or there at
+hazard; without the least care as to their installation.
+
+"The eggs of the Locustidae are implanted in the earth like seeds and
+germinate like grain."
+
+But stop before the Lycosa, that magnificent type of maternal love which
+Fabre has already depicted. "She broods over her eggs with anxious
+affection. With the hinder claws resting on the margin of the well she
+holds herself supported above the opening of the white sac, which is
+swollen with eggs. For several long weeks she exposes it to the sun during
+half the day. Gently she turns it about in order to present every side to
+the vivifying light. The bird, in order to hatch her eggs, covers them with
+the down of her breast, and presses them against that living calorifer, her
+heart. The Lycosa turns hers about beneath the fires of heaven; she gives
+them the sun for incubator." (10.2.) Could abnegation be more perfect? What
+greater proof could there be of renunciation and self-oblivion?
+
+But appearances are vain. Substitute for the beloved sac some other object,
+and the spider "will turn about, with the same love, as though it were her
+sac of eggs, a piece of cork, a pincushion, or a ball of paper," just as
+the hen, another victim of this sublime deception, will give all her heart
+to hatching the china nest-eggs which have been placed beneath her, and for
+weeks will forget to feed.
+
+The young brood hatches, and the spider goes a-hunting, carrying her little
+ones on her back; she protects them in case of danger, but is incapable of
+recognizing them or of distinguishing them from the young of others. The
+Copris and the Scorpion are no less blind, "and their maternal tenderness
+barely exceeds that of the plant, which, a stranger to any sense of
+affection or morality, none the less exercises the most exquisite care in
+respect of its seeds."
+
+Moreover, the impulse to work is only a kind of unconscious pleasure. When
+the Pelopaeus "has stored her lair with game," when the Cerceris has sealed
+the crypt to which she has confided the future of her race, neither one nor
+the other can foresee "the future offspring which their faceted eyes will
+never behold, and the very object of their labours is to them occult."
+
+With them, as with all, life can only be a perpetual illusion.
+
+Yet the marvellous edifice of the "Souvenirs entomologiques" is consummated
+by the astonishing history of the Minotaur, whose habits surpass in ideal
+beauty all that could be imagined.
+
+At the bottom of a burrow, in a deeply sunken vault, two dung-beetles are
+at work, the Minotaurs, who, once united, recognize one another, and can
+find one another again if separated, but do not voluntarily separate,
+realizing "the moral beauty of the double life" and "the touching concept
+of the family, the sacred group par excellence." The male buries himself
+with his companion, remains faithful to her, comes to her assistance, and
+"stores up treasure for the future. Never discouraged by the heavy labour
+of climbing, leaving to the mother only the more moderate labour, keeping
+the severest for himself, the heavy task of transport in a narrow tunnel,
+very deep and almost vertical, he goes foraging, forgetful of himself,
+heedless of the intoxicating delights of spring, though it would be so good
+to see something of the country, to feast with his brothers, and to pester
+the neighbours; but no! he collects the food which is to nourish his
+children, and then, when all is ready for the new-comers, when their living
+is assured, having spent himself without counting the cost, exhausted by
+his efforts, and feeling himself failing, he leaves his home and goes away
+to die, that he may not pollute the dwelling with a corpse."
+
+The mother, on her side, allows nothing to divert her from her household,
+and only returns to the surface when accompanied by her young, who disperse
+at will. Then, having nothing more to do, the devoted creature perishes in
+turn. (10/3.)
+
+Compared with the Scarabaeus, which contents itself with idle wandering, or
+even with the meritorious Sisyphus, does it not seem that the Minotaur
+moves on an infinitely higher plane?
+
+What nobler could be found among ourselves? What father ever better
+comprehended his duties and obligations toward his family? What morality
+could be more irreproachable; what fairer example could be meditated?
+
+"Is not life everywhere the same, in the body of the dung-beetle as in that
+of man? If we examine it in the insect, do we not examine it in ourselves?"
+
+Whence does the Minotaur derive these particular graces? How has it risen
+to so high a level on the wings of pure instinct? How could we explain the
+rarity of so sublime an example, did we not know, to satiety, that "nature
+everywhere is but an enigmatic poem, as who should say a veiled and misty
+picture, shining with an infinite variety of deceptive lights in order to
+evoke our conjectures"? (10/4.)
+
+Nevertheless, it is a fact that the majority have no other rule of conduct
+than to follow the trend of their instincts, and to obey "their unbridled
+desires." No one better than Fabre has expounded the blind operation of
+these little natural forces, the brutality of their manners, their
+cannibalism, and what we might call their amorality, were it possible to
+employ our human formulae outside our own human world.
+
+With the gardener-beetles, if one is crippled, none of the same race halts
+or lingers; none attempts to come to his aid. Sometimes the passers-by
+hasten to the invalid to devour him."
+
+In the republic of the wasps "the grubs recognized as incurable are
+pitilessly torn from their place and dragged out of the nest. Woe to the
+sick! they are helpless and at once expelled."
+
+When the winter comes all the larvae are massacred, and the whole vespine
+city ends in a horrible tragedy.
+
+But life is a whole, and all conduct is good whose actions realize an
+object and are adapted to an end. If there is a "spirit" of the hive, the
+insect also has its morality and the wasp's nest its "law," and the conduct
+of its inmates, horrible though it may seem to Fabre, is doubtless only a
+submission to certain exigencies of that universal law which makes nature a
+"savage foster-mother who knows nothing of pity."
+
+These cruelties particularly show us that one of the functions of the
+insect in nature is to preside over the disappearance and also the ultimate
+metamorphoses of the least "remnants of life."
+
+Each has its providential hygienic function.
+
+The Necrophori, "the first of the tiny scavengers of the fields," bury
+corpses in order to establish their progeny in them; in the space of a few
+hours an enormous body, a mole, a water-rat, or an adder, will completely
+disappear, buried under the earth.
+
+The Onthophagi purify the soil, "dividing all filth into tiny crumbs,
+ridding the earth of its defilements."
+
+A very small beetle, the Trox, has the imprescriptible mission of purging
+the earth of the rabbits' fur rejected by the fox. (10/5.)
+
+Here structure explains the function.
+
+The intestine of the grub of the rose-beetle "is a veritable triturating
+mill, which transforms vegetable matter into mould; in a month it will
+digest a volume of matter equal to several thousand times the initial
+volume of the grub."
+
+The intestine of the Scarabaei is prolonged to a prodigious length in order
+to "drain the excrement to the last atom in its manifold circuits. The
+sheep has finely divided the vegetable matter; the grub, that incomparable
+triturator, reduces it to the finest possible consistency; not a morsel is
+left in which the magnifying glass can reveal a fibre."
+
+To fulfil its hygienic mission the insect arrives in due season, and
+multiplies its legions; "there are twenty thousand eggs in the flanks of
+the house fly; immediately they are hatched these twenty thousand maggots
+set to work, so that Linnaeus has said that three flies would suffice to
+devour the body of a horse or a lion."
+
+Feeding only upon wheat, a single weevil, the Calendar beetle, produces ten
+thousand eggs, whence issue as many larvae, each of them devouring its
+grain.
+
+In all species the number of births is at first exaggerated, for all, the
+obscure, the nameless, the most destructive, our pests as well as our most
+precious helpers, have their utility and their part to play in the general
+scheme of life, a raison d'être in the eternal renewal of things, which is
+without reference to the vexatious or beneficent quality of their behaviour
+to us.
+
+Each has its rank assigned, each has its task, to one the flower, to
+another the roots, to a third the leaves; the vine has its caterpillars,
+its beetles, its butterflies; the clover, its moths and mites. (10/6.)
+
+Man sees himself forced to submit to them, and spends himself in vain
+efforts to carry on an often useless campaign. Nothing seems to affect
+them, neither drought, nor rain, nor even the severest cold; and the eggs
+and larvae, organizations apparently delicate in the extreme, are often
+more tenacious of life than the adults. Fabre has proved this: let the
+temperature suddenly fall twenty degrees: the eggs of Geotrupes and the
+larvae of the cockchafer or the rose-beetle endure such vicissitudes of
+temperature with impunity; contracted and stiffened into little masses of
+ice, but not destroyed, they revive in spring no less than the eel fry, the
+rotifers, or the tardigrades. One can scarcely believe that life still
+persists in a state of suspense only in these little frozen creatures,
+whose organization is already so complicated.
+
+Then, of a sudden, the ravagers disappear; more often than not none knows
+how or why; deliverance is at hand. What indeed would become of the world
+were nothing to moderate such fecundity?
+
+Again, each species has its trials which appear in time to moderate its
+surplusage, and Fabre expounds for us, with a stern philosophy, the
+terrible devices by which this repression is effected.
+
+Each has its appointed enemy, which lives upon it or its offspring, and
+which in turn becomes the prey of some smaller creature. The gentle itself,
+"the king of the dead," has its parasites. While it swims in the
+deliquescence of putrefying flesh a minute Chalcidian perforates its skin
+with an imperceptible wound, and introduces its terrible eggs, whence in
+the future will issue larvae which to-morrow will devour the devourers of
+to-day.
+
+None exists save to the detriment of others. Everywhere, even in the
+smallest, we find "an atrocious activity, a cunning brigandage," a savage
+extermination, which dominates a vast unconscious world of which the final
+result is the restoration of equilibrium. (10/7.) It is only on these
+antagonisms, on the enemies of our enemies, that we can found any hope of
+seeing this or that pest disappear. A small Hymenopteron, almost invisible,
+the Microgaster glomeratus, is entrusted with the destruction of the
+cabbage caterpillar; the cochineal wages war to the death upon the green-
+fly; the Ammophila is the predestined murderer of the harvest Noctuela,
+whose misdeeds in a beetroot country often amount to a disaster. The
+Odynerus has for its instinctive mission to arrest the excessive
+multiplication of a lucerne weevil, no less than twenty-four of whose grubs
+are necessary to rear the offspring of the brigand, and nearly sixty
+gadflies are sacrificed to the growth of a single Bembex.
+
+Everywhere craft is organized to triumph over force. Around each nest the
+parasites lie in wait, "atrocious assassins of the child in the cradle,
+watching at the doors for the favourable occasion to establish their family
+at the expense of others. The enemy penetrates the most inaccessible
+fortress; each has its tactics of war, devised with a terrible art. Of the
+nest and the cocoon of the victim the intruder makes its own nest, its own
+cocoon, and in the following year, instead of the master of the house, he
+will emerge from underground as the usurping bandit, the devourer of the
+inhabitant."
+
+While the cicada is absorbed in laying her eggs an insignificant fly
+labours to destroy them. How express the calm audacity of this pigmy,
+following closely after the colossus, step by step; several at once almost
+under the talons of the giant, which could crush them merely by treading on
+them? But the cicada respects them, or they would long ago have
+disappeared." (10/8.)
+
+Fabre thus agrees with Pasteur, who in the world of the infinitely little
+shows us the same antagonisms, the same vital competition, the same eternal
+movement of flux and reflux, the same whirlpool of life, which is
+extinguished only to reappear: tending always towards an equilibrium which
+is incessantly destroyed. And it is thanks to this balancing that the
+integral of life remains everywhere and always almost identical with
+itself.
+
+
+CHAPTER 11. HARMONIES AND DISCORDS.
+
+Such indeed is the economy of nature that secret relations and astonishing
+concordances exist throughout the whole vast weft of things. There are no
+loose ends; everything is consequent and ordered. Hidden harmonies meet and
+mingle.
+
+Among the terebinth lice, "when the population is mature, the gall is ripe
+also, so fully do the calendars of the shrub and the animal coincide"; and
+the mortal enemy of the Halictus, the sinister midge of the springtime, is
+hatched at the very moment when the bee begins to wander in search of a
+location for its burrows.
+
+The fantastic history of the larvae of the Anthrax furnishes us with one of
+the most suggestive examples of these strange coincidences. (10/9.)
+
+The Anthrax is a black fly, which sows its eggs on the surface of the nests
+of the Mason-bee, whose larvae are at the moment reposing in their silken
+cocoons.
+
+"The grub of the Anthrax emerges and comes to life under the touch of the
+sunlight. Its cradle is the rugged surface of the cell; it is welcomed into
+the world by a literally stony harshness...Obstinately it probes the chinks
+and pores of the nest; glides over it, crawls forward, returns, and
+recommences. The radicle of the germinating seed is not more persevering,
+not more determined to descend into the cool damp earth. What inspiration
+impels it? What compass guides it? What does the root know of the fertility
+of the soil?...The nurseling, the seed of the Anthrax, is barely visible,
+almost escaping the gaze of the magnifying glass; a mere atom compared to
+the monstrous foster-mother which it will drain to the very skin. Its mouth
+is a sucker, with neither fangs nor jaws, incapable of producing the
+smallest wound; it sucks in place of eating, and its attack is a kiss." It
+practises, in short, a most astonishing art, "another variation of the
+marvellous art of feeding on the victim without killing it until the end of
+the meal, in order always to have a store of fresh meat. During the
+fourteen days through which the nourishment of the Anthrax continues, the
+aspect of the larva remains that of living flesh; until all its substance
+has been literally transferred, by a kind of transpiration, to the body of
+the nurseling, and the victim, slowly exhausted, drained to the last drop,
+while retaining to the end just enough life to prove refractory to
+decomposition, is reduced to the mere skin, which, being insufflated, puffs
+itself out and resumes the precise form of the larva, there being nowhere a
+point of escape for the compressed air."
+
+Now the grub of the Anthrax "appears precisely at the exact moment when the
+larva of the Chalicodoma is attacked by that lethargy which precedes
+metamorphosis, and which renders it insensible, and during which the
+substance of the grub about to be transfigured into a bee commences to
+break down and resolve itself into a liquid pulp, for the processes of life
+always liquefy the grub before achieving the perfect insect." (11/2.)
+
+Here again the time-tables coincide.
+
+But it is perhaps in the celebrated Odyssey of the grub of the Sitaris that
+Fabre most urgently claims our admiration for the marvellous and
+incomprehensible wisdom of the Unconscious!
+
+Let us recapitulate the unheard-of series of events, the inextricable
+complication of circumstances, which are required to condition the lowly
+life of a Sitaris.
+
+In the first place, this microscopic creature must be provided with talons,
+or how could it adhere to the fleece of the Anthophora, on which it must
+live as parasite for a certain length of time?
+
+Then again, it must transfer itself from the male to the female bee in the
+course of its travels abroad, or its destiny would be cut short.
+
+Again, it must not miss the opportunity of embarking itself upon the egg
+just at the propitious moment.
+
+Then the volume of this egg must be so calculated as to represent an
+allowance of food exactly proportioned to the duration of the first phase
+of its metamorphosis. Moreover, the quantity of honey accumulated by the
+bee must suffice for the whole of the remaining cycle of its larval
+existence.
+
+Let a single link of the chain be broken, and the entire species of the
+Sitaris is no longer possible.
+
+If every species has its law; if the Geotrupes remain faithful to filth,
+although experience shows that they can accommodate themselves equally well
+to the putrefaction of decayed leaves; if the predatory species--the
+Cerceris, the Sphex, the Ammophila--resort only to one species of quarry to
+nourish their larvae, although these same larvae accept all indifferently,
+it is on account of those superior economic laws and secret alliances the
+profound reasons for which as a rule escape us or are beyond the scope of
+our theories.
+
+For all things are produced and interlocked by the eternal necessity; link
+engages in link, and life is only a plexus of solitary forces allied among
+themselves by their very nature, the condition of which is harmony. And the
+whole system of living creatures appears to us, through the work of the
+great naturalist, as an immense organism, a sort of vast physiological
+apparatus, of which all the parts are mutually interdependent, and as
+narrowly controlled as all the cells of the human body.
+
+Fabre goes on to present us with other facts, which at a first glance
+appear highly immoral; I am referring to certain phases of sexual love
+among the lower animals, and his ghoulish revelations concerning the
+horrible bridals of the Arachnoids, the Millepoda, and the Locustidae.
+
+The Decticus surrenders only to a single exploit of love; a victim of its
+"strange genesics"; utterly exhausted by the first embrace, empty, drained,
+extenuated, motionless in all its members, utterly worn out, it quickly
+succumbs, a mere broken simulacrum, like the miserable lover of a monstrous
+succubus who "loves him enough to devour him." (11/3.)
+
+The female scorpion devours the male; "all is gone but the tail!"
+
+The female Spider delights in the flesh of her lover.
+
+The cricket also devours a small portion of her "debonair" admirer.
+
+The Ephippigera "excavates the stomach of her companion and eats him."
+
+But the horror of these nuptial tragedies is surpassed by the insatiable
+lust, the monstrous conjunction, the bestial delights of the Mantis, that
+"ferocious spectre, never wearied of embraces, munching the brains of its
+spouse at the very moment of surrendering her flanks to him." (11/4.)
+
+Whence these strange discords, these frightful appetites?
+
+Fabre refers us to the remotest ages, to the depths of the geological
+night, and does not hesitate to regard these cruelties as "remnants of
+atavism," the lingering furies of an ancient strain, and he ventures a
+profound and plausible explanation.
+
+The Locusts, the Crickets, and the Scolopendrae are the last
+representatives of a very ancient world, of an extinct fauna, of an early
+creation, whose perverse and unbridled instincts were given free vent, when
+creation was as yet but dimly outlined, "still making the earliest essays
+of its organizing forces"; when the primitive Orthoptera, "the obscure
+forebears of those of to-day, were "sowing the wild oats of a frantic rut,
+"in the colossal forests of the secondary period; by the borders of the
+vast lakes, full of crocodiles, and antediluvian marshes, which in Provence
+were shaded by palms, and strange ferns, and giant Lycopodia, never as yet
+enlivened by the song of a bird.
+
+These monstrosities, in which life was making its essays, were subject to
+singular physical necessities. The female reigned alone; the male did not
+as yet exist, or was tolerated only for the sake of his indispensable
+assistance. But he served also another and less obvious end; his substance,
+or at least some portion of his substance, was an almost necessary
+ingredient in the act of generation, something in the nature of a necessary
+excitant of the ovaries, "a horrible titbit," which completed and
+consummated the great task of fecundation. Such, in Fabre's eyes, was the
+imperious physiological reason of these rude laws. This is why the love of
+the males is almost equivalent to their suicide; the Gardener-beetle,
+attacked by the female, attempts to flee, but does not defend himself; "it
+is as though an invincible repugnance prevents him from repulsing or from
+eating the eater." In the same way the male scorpion "allows himself to be
+devoured by his companion without ever attempting to employ his sting," and
+the lover of the Mantis "allows himself to be nibbled to pieces without any
+revolt on his part."
+
+A strange morality, but not more strange than the organic peculiarities
+which are its foundation; a strange world, but perhaps some distant sun may
+light others like it.
+
+These terrible creatures are a source of dismay to Fabre. If all things
+proceed from an underlying Reason, if the divine harmony of things
+testifies everywhere to a sovereign Logic, how shall the proofs of its
+excellence and its sovereign wisdom be found in such things as these?
+
+Far from attributing to the order of the universe a supposed perfection,
+far from considering nature as the most immediate expression of the Good
+and the Beautiful, in the words of Tolstoy (11/5.), he sees in it only a
+rough sketch which a hidden God, hidden, but close at hand, and living
+eternally present in the heart of His creatures, is seeking to test and to
+shape.
+
+Living always with his eyes upon some secret of the marvels of God, whom he
+sees in every bush, in every tree, "although He is veiled from our
+imperfect senses" (11/6.), the vilest insect reveals to him, in the least
+of its actions, a fragment of this universal Intelligence.
+
+What marvels indeed when seen from above! But consider the Reverse--what
+antinomies, what flagrant contradictions! What poor and sordid means! And
+Fabre is astonished, in spite of all his candid faith, that the fatality of
+the belly should have entered into the Divine plan, and the necessity of
+all those atrocious acts in which the Unconscious delights. Could not God
+ensure the preservation of life by less violent means? Why these
+subterranean dramas, these slow assassinations? Why has Evil, THE POISON OF
+THE GOOD (11/7.), crept in everywhere, even to the origin of life, like an
+eternal Parasite?
+
+Within this fatal circle, in which the devourer and the devoured, the
+exploiter and the exploited, lead an eternal dance, can we not perceive a
+ray of light?
+
+For what is it that we see?
+
+The victims are not merely the predestined victims of their persecutors.
+They seek neither to struggle nor to escape nor to evade the inevitable;
+one might say that by a kind of renunciation they offer themselves up whole
+as a sacrifice!
+
+What irresistible destiny impels the bee to meet half-way the Philanthus,
+its terrible enemy! The Tarantula, which could so easily withstand the
+Pompilus, when the latter rashly carries war into its lair, does not
+disturb itself, and never dreams of using its poisoned fangs. Not less
+absolute is the submission of the grasshopper before the Mantis, which
+itself has its tyrant, the Tachytes.
+
+Similarly those which have reason to fear for their offspring, if not for
+themselves, do nothing to evade the enemy which watches for them; the
+Megachile, although it could easily destroy it, is indifferent to the
+presence of a miserable midge, "the bandit who is always there, meditating
+its crime"; the Bembex, confronted with the Tachinarius, cannot control its
+terror, but nevertheless resigns itself, while squeaking with fright.
+
+If each creature is what it is only because it is a necessary part of the
+plan of the supreme Artisan who has constructed the universe, why have some
+the right of life and death and others the terrible duty of immolation?
+
+Do not both obey, not the gloomy law of carnage, but a kind of sovereign
+and exquisite sacrifice, some sort of unconscious idea of submission to a
+superior and collective interest?
+
+This hypothesis, which was one day suggested to Fabre by a friend of great
+intellectual culture (11/8.), charmed and interested him keenly. I noticed
+that he was more than usually attentive, and he seemed to me to be suddenly
+reassured and appeased. For him it was as though a faint ray of light had
+suddenly fallen among these impenetrable and distressing problems.
+
+It seemed to him that by setting before our eyes the spectacle of so many
+woes, universally distributed, and doubtless necessary, woes which do not
+spare even the humblest of creatures, the Sovereign Intelligence intends to
+exhort us to examine ourselves truly and to dispose us to greater love and
+pity and resignation.
+
+All his work is highly and essentially religious; and while he has given us
+a taste for nature, he has not also endeavoured to give us, according to
+the expression of Bossuet "the taste for God," or at least a sense of the
+divine? In opposing the doctrine of evolution, which reduces the animal
+world to the mere virtualities of the cell; in revealing to us all these
+marvels which seem destined always to escape human comprehension; finally,
+by referring us more necessarily than ever to the unfathomable problem of
+our origins, Fabre has reopened the door of mystery, the door of the divine
+Unknown, in which the religion of men must always renew itself. We should
+belittle his thought, we should dwarf the man himself, were we to seek to
+confine to any particular thesis his spiritualistic conception of the
+universe.
+
+Fabre recognizes and adores in nature only the great eternal Power, whose
+imprint is everywhere revealed by the phenomena of matter.
+
+For this reason he has all his life remained free from all superstition and
+has been completely indifferent to dogmas and miracles, which to his mind
+imply not only a profound ignorance of science, but also a gross and
+complete miscomprehension of the divine Intelligence. He kneels upon the
+ground or among the grasses only the more closely to adore that force, the
+source of all order, the intuitive knowledge of which, innate in all
+creatures, even in the tiny immovable minds of animals, is merely a
+magnificent and gratuitous gift. The office in which he eagerly
+communicates is that glorious and formidable Mass in which the ragged
+sower, "noble in his tatters, a pontiff in shabby small-clothes, solemn as
+a God, blesses the soil, more majestic than the bishop in his glory at
+Easter-tide." (11/9.) It is there that he finds his "Ideal," in the incense
+of the perfumes "which are softly exhaled from the shapely flowers, from
+their censers of gold," in the heart of all creatures, "chaffinch and
+siskin, skylark and goldfinch, tiny choristers" piping and trilling,
+"elaborating their motets" to the glory of Him who gave them voice and
+wings on the fifth day of Genesis. He fraternizes with all, with his dogs
+and his cats, his tame tortoise, and even the "slimy and swollen frog"; the
+"Philosopher" of the Harmas, whose murky eyes he loves to interrogate as he
+paces his garden "by the light of the stars"; persuaded that all are
+accomplishing a useful work, and that all creatures, from the humblest
+insect which has only nibbled a leaf, or displaced a few grains of sand, to
+man himself, are anointed with the same chrism of immortality.
+
+And as he has always set the pleasures of study before all others, he can
+imagine no greater recompense after death than to obtain from heaven
+permission still to continue in their midst, during eternity, his life of
+labour and effort.
+
+
+CHAPTER 12. THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.
+
+We have noted the essential features of his precise and unfailing vision
+and the value of the documents which record the work of Fabre, but the
+writer merits no less attention than the observer and the philosopher.
+
+In the domain of things positive, it is not always sufficient to gather the
+facts, to record them, and to codify in bare formulae the results of
+inquiry. Doubtless every essential discovery is able to stand by itself; in
+what would an inventor profit, for example, by raising himself to the level
+of the artist? "For the theorem lucidity suffices; truth issues naked from
+the bottom of a well."
+
+But the manner of speaking, describing, and depicting is none the less an
+integral part of the truth when it is a matter of expounding and
+transmitting the latter. To express it feebly is often to compromise it, to
+diminish it; and even to betray it. There are terms which say better than
+others what has to be said. "Words have their physiognomy; if there are
+lifeless words, there are also picturesque and richly-coloured words,
+comparable to the brush strokes which scatter flecks of light on the grey
+background of the picture." There are particular terms of expression,
+felicities which present things in a better light, and the writer must
+search in his memory, his imagination, and his heart, for the fitting
+accent; for the flexibility of language and the wealth of words which are
+needful if he would fully succeed in the portrayal of living creatures; if
+he would tender the living truth, reproduce in all its light and shade the
+spectacle of the world, arouse the imagination, and faithfully interpret
+the mysterious spirit which impregnates matter and is reflected in thought.
+
+The artist then comes forward to co-ordinate all these scattered fragments,
+to assemble them, to breathe vitality into them, to restore these inert
+truths to life.
+
+But what a strange manner of working was Fabre's; what a curious method of
+composition! However full of ideas his mind might be, he was incapable of
+expressing them if he remained in one place and assumed the ordinary
+preliminary attitude of a man preparing to write. Seated and motionless,
+his limbs at rest, pen in hand, with a blank page before him, it seemed to
+him that all his faculties became of a sudden paralysed. He must first move
+about; activity helped him to pursue his ideas; it was in action that he
+recovered his ardour and uncovered the sources of inspiration. Just as he
+never observed without enthusiasm, so he found it impossible to write
+without exaltation, and it was precisely because he so ardently loved the
+truth that he felt himself compelled to show it in all its beauty.
+
+Moving like a circus-horse about the great table of his laboratory, he
+would begin to tramp indefatigably round and round, so that his steps have
+worn in the tiles of the floor an ineffaceable record of the concentric
+track in which they moved incessantly for thirty years.
+
+His mind would grow clear and active as he walked, smoking his pipe and
+"using his marrow-bones." (12/1.) He was already at work; he was
+"hammering" his future chapters in his brain; for the idea would be all the
+more precise as the form was more finished and more irreproachable, more
+closely identified with the thought; he would wait until the word quivered,
+palpitated, and lived; until the transcription was no longer an illusion, a
+phantom, a vision devoid of reality, but a faithful echo, a sincere
+translation, a finished interpretation, reflecting entire the fundamental
+essence of the thing; in a word, a work of art, a parallel to nature.
+
+Then only would he sit before the little walnut-wood table "spotted with
+ink and scarred with knife-cuts, just big enough to hold the inkstand, a
+halfpenny bottle, and his open notebook": that same little table at which,
+in other days, by force of meditation, he achieved his first degrees.
+
+Then he would begin to write, "his pen dipped not in ink only" but in his
+heart's blood (12/2.); first of all in ordinary ruled notebooks bound in
+black cloth, in which he noted, day by day, hour by hour, the observations
+of every moment, the results of his experiments, together with his thoughts
+and reflections. Little by little those documents would come together which
+elucidated and completed one another, and at last the book was written.
+These notebooks, these copious records, are remarkable for the regularity
+of the writing and the often impeccable finish of the first draught.
+Although here and there the same data are transcribed several times in
+succession, and each time struck through with a vigorous stroke of the pen,
+there are whole pages, and many pages together, without a single erasure.
+The handwriting, excessively small--one might think it had been traced by
+the feet of a fly--becomes in later years so minute that one almost needs a
+magnifying glass to decipher it.
+
+These notebooks are not the final manuscript. The entomologist would write
+a new and more perfect copy on loose sheets of paper, making one draught
+after another, patiently fashioning his style and polishing his work,
+although many passages were included without revision as they were written
+in the first instance.
+
+The greatest magician of modern letters, versed in all the artifices of the
+French language, speaking one day of Fabre and his writings, made in my
+hearing the assertion that he was not, properly speaking, an artist. He
+might well be a great naturalist, a veteran of science, an observer of
+genius, but he was by no means and would never be a writer according to the
+canons of the craft.
+
+But how many others, like him, in their time regarded as "pitiable in
+respect of their language," charm us to-day, simply because they were
+gifted with imagination and the power of giving life to their work! (12/3.)
+
+To tell the truth, Fabre is absolutely careless of all literary procedure,
+and solely preoccupied with bringing his style into harmony with his
+thoughts; he is not in the least a manufacturer of literary phrases. There
+is no trace of artistic writing in his books, and it is only his manner of
+feeling and of expressing himself that makes him so dear to us.
+
+What touches us in him is the accent, the simplicity, the measure, the good
+sense, and the perfect equilibrium of each of these pages: simple, often
+commonplace, even incorrect or trivial, but so alive, so human, that the
+blood seems to flow in them. It is the lover in Fabre that draws us to him;
+nothing quite like his work has been seen since the days of Jean de La
+Fontaine.
+
+He has liberated science; he laughs at the specialists who take refuge
+behind their "barbarian terminologies," at the "jargon" of those "who see
+the world only through the wrong end of the glass"; at the exaggerated
+importance which they attribute to insignificant details, the narrowness of
+classifications, and the chaos of systems; all that incoherent, remote, and
+inaccessible science, which he, on the contrary, strives to render pleasant
+and attractive.
+
+This is why the great scientist has endeavoured to speak like other people,
+preferring, to the harsh consonants of technical phrases which sound "like
+insults" or have the air of "a magical invocation, which make certain
+scientific works read like so much gibberish," the "naive and picturesque
+appellation, the familiar, trivial name, the popular, living term which
+directly interprets the exact signification of the habits of an insect, or
+informs us fully of its dominant characteristic, or which, at least, leaves
+nothing to conjecture."
+
+He considers it useless and even inconvenient to abandon many charming
+expressions, appropriate and significant as they are, which may be borrowed
+from the good old French tongue; and in this he resembles the immortal de
+Jussieu, who in his botanical classifications was careful not to discard
+the old popular denominations which Theophrastus, Virgil, and Linnaeus had
+thought fit to bestow upon plant and tree.
+
+It is for the same reasons that he loves the Provençal tongue; that
+beautiful idiom, that superb language, rich in music, in sonorous words, so
+suggestive and so full of colour, many of whose terms, saying precisely
+what they intend to say, have no equivalent in French. He has learned the
+language, and reads it: in particular Roumanille, whose easy, familiar
+style pleases him better than the grandiloquence of Mistral, although he
+delights also in Calendal, whose lyrical powers fill him with enthusiasm.
+>From this ancient tongue, which was early as familiar to him as the French,
+he borrowed certain mannerisms, certain tricks of style, certain
+neologisms, and also, to some extent, his simplicity of manner and the
+cadence of his prose.
+
+It was not without difficulty that he attained this mastery. Measure the
+gulf between his first volumes and his last; in the first the style is
+slightly nerveless and indefinite: it was only as he gradually advanced in
+his career that he acquired what may be called his final manner, or
+achieved, in his narratives, a perfect literary style. The most
+substantially constructed, the most happily expressed of his pages were
+written principally in his extreme old age. Not only is there no sign of
+failing in these, but in his latest "Souvenirs" the perfection of form is
+perhaps even more remarkable than the wealth of matter.
+
+How vitally his scrupulous records impress the mind's eye; how firmly they
+establish themselves in the memory!
+
+Even if one has never seen the Pelopaeus, one readily conceives an
+impression of "her wasp-like costume, and curving abdomen, suspended at the
+end of a long thread." What exactitude in this snapshot, taken at the
+moment when the insect is occupied in scooping out of the mire the lump of
+mud intended for the construction of her nest: "like a skilled housekeeper,
+with her clothing carefully tucked up that it may not be soiled, the wings
+vibrating, the limbs rigidly straightened, the black abdomen well raised on
+the end of its yellow stalk, she rakes the mud with the points of her
+mandibles, skimming the shining surface." (12/4.)
+
+He draws, in passing, this charming sketch of the gadfly, the pest of
+horses, which nourishes itself with their blood:
+
+"Gadflies of several species used to take refuge under the silken dome of
+my umbrella, and there they would quietly rest, one here, one there, on the
+tightly stretched fabric; I rarely lacked their company when the heat was
+overpowering. To while away the hours of waiting, I used to love to watch
+their great golden eyes, which would shine like carbuncles on the vaulted
+ceiling of my shelter; I used to love to watch them slowly change their
+stations, when the excessive heat of some point of the ceiling would force
+them to move a little." (12/5.)
+
+We follow all the manoeuvres of the Balaninus, the acorn-weevil, "burying
+her drill" which "operates by means of little bites." The narrator calls
+our attention to the slightest episodes, even to those accidents which
+sometimes surprise the worker in the course of her labours; when, with the
+rostrum buried deep in the acorn, her feet suddenly lose their hold. Then
+the unhappy creature, unable to free herself, finds herself suspended in
+the air, at right angles to her proboscis, far from any foothold or point
+of vantage, at the extremity of her disproportionately long pike, that
+"fatal stake." (12/6.)
+
+As for the poplar-weevil, we can almost see it moving "in the subtlest
+equilibrium, clinging with its hooked talons to the slippery surface of the
+leaf"; we watch all the details of its methods and the progress of its
+labours. We see the flexed leaf assume the vertical under the awl-stroke
+which the insect applies to the pedicle, "when, partially deprived of sap,
+the leaf becomes more flexible, more malleable; it is in a sense partly
+paralysed, only half alive." Then we follow the rolling process; "the
+imperturbable deliberation of the worker as it rolls its cigar, which
+finally hangs perpendicularly at the end of the bent and wounded stem."
+(12/7.)
+
+Fabre, like a true artist, finds all sorts of expressions to describe the
+tiny, fragile eggs of his insects; little shining pearls, delicious coffers
+of nickel or amber, miniature pots of translucid alabaster, "which we might
+think were stolen from the cupboard of a fairy."
+
+He opens the enchanted alcoves wherein the puny grubs lie slumbering, "fat,
+rounded puppets"; the tender larvae which "gape and swing their heads to
+and fro" when the mother returns to the nest with her toothsome mouthful or
+her crop swollen with honey.
+
+What compassion, what tenderness, what sensitiveness in the affecting
+picture of the mother Halictus, abandoned, deprived of her offspring,
+bewildered and lost, when the terrible spring fly has destroyed her house:
+bald, emaciated, shabby, careworn, already dogged by the small grey lizard!
+(12/8.)
+
+The tragedy of the wasps' nest at the approach of the first chills of
+winter is the final fragment of an epic. At first there is a sort of
+uneasiness, "a species of indifference and anxiety which broods over the
+city"; already it has a presentiment of coming misfortune, of an
+approaching catastrophe. Presently a wild excitement ensues; the foster-
+mothers, "frightened, fierce, and restless," as though suddenly attacked by
+an incomprehensible insanity, conceive an aversion for the young; "the
+neuters extirpate the larvae and drag them out of the nest," and the drama
+of destruction draws to a close with "the final catastrophe; the infirm and
+the dying are dismembered, eviscerated, dissected in a heap in the
+catacombs by maggots, woodlice, and centipedes." Finally the moth comes
+upon the scene, its larvae "attacking the dwelling itself; gnawing and
+destroying the joists and rafters, until all is reduced to a few pinches of
+dust and shreds of grey paper." (12/9.)
+
+What picturesque expressions he employs to depict, by means of some
+significant feature, the striking peculiarities of the insect physiognomy!
+
+"The gipsy who night and day for seven months goes to and fro with her
+brats upon her back" is the Lycosa, the Tarantula with the black stomach,
+the great spider of the wastes.
+
+The larva of the great Capricornis, which gnaws the interior of old oak-
+trees, "leaving behind it, in the form of dry-rot, the refuse of its
+digestive processes," is "a scrap of intestine which eats its way as it
+goes."
+
+In "that hideous lout" the Scorpion he shows us a rough epitome of the
+shapeless head, the truncated face of the spider.
+
+The Tachinae, those "brazen diptera" which swarm on the sunny sand on the
+watch for Bembex or Philanthus, in order to establish their offspring at
+its expense, "are bandits clad in fustian, the head wrapped in a red
+handkerchief, awaiting the hour of attack!"
+
+The Languedocian Sphex, sprawling flat upon the vine leaves, grows dizzy
+with the heat and frisks for very pleasure; "with its feet it taps rapidly
+on its resting-place, and thus produces a drumming like that of a shower of
+rain falling thickly on the leaves." Fabre takes a keen delight in the
+production of these pictures, at once so exact and lifelike; but we must
+not therefore suppose that his mind is incapable of the detailed
+descriptions necessitated by the laborious processes of minute anatomy.
+
+Like all sciences, entomology has its uninteresting aspects when we seek to
+study it deeply. Yet with what interest and lucidity has Fabre succeeded in
+expounding the complex morphoses of the obscure and miserable larva of the
+Sitaris, the curious intestine of the Scarabaeus, the secret of the
+spawning of the weevil, and the ingenious mechanisms of the musical
+instruments of the Decticus and the Cicada. With what subtle art he
+explains the song of the cricket, how the five hundred prisms of the
+serrated bow set the four tympana in vibration; and how the song is
+sometimes muffled by a process of muting. (12/10.)
+
+Some of the images suggested to him by the forms of animals are so
+beautiful that certain of his descriptions might well serve to inspire an
+artist, or suggest new motives of decoration in the arts of enamelling,
+gem-engraving, jewellery, etc.
+
+Instead of eternally copying ancient things, or seeking inspiration in
+lifeless texts, why not turn our attention to the numerous and interesting
+motives which are scattered all around us, whose originality consists
+precisely in the fact that they have never yet been employed? Why torture
+the mind to produce more painful elaborations of awkward, frozen, poverty-
+stricken combinations, when Nature herself is at hand, offering the
+inexhaustible casket of her living marvels, full of the profoundest logic
+and as yet unexamined?
+
+If the bee by means of the hexagonal prism has anticipated all the
+geometers in the problem of the economy of space and matter; if the Epeïra
+and the mollusc have invented the logarithmic spiral and its transcendent
+properties; if all creatures "inspired by an aesthetic which nothing
+escapes, achieve the beautiful" (12/11.), surely human art, which can but
+imitate and remember, has only to employ to its profit and transfigure into
+ideal images the natural beauties so profusely furnished by the
+Unconscious.
+
+Modern art, influenced more especially by the subtle Japanese, is already
+treading this path.
+
+What artist could ever engrave on rare metals or model in precious
+substances a more beautiful subject than the wonderful picture of the
+Tarantula offering, at the length of her extended limbs, her white sac of
+eggs to the sun; or the transparent nymph of the Onthophagus taurus, "as
+though carved from a block of crystal, with its wide snout and its enormous
+horns like those of the Aurochs"? (12/12.) What an undiscovered subject he
+might find in the nymph of the Ergatus (12/13.), with its almost
+incorporeal grace, as though made of "translucent ivory, like a communicant
+in her white veils, the arms crossed upon the breast; a living symbol of
+mystic resignation before the accomplishment of destiny"; or in the still
+more mysterious nymph of the Scarabaeus sacer, first of all "a mummy of
+translucent amber, maintained by its linen cerements in a hieratic pose;
+but soon upon this background of topaz, the head, the legs, and the thorax
+change to a sombre red, while the rest of the body remains white, and the
+nymph is slowly transfigured, assuming that majestic costume which combines
+the red of the cardinal's mantle with the whiteness of the sacerdotal alb."
+
+On the other hand, what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature
+than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal
+hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its
+scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed
+face, turned-up moustaches, great prominent eyes, and a "stupendous mitre":
+the most grotesque, the most fantastic freaks that creation can ever have
+evolved? (12/14.)
+
+
+CHAPTER 13. THE EPIC OF ANIMAL LIFE.
+
+Although in his portraits and descriptions Fabre is simple and exact, and
+so full of natural geniality; although he can so handle his words as to
+render them "adequate" to reproduce the moving pictures of the tiny
+creatures he observes, his style touches a higher level, flashes with
+colour, and grows rich with imagery when he seeks to interpret the feelings
+which animate them: their loves, their battles, their cunning schemes, and
+the pursuit of their prey; all that vast drama which everywhere accompanies
+the travail of creation.
+
+It is here in particular that Fabre shows us what horizons, as yet almost
+unexplored, what profound and inexhaustible resources science is able to
+offer poetry.
+
+The breaking of egg or chrysalid is in itself a moving event; for to attain
+to the light is for all these creatures "a prodigious travail."
+
+The hour of spring has sounded. At the call of the field-cricket, the
+herald of the spring, the germs that slumber in nymph or chrysalis have
+broken through their spell.
+
+What haste and ingenuity are required to emerge from the natal darkness, to
+unwrap the swaddling-bands, to break the subterranean shells, to demolish
+the waxen bulkheads, to perforate the soil or to escape from prisons of
+silk!
+
+The woodland bug, whose egg is a masterpiece, invents I know not what
+magical centre-bit, what curious piece of locksmith's work, in order to
+unlock its natal casket and achieve its liberty.
+
+For days the grasshopper "butts its head against the roughness of the soil,
+and wars upon the pebbles; by dint of frantic wriggling it escapes from the
+womb of the earth, bursts its old coat, and is transfigured, opening its
+eyes to the light, and leaping for the first time."
+
+The Bombyx of the pine-tree "decks its brow with points of diamond, spreads
+its wings, and erects its plumes, and shakes out its fleece to fly only in
+the darkness, to wed the same night, and to die on the morrow."
+
+What marvellous inventions, what machinery, what incredible contrivances,
+"in order that a tiny fly can emerge from under ground"!
+
+The Anthrax assumes a panoply of trepans, an assortment of gimlets and
+knives, harpoons and grapnels, in order to perforate its ceiling of cement;
+then the lugubrious black fly appears, all moist as yet with the humours of
+the laboratory of life, steadies itself upon its trembling legs, dries its
+wings, quits its suit of armour, and takes flight."
+
+The blue-fly, buried in the depth of the sand, "cracks its barrel-shaped
+coffin," and splits its mask, in order to disinter itself; the head divides
+into two halves, between which we see emerging and disappearing by turns a
+monstrous tumour, which comes and goes, swells and shrivels, palpitates,
+labours, lunges, and retires, thus compressing and gradually undermining
+the sand, until at last the newborn fly emerges from the depth of the
+catacombs. (13/1.)
+
+Certain young spiders, in order to emancipate themselves, to conquer space,
+and disperse themselves about the world, resort to an ingenious system of
+aviation. They gain the highest point of the thicket, and release a thread,
+which, seized by the wind, carries them away suspended. Each shines like a
+point of light against the foliage of the cypresses. There is a continuous
+stream of tiny passengers, leaping and descending in scattered sheaves
+under the caresses of the sun, like atomic projectiles, like the fountain
+of fire at a pyrotechnic display. What a glorious departure, what an entry
+into the world! Gripping its aeronautic thread, the insect ascends in
+apotheosis! (13/2.)
+
+But if all are called all are not chosen. "How many can move only at the
+greatest peril under the rugged earth, proceeding from shock to shock, in
+the harsh womb of universal life, and, arrested by a grain of sand, succumb
+half-way"!
+
+There are others whom slower metamorphoses condemn to vegetate still longer
+in the subterranean night, before they are permitted to assume their
+festival attire, and share in their turn in the gladness of creation.
+
+Thus the Cicada is forced to labour for long gloomy years in the darkness
+before it can emerge from the soil. At the moment when it issues from the
+earth the larva, soiled with mire, "resembles a sewer-man; its eyes are
+whitish, nebulous, squinting, blind." Then "it clings to some twig, it
+splits down the back, rejects its discarded skin, drier than horny
+parchment, and becomes the Cigale, which is at first of a pale grass-green
+hue." Then,
+
+"Half drunken with her joy, she feasts
+In a hail of fire";
+
+And all day long drinks of the sugared sap of tender bark, and is silent
+only at night, sated with light and heat. The song, which forms part of the
+majestic symphony of the harvest-tide, announces merely its delight in
+existence. Having passed years underground, the cigale has only a month to
+reign, to be happy in a world of light, under the caressing sun. Judge
+whether the wild little cymbals can ever be loud enough "to celebrate such
+felicity, so well earned and so ephemeral"! (13/3.)
+
+All sing for happiness, each after its kind, through the calm of the summer
+days. Their minds are intoxicated; it is their fashion of praying, of
+adoring, of expressing "the joys of life: a full crop and the sun on the
+back." Even the humble grasshopper rubs its flanks to express its joy,
+raises and lowers its shanks till its wing-cases squeak, and is enchanted
+with its own music, which it commences or terminates suddenly "according to
+the alternations of sun and shade." Each insect has its rhythm, strident or
+barely perceptible; the music of the thickets and fallows caressed by the
+sun, rising and falling in waves of joyful life.
+
+The insects make merry; they hold uproarious festival; and they mate
+insatiably; even before forming a mutual acquaintance; in a furious rush of
+living, for "love is the sole joy of the animal," and "to love is to die."
+
+Hardly unwrapped, still dusty from the strenuous labour of deliverance,
+"the female of the Scolia is seized by the male, who does not even give her
+time to wash her eyes." Having slept over a year underground, the Sitares,
+barely rid of their mummy-cases, taste, in the sunlight, a few minutes of
+love, on the very site of their re-birth; then they die. Life surges,
+burns, flares, sparkles, rushes "in a perpetual tide," a brief radiance
+between two nights.
+
+A world of a myriad fairies fills the rustling forest: day and night it
+unfolds a thousand marvellous pictures; about the root of a bramble, in the
+shadow of an old wall, on a slope of loose soil, or in the dense thickets.
+
+"The insect is transfigured for the nuptial ceremony; and each hopes, in
+its ritual, to declare its passion." Fabre had some thought of writing the
+Golden Book of their bridals and their wedding festivals (13/4.); the
+Kamasutra of their feasts and rules of love; and with what art, at once
+frank and reserved, has he here and there handled this wonderful theme! In
+the radiant garden of delight, where no detail of truth is omitted, but
+where nothing shocks us, Fabre reveals himself as he is in his
+conversation; evading the subject where it takes a licentious turn;
+fundamentally chaste and extremely reserved.
+
+At the foot of the rocks the Psyche "appears in the balcony of her boudoir,
+in the rays of the caressing sun; lying on the cloudy softness of an
+incomparable eider-down." She awaits the visit of the spouse, "the gentle
+Bombyx," who, for the ceremony, "has donned his feathery plumes and his
+mantle of black velvet." "If he is late in coming, the female grows
+impatient; then she herself makes the advances, and sets forth in search of
+her mate."
+
+Drawn by the same voluptuous and overwhelming force, the cricket ventures
+to leave his burrow. Adorned "in his fairest attire, black jacket, more
+beauteous than satin, with a stripe of carmine on the thigh," he wanders
+through the wild herbage, "by the discreet glimmer of twilight," until he
+reaches the distant lodging of the beloved. There at last he arrives "upon
+the sanded walk, the court of honour that precedes the entry." But already
+the place is occupied by another aspirant. Then the two rivals fall upon
+one another, biting one another's heads, "until it ends by the retreat of
+the weaker, whom the victor insults by a bravura cry." The happy champion
+bridles, assuming a proud air, as of one who knows himself a handsome
+fellow, before the fair one, who feigns to hide herself behind her tuft of
+aphyllantus, all covered with azure flowers. "With a gesture of a fore-limb
+he passes one of his antennae through his mandibles as though to curl it;
+with his long-spurred, red-striped legs he shuffles with impatience; he
+kicks the empty air; but emotion renders him mute." (13/5.)
+
+In the foliage of the ash-tree the lover of the female Cantharis thrashes
+his companion, who makes herself as small as she can, hiding her head in
+her bosom; he bangs her with his fists, buffets her with his abdomen,
+"subjects her to an erotic storm, a rain of blows"; then, with his arms
+crossed, he remains a moment motionless and trembling; finally, seizing
+both antennae of the desired one, he forces her to raise her head "like a
+cavalier proudly seated on horse and holding the reins in his hands."
+
+The Osmiae "reply by a click of the jaws to the advances of their lovers,
+who recoil, and then, doubtless to make themselves more valiant, they also
+execute a ferocious mandibular grimace. With this byplay of the jaws and
+their menacing gestures of the head in the empty air the lovers have the
+air of intending to eat one another." Thus they preface their bridals by
+displays of gallantry, recalling the ancient betrothal customs of which
+Rabelais speaks; the pretenders were cuffed and derided and threatened with
+a hearty pummelling. (13/6.)
+
+On the arid hillsides, where the doubtful rays of the moon pierce the
+storm-clouds and illumine the sultry atmosphere, the pale scorpions, with
+short-sighted eyes, hideous monsters with misshapen heads, "display their
+strange faces, and two by two, hand in hand, stalk in measured paces amid
+the tufts of lavender. How tell their joys, their ecstasies, that no human
+language can express...!" (13/7.)
+
+However, the glow-worm, to guide the lover, lights its beacon "like a spark
+fallen from the full moon"; but "presently the light grows feebler, and
+fades to a discreet nightlight, while all around the host of nocturnal
+creatures, delayed in their affairs, murmur the general epithalamium."
+(13/8.)
+
+But their happy time is soon over; tragedy is about to follow idyll.
+
+One must live, and "the intestine rules the world."
+
+All creatures that fill the world are incessantly conflicting, and one
+lives only at the cost of another.
+
+On the other hand, in order that the coming generations may see the light,
+the present generations must think of the preservation of the young.
+"Perish all the rest provided the brood flourish!" And in the depth of
+burrows the future larvae who live only for their stomachs, "little ogres,
+greedy of living flesh," must have their prey.
+
+To hunger and maternity let us also add love, which "rules the world by
+conflict."
+
+Such are the components of the "struggle for existence," such as Fabre has
+described it, but with no other motive than to describe what he has
+observed and seen. Such are the ordinary themes of the grandiose battles
+which he has scattered through his narratives, and never did circus or
+arena offer more thrilling spectacles; no jungle ever hid more moving
+combats in its thickets."
+
+"Each has its ruses of war, its methods of attack, its methods of killing."
+
+What tactics--"studied, scientific, worthy of the athletes of the ancient
+palaestra"--are those which the Sphex employs to paralyse the Cricket and
+the Cerceris to capture the Cleona, to secure them in a suitable place, so
+as to operate on them more surely and at leisure!
+
+Beside these master paralysers, so expert in the art of dealing slow death,
+there are those which, with a precision no less scholarly, kill and wither
+their victims at a single stroke, and without leaving a trace: "true
+practitioners in crime."
+
+On the rock-rose bushes, with their great pink flowers, "the pretty
+Thomisus, the little crab-spider, clad in satin," watches for the domestic
+bee, and suddenly kills it, seizing the back of the head, while the
+Philanthus, also seizing it by the head, plunges its sting under the chin,
+neither too high nor too low, but "exactly in the narrow joint of the
+neck," for both insects know that in this limited spot, in which is
+concentrated a small nervous mass, something like a brain, is "the weak
+point, most vulnerable of all," the fault in the cuirass, the vital centre.
+Others, like the Araneidae, intoxicate their prey, and their subtle bite,
+"which resembles a kiss," in whatever part of the body it is applied,
+"produces almost immediately a gradual swoon."
+
+Thus the great hairy Bourdon, in the course of its peregrinations across
+the wastes of thyme, sometimes foolishly strays into the lair of the
+Tarantula, whose eyes glimmer like jewels at the back of his den. Hardly
+has the insect disappeared underground than a sort of shrill rattling is
+heard, a "true death-song," immediately followed by the completest silence.
+"Only a moment, and the unfortunate creature is absolutely dead, proboscis
+outstretched and limbs relaxed. The bite of the rattlesnake would not
+produce a more sudden paralysis."
+
+The terrible spider "crouching on the battlements of his castle, his heavy
+belly in the sun, attentive to the slightest rustling, leaps upon whatever
+passes, fly or Libellula, and with a single stroke strangles his victim,
+and drains its body, drinking the warm blood."
+
+"To dislodge him from his keep needs all the cunning strategy of the
+Pompilus; a terrible duel, a hand-to-hand combat, stupendous, truly epic,
+in which the subtle address and the ingenious audacity of the winged insect
+eventually triumph over the dreadful spider and his poisoned fangs."
+(13/9.)
+
+On the pink heather "the timid spider of the thickets suspends by ethereal
+cables the branching whorl of his snare, which the tears of the night have
+turned into chaplets of jewels...The magical jewellery sparkles in the sun,
+attracting mosquitoes and butterflies; but whosoever approaches too closely
+perishes, a victim of curiosity." Above the funnel is the trap, "a chaos of
+springs, a forest of cordage; like the rigging of a ship dismembered by the
+tempest. The desperate creature struggles in the shrouds of the rigging,
+then falls into the gloomy slaughter-house where the spider lurks ready to
+bleed his prey."
+
+Death is everywhere.
+
+Each crevice of bark, each shadow of a leaf, conceals a hunter armed with a
+deadly weapon, all his senses on the alert. Everywhere are teeth, fangs,
+talons, stings, pincers, and scythes.
+
+Leaping in the long grasses, the Decticus with the ivory face "crunches the
+heads of grasshoppers in his mandibles."
+
+A ferocious creature, the grub of the Hemerobius, disembowels plant-lice,
+making of their skins a battle-dress, covering its back with the
+eviscerated victims, "as the Red Indian ties about his loins the tresses of
+his scalped enemies."
+
+Caterpillars are surrounded by the implacable voracity of the Carabidae:
+
+"The furry skins are gaping with wounds; their contents escape in knots of
+entrails, bright green with their aliment, the needles of the pine-tree;
+the caterpillars writhe, struggling with loop-like movements, gripping the
+sand with their feet, dribbling and gnashing their mandibles. Those as yet
+unwounded are digging desperately in the attempt to escape underground. Not
+one succeeds. They are scarcely half buried before some beetle runs to them
+and destroys them by an eviscerating wound."
+
+At the centre of its net, which seems "woven of moonbeams," in the midst of
+its snare, a glutinous trap of infernal ingenuity, or hidden at a distance
+in its cabin of green leaves, the Epeïra fasciata waits and watches for its
+prey. Let the terrible hornet, or the Libellula auripennis, flying from
+stem to stem, fall into the limed snare; the insect struggles, endeavours
+to unwind itself; the net trembles violently as though it would be torn
+from its cables. Immediately the spider darts forward, running boldly to
+the intruder. With rapid gestures the two hinder limbs weave a winding-
+sheet of silk as they rotate the victim in order to enshroud it...The
+ancient Retiarius, condemned to meet a powerful beast of prey, appeared in
+the arena with a net of cordage lying upon his left shoulder; the animal
+sprang upon him; the man, with a sudden throw, caught it in the meshes; a
+stroke of the trident despatched it. Similarly the Epeïra throws its web,
+and when there is no longer any movement under the white shroud the spider
+draws closer; its venomous fangs perform the office of the trident.
+(13/10.)
+
+The Praying Mantis, that demoniac creature which alone among the insects
+turns its head to gaze, "whose pious airs conceal the most atrocious
+habits," remains on the watch, motionless, for hours at a time. Let a great
+grasshopper chance to come by: the Mantis follows it with its glance,
+glides between the leaves, and suddenly rises up before it; "and then
+assumes its spectral pose, which terrifies and fascinates the prey; the
+wing-covers open, the wings spring to their full width, forming a vast
+pyramid which dominates the back; a sort of swishing sound is heard, like
+the hiss of a startled adder; the murderous fore-limbs open to their full
+extent, forming a cross with the body, and exhibiting the axillae
+ornamented with eyes vaguely resembling those of the peacock's tail, part
+of the panoply of war, concealed upon ordinary occasions. These are only
+exhibited when the creature makes itself terrible and superb for battle.
+Then the two grappling-hooks are thrown; the fangs strike, the double
+scythes close together and hold the victim as in a vice." (13/11.)
+
+There is no peace; night falls and the horrible conflict continues in the
+darkness. Atrocious struggles, merciless duels, fill the summer nights. On
+the stems of the long grasses, beside the furrows, the glow-worm
+"anaethetizes the snail," instilling into it its venom, which stupefies and
+produces sleep, in order to immobilize its prey before devouring it.
+
+Having chorused their joy all the day long in the sunshine, in the evening
+the Cicadae fall asleep among the olives and the lofty plane-trees. But
+suddenly there is a sound as of a cry of anguish, short and strident; it is
+the despairing lamentation of the cicada, surprised in repose by the green
+grasshopper, that ardent hunter of the night, which leaps upon the cicada,
+seizes it by the flank, and devours the contents of the stomach. After the
+orgy of music comes night and assassination.
+
+Such is the gloomy epic which goes forward among the flowers, amidst the
+foliage, under the shadowy boughs, and on the dusty fallows. Such are the
+sights that nature offers amid the profound peace of the fields, behind the
+flowering of the sudden spring-tide and the splendours of the summer. These
+murders, these assassinations are committed in a mute and silent world, but
+"the ear of the mind" seems to hear
+
+"A tiger's rage and cries as of a lion
+Roaring remotely through this pigmy world."
+
+Was it to these thrilling revelations that Victor Hugo intended to apply
+these so wonderfully appropriate lines? Was it he who bestowed upon Fabre,
+according to a poetic tradition, the name of "the Homer of the insects,"
+which fits him so marvellously well?
+
+It is possible, although Fabre himself can cite no evidence to support
+these suggestions; but let us respect the legend, simply because it is
+charming, and because it adds an exact and picturesque touch to the
+portrait of Fabre.
+
+In this drama of a myriad scenes, in which the little actors in their
+rustic stage play each in his turn their parts at the mercy of occasion and
+the hazard of encounter, the humblest creatures are personages of
+importance.
+
+Like the human comedy, this also has its characters privileged by birth,
+clothed in purple, dazzling with embroidery, "adorned with lofty plumes,"
+who strut pretentiously; "its idle rich," covered with robes of gold of
+rustling splendour, who display their diamonds, their topazes and their
+sapphires; who gleam with fire and shine like mirrors, magnificent of mien;
+but their brains are "dense, heavy, inept, without imagination, without
+ingenuity, deprived of all common sense, knowing no other anxiety than to
+drink in the sunlight at the heart of a rose or to sleep off their draughts
+in the shadow of a leaf.
+
+Those who labour, on the contrary, do not attract the eye, and the most
+obscure are often the most interesting. Necessitous poverty has educated
+and formed them, has excited in them "feats of invention," unsuspected
+talents, original industries; a thousand curious and unexpected callings,
+and no subject of poetry equals in interest the detailed history of one of
+these tiny creatures, by which we pass without observing them, amid the
+stones, the brambles, and the dead leaves. It is these above all that add
+an original and epic note to the vast symphony of the world.
+
+But death also has its poetry. Its shadowy domains hold lessons no less
+magnificent, and the most putrid carrion is to Fabre a "tabernacle" in
+which a divine comedy is enacted.
+
+The ant, that "ardent filibuster, comes first, and commences to dissect it
+piecemeal."
+
+The Necrophori "exhaling the odour of musk, and bearing red pompons at the
+end of their antennae," are "transcendent alchemists."
+
+The Sarcophagi, or grey flesh flies, "with red bloodshot eyes, and the
+stony gaze of a knacker"; the Saprinidae, "with bodies of polished ebony
+like pearls of jet"; the Silpha aplata, with large and sombre wing-cases in
+mourning; the shiny slow-trotting Horn-beetle; the Dermestes, "powdered
+with snow beneath the stomach"; the slender Staphylinus; the whole fauna of
+the corpse, the whole horde of artisans of death, "intoxicating themselves
+with purulence, probing, excavating, mangling, dissecting, transmuting, and
+stamping out infection."
+
+Fabre gives a curious exposition of "that strange art" by which the grub of
+the grey bot-fly, the vulgar maggot, by means of a subtle pepsine,
+disintegrates and liquefies solid matter; and it is because this singular
+solvent has no effect upon the epidermis that the fly, in its wisdom,
+chooses by preference the mucous membranes, the corner of the eye, the
+entrance of the nostrils, the borders of the lips, the live flesh of
+wounds, there to deposit its eggs.
+
+With what penetration this original mind has analysed "the operation of the
+crucible in which all things are fused that they may recommence" and has
+expounded the marvellous lesson which is revealed by decomposition and
+putridity!
+
+
+CHAPTER 14. PARALLEL LIVES.
+
+We have now seen what entomology becomes in the hands of the admirable
+Fabre. The vast poem of creation has never had a more familiar and luminous
+interpreter, and you will nowhere find other work like his.
+
+How far he outstrips Buffon and his descriptions of animals--so general, so
+vague, so impersonal--his records unreliable and his entire erudition of a
+second-hand quality!
+
+It is with Réaumur that we are first of all tempted to compare him; and
+some have chosen to see in him only one who has continued Réaumur's work.
+In reality he has eagerly read Réaumur, although at heart he does not
+really enjoy his writings; he has drunk from this fruitful source, but he
+owes him no part of his own rich harvest.
+
+But there are many affinities between them; they have many traits in
+common, despite the points of difference between them.
+
+The illustrious son of Rochelle was born, like Fabre, with a love of all
+natural things, and before attacking the myriad problems of physics and
+natural history, wherein he was to shine by so many curious discoveries, he
+also had prepared himself by a profound study of mathematics.
+
+Luckier than Fabre, however, Réaumur enjoyed not only the advantages of
+birth, but all the material conditions necessary to his ardent intellectual
+activity. Fortune overwhelmed her favourite with gifts, and played no small
+part in his glory by enabling him, from an early age, to profit by his
+leisure and to give a free rein to his ruling passions. He was no less
+modest than the sage of Sérignan; self-effacing before others, says one of
+his biographers, so that they were never made to feel his superiority.
+(14/1.)
+
+In the midst of the beautiful and spacious gardens at the end of the
+Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where he finally made his home, he also contrived
+to create for himself a Harmas after his own heart.
+
+It was there that in the as yet virgin domain of entomology he unravelled
+the riddle of the marvellous republic of the bees, and was able to expound
+and interpret a large number of those tiny lives which every one had
+hitherto despised, and which indeed they continued to despise until the
+days of Fabre, or at least regarded as absolutely unimportant. He was the
+first to venture to suspect their connection with much "that most nearly
+concerns us," or to point out "all the singular conclusions" which may be
+drawn therefrom. (14/2.)
+
+How many details he has enshrined in his interesting "Memoirs," and how
+many facts we may glean from this great master! He, like Fabre, had the
+gift of charming a great number of his contemporaries. Tremblay, Bonnet,
+and de Geer owed their vocations to Réaumur, not to speak of Huber, whose
+genius he inspired.
+
+A physicist before all, and accustomed to delicate and meticulous though
+comparatively simple tasks, he had admirably foreseen the extraordinary
+complication of these inquiries; so much so that, with the modesty of the
+true scientist that he was, he regarded his own studies, even the most
+substantial, as mere indications, intended to point the way to those that
+followed him.
+
+As methodical, in short, as the author of the "Souvenirs," the scrupulous
+Réaumur wrote nothing that he himself had not proved or verified with the
+greatest care; and we may be sure that all that he records of his personal
+and immediate observations he has really seen with his own eyes.
+
+In the wilderness of error he had, like Fabre, an infallible compass in his
+extraordinary common sense; and, equally skilled in extracting from the
+false the little particle of truth which it often contains, he was no less
+fond of listening at the gate of legends, of tracing the source of
+traditions; rightly considering that before deriding them as old-wives'
+tales we should first probe in all directions into their origin and
+foundation. (14/3.)
+
+He was also tempted to experiment, and he well knew that in such problems
+as those he attacked observation alone is often powerless to reveal
+anything. It is enough to recall here one of the most promising and
+unexpected of the discoveries which resulted from his experiments. Réaumur
+was the first to conceive the ingenious idea of retarding the hatching of
+insects' eggs by exposing them to cold, thus anticipating the application
+of cold to animal life and the discoveries of Charles Tellier, whose more
+illustrious forerunner he was; at the same time he discovered the secret of
+prolonging, in a similar fashion, the larval existence of chrysalids during
+a space of time infinitely superior to that of their normal cycle; and what
+is more, he succeeded in making them live a lethargic life for years and
+even for a long term of years, thus repeating at will the miracle of the
+Seven Sleepers. (14/4.)
+
+Too much occupied, however, with the smaller aspect of things, he had not
+the art of forcing Nature to speak, and in the province of psychical
+aptitudes he was barely able to rise above the facts.
+
+As he was powerless to enter into real communion with the tiny creatures
+which he observed, although his observations were conducted with religious
+admiration; as he saw always only the outside of things, like a physicist
+rather than a poet or psychologist, he contented himself with noting the
+functioning of their organs, their methods of work, their properties, and
+the changes which they undergo; he did not interpret their actions. The
+mystery of the life which quivers within and around them eludes him. This
+is why his books are such dry reading. He is like a bright garden full of
+rare plants; but it is a monotonous garden, without life or art, without
+distant vistas or wide perspectives. His works are somewhat diffuse and
+full of repetitions; entire monographs, almost whole volumes, are devoted
+to describing the emerging of a butterfly; but they form part of the
+library of the curious lover of nature; they are consulted with interest,
+and will always be referred to, but it cannot be said that they are read.
+
+After Réaumur, according to the dictum of the great Latreille, entomology
+was confined to a wearisome and interminable nomenclature, and if we except
+the Hubers, two unparalleled observers, although limited and circumscribed,
+the only writer who filled the interregnum between Réaumur and Fabre was
+Léon Dufour.
+
+In the quiet little town whither he went to succeed his father, this
+military surgeon, turned country doctor, lived a busy and useful life.
+
+While occupied with his humble patients, whom he preferred to regard merely
+as an interesting clinic, and while keeping the daily record of his medical
+observations, he felt irresistibly drawn "to ferret in all the holes and
+corners of the soil, to turn over every stone, large or small; to shrink
+from no fatigue, no difficulty; to scale the highest peaks, the steepest
+cliffs, to brave a thousand dangers, in order to discover an insect or a
+plant. (14/5.)
+
+A disciple of Latreille, he shone above all as an impassioned descriptive
+writer.
+
+No one was more skilled in determining a species, in dissecting the head of
+a fly or the entrails of a grub, and no spectacle in the world was for him
+so fascinating as the triple life of the insect; those magical
+metamorphoses, which he justly considered as one of the most astonishing
+phenomena in creation. (14/6.)
+
+He saw further than Réaumur, and burned with the same fire as Fabre, for he
+also had the makings of a great poet. His curiosity had assembled enormous
+collections, but he considered, as Fabre considered, that collecting is
+"only the barren contemplation of a vast ossuary which speaks only to the
+eyes, and not to the mind or imagination," and that the true history of
+insects should be that of their habits, their industries, their battles,
+their loves, and their private and social life; that one must "search
+everywhere, on the ground, under the soil, in the waters, in the air, under
+the bark of trees, in the depth of the woods, in the sands of the desert,
+and even on and in the bodies of animals."
+
+Was not this in reality the ambitious programme which Fabre was later to
+propose to himself when he entered into his Harmas and founded his living
+laboratory of entomology; he also having set himself as his exclusive
+object the study of "the insects, the habits of life, the labours, the
+struggles and the propagation of this little world, which agriculture and
+philosophy should closely consider"? (14/7.)
+
+Dufour also had admirably grasped the place of the insect in the general
+harmony of the universe, and he clearly perceived that parasitism, that
+imbrication of mutually usurping lives, is "a law of equilibration, whose
+object is to set a limit to the excessive multiplication of individuals of
+the same type," that the parasites are predestined to an imprescriptible
+mission, and that this mysterious law "defies all explanation."
+
+On the other hand, he did not become very intimate with these tiny peoples;
+his attention was dispersed over too many points; perhaps he was
+fundamentally incapable of concentrating himself for a long period upon a
+circumscribed object; perhaps he lacked that first condition of genius,
+patience, so essential to such researches: although he enriched science by
+an infinite multitude of precious facts and has recorded a quantity of
+details concerning the habits of insects, he did not succeed in
+representing any one of these innumerable little minds. He had an intense
+feeling for nature, but he was not able to interpret it, and his immense
+volume of work, scattered through nearly three hundred monographs, remains
+ineffective.
+
+Let us compare with his work the vast epic of the "Souvenirs." We become
+familiar with the whole life of the least insect, and all its unending
+related circumstances; we obtain sudden glimpses of insight into our own
+organization, with its abysses and its lacunae, and also into those rich
+provinces or faculties which we are only beginning to suspect in the depths
+of our unconscious activity.
+
+In the evening twilight, after the vast andante of the cicadae is hushed,
+at the hour when the shining glow-worms "light their blue fires," and the
+"pale Italian cricket, delirious with its nocturnal madness, chirrups among
+the rosemary thickets," while in the distance sounds the melodious tinkle
+of the bell-ringer frogs, replying from one hiding-place to another, the
+old master shows us that profound and mysterious magic with which matter is
+endowed by the faintest glimmer of life.
+
+He shows us the intimate connection of things, the universal harmony which
+so intimately allies all creatures; and he shows us also that everywhere
+and all around us, in the smallest object, poetry exists like a hidden
+flame, if only we know how to seek it.
+
+And in revealing so many marvellous energies in even the lowest creatures,
+he helps us to divine the infinity of phenomena still unguessed-at, which
+the subtlety of the unknowable force which thrills through the whole
+universe hides from us under the most trivial appearances.
+
+For he has not told everything; this incommensurable region, which had
+hitherto remained unworked, is far from being exhausted.
+
+How many unknown and hidden things are still left to be gleaned! There will
+be a harvest for all. Remember that "even the humblest species either has
+no history, or the little that has been written concerning it calls for
+serious revision" (14/8.); that a single bush, such as the bramble,
+suffices to rear more than fifty species of insects, and that each species,
+according to the just observation of Réaumur, "has its habits, its tricks
+of cunning, its customs, its industries, its art, its architecture, its
+different instincts, and its individual genius."
+
+What a stupendous alphabet to decipher, of which we have as yet only
+commenced to read the first few letters! When we are able to read it almost
+entirely, when observers are more numerous and have concerted their
+efforts, mutually illuminating, completing and correcting one another,
+then, and then only, we shall succeed, if not in resolving some of those
+high problems which have never ceased to interest mankind, at least in
+seizing some reflected knowledge of ourselves, and in seeing a little
+farther into the kingdom of the mind.
+
+
+CHAPTER 15. THE EVENINGS AT SÉRIGNAN.
+
+But it will doubtless be long before a new Fabre will resume, with the same
+heroic ardour, the life of solitary labour, varied only by a few austere
+recreations.
+
+Rising at six o'clock, he would first of all pace the tiles of his kitchen,
+breakfast in hand; so imperious in him was the need of action, if his mind
+was to work successfully, that even at this moment of morning meditation
+his body must already be in movement. Then, after many turns among the
+bushes of the enclosure, all irised with drops of dew which were already
+evaporating, he went straight to his cell: that is, to the silence of his
+laboratory.
+
+There, in unsociable silence, invisible to all, he worked hard and steadily
+until noon; pursuing an observation or carrying out some experiment, or
+recording what he saw or what he had seen the day before, or re-drafting
+his records in their final form.
+
+How many who have come hither to knock upon the door in these morning
+hours, or to ring at the little gate, silent as the tomb, which gives upon
+the private path frequented only by foot-passengers on their way to the
+fields, have undertaken a fruitless journey! But without such discipline
+would it have been possible to accomplish such a task as his?
+
+At last he would leave his workroom; jaded, exhausted by the excessive
+intensity of his work, "face pale and features drawn." (15/1.)
+
+Now he is "at leisure: the half-day is over" (15/2.); and he can satisfy
+his immense need not of repose, but of relaxation and distraction in less
+severe occupations; for he is never at any time nor anywhere inactive;
+incessantly making notes, with little stumps of pencil which he carries
+about in his pockets, and on the first scrap of paper that comes to hand,
+of all that passes through his mind. Those eternal afternoons, which
+usually, in the depth of the French provinces, prove so dull and wearisome,
+seem short enough to him. Now he will halt before his plants, now stoop to
+the ground, the better to observe a passing insect; always in search of
+some fresh subject of study; or now bending over his microscope. (15/3.)
+Then he undertakes, for his later-born children at Sérignan, the duties
+which he formerly performed for the elder family at Orange: he teaches them
+himself; he has much to do with them, for their sake and for his own as
+well, for he is jealous of possessing them, and he regrets parting with
+them. They too have their tasks arranged in advance.
+
+They are his assistants, his appointed collaborators, who keep and relieve
+guard, undertaking, in his absence, some observation already in hand, so
+that no detail may be lost, no incident of the story that unrolls itself
+sometimes with exasperating slowness beneath the bell-covers of the
+laboratory or on some bush in the garden. He inspires the whole household
+with the fire of his own genius, and all those about him are almost as
+interested as he.
+
+At home, in the house, always wearing his eternal felt hat, and absorbed in
+meditation, he speaks little, holding that every word should have its
+object, and only employing a term when he has tested its weight and
+meaning. Silence at mealtimes again is a rule that no one of his household
+would infringe. But he unbends his brow when he receives a friend at his
+hospitable table, where but lately his smiling wife would sit, full of
+little attentions for him. (15/4.)
+
+Frugal in all respects, he barely touches the dishes before him; avoiding
+all meats, and saving himself wholly for the fruits; for is not man
+naturally frugivorous, by his teeth, his stomach, and his bowels? Certain
+dishes repel him, for reasons of sentiment rather than through any real
+disgust; such as paté de foie gras, which reminds him too forcibly of the
+so cruelly tortured goose; such cruelty is too high a price to pay for a
+mere greasy mouthful. (15/5.) On the other hand, he drinks wine with
+pleasure, the harsh, rough "wine of the country" of the plains of Sérignan.
+He is also well able to appreciate good things and appetizing cookery; no
+one ever had a finer palate; but he is happiest in seeing others appreciate
+the pleasures of the table. Witness that breakfast worthy of Gargantua,
+which he himself organized in honour of his guests, whom he had invited to
+an excursion over the Ventoux Alp; where he seems expressly to have
+commanded "that all should come in shoals." What a tinkling of bottles,
+what piles of bread! There are green olives "flowing with brine," black
+olives "seasoned with oil," sausages of Arles "with rosy flesh, marbled
+with cubes of fat and whole peppercorns," legs of mutton stuffed with
+garlic "to dull the keen edge of hunger"; chickens "to amuse the molars";
+melons of Cavaillon too, with white pulp, not forgetting those with orange
+pulp, and to crown the feast those little cheeses, so delightfully
+flavoured, peculiar to Mont Ventoux, "spiced with mountain herbs," which
+melt in the mouth. (15/6.)
+
+But his greatest pleasure is his pipe; a briar, which in absence of mind he
+is always allowing to go out, and always relighting.
+
+Respectful of all traditions, he has kept up the observance of old customs;
+no Christmas Eve has ever been passed under the roof of his Harmas without
+the consecrated meats upon the table; the heart of celery, the nougat of
+almonds, the dish of snails, and the savoury-smelling turkey. Then, stuck
+into the Christmas bread (15/7.), the sprigs of holly, the verbouisset, the
+sacred bush whose little starry flowers and coral berries, growing amid
+evergreen leaves, affirm the eternal rebirth of indestructible nature.
+
+At Sérignan Fabre is little known and little appreciated. To tell the
+truth, folk regard him as eccentric; they have often surprised him in the
+country lying on his stomach in the middle of a field, or kneeling on the
+ground, a magnifying glass in hand, observing a fly or some one of those
+insignificant creatures in which no sane person would deign to be
+interested.
+
+How should they know him, since he never goes into the village? When he did
+once venture thither to visit his friend Charrasse, the schoolmaster, his
+appearance was an event of which every one had something to say, so greatly
+did it astonish the inhabitants. (15/8.)
+
+Yet he never hesitates to place his knowledge at the service of all, and
+welcomes with courtesy the rare pilgrims in whom a genuine regard is
+visible, although he is always careful never to make them feel his own
+superiority; but he very quickly dismisses, sometimes a trifle hastily,
+those who are merely indiscreet or importunate; pedantic and ignorant
+persons he judges instantaneously with his piercing eyes; with such people
+he cannot emerge from his slightly gloomy reserve; he shuts himself up like
+the snail, which, annoyed by some displeasing object, retires into its
+shell, and remains silent in their presence.
+
+Professors come to consult him: asking his advice as to their programmes of
+instruction, or begging him to resolve some difficult problem or decide
+some especially vexed question; and his explanations are so simple, so
+clear, so logical that they are astonished at their own lack of
+comprehension and their embarrassment. (15/9.)
+
+But there are few who venture within the walls of that enclosure, which
+seems to shut out all the temptations of the outer world; the only intimate
+visitors to the Harmas are the village schoolmaster--first Laurent, then
+Louis Charrasse (15/10.), and later Jullian--and a blind man, Marius.
+
+This latter lost his sight at the age of twenty. Then, to earn a living, he
+began to make and repair chairs, and in his misfortune, although blind and
+extremely poor, he kept a calm and contented mind.
+
+Fabre had discovered the sage and the blind man on his arrival at Sérignan,
+and also Favier (15/11.), "that other native, whose jovial spirit was so
+prompt to respond, and who helped to dig up the Harmas; to set up the
+planks and tiles of the little kitchen-garden; a rude task, since this
+scrap of uncultivated ground was then but a terrible desert of pebbles." To
+Favier fell the care of the flowers, for the new owner was a great lover of
+flowers. Potted plants, sometimes of rare species, were already, as to-day,
+crowded in rows upon the terrace before the house, where all the summer
+they formed a sort of vestibule in the open air, on either side of the
+entrance; and these Fabre never ceased to watch over with constant and
+meticulous care. Both spoke the same language, and the words they exchanged
+were born of a like philosophy; for Favier also loved nature in his own
+way, and at heart was an artist; and when, after the day's work, sitting
+"on the high stone of the kitchen hearth, where round logs of green oak
+were blazing," he would evoke, in his picturesque and figurative language,
+the memories of an old campaigner, he charmed all the household and the
+evening seemed to pass with strange rapidity.
+
+When this precious servant and boon companion had disappeared, after two
+years of digging, sowing, weeding, and hoeing, all was ready; the frame was
+completed and the work could be commenced. It was then that Marius became
+the master's appointed collaborator, and it is he who now constructs his
+apparatus, his experimental cages; stuffs his birds, helps to ransack the
+soil, and shades him with an umbrella while he watches under the burning
+sun. Marius cannot see, but so intimate is his communion with his master,
+so keen his enthusiasm for all that Fabre does, that he follows in his
+mind's eye, and as though he could actually see them, all the doings at
+which he assists, and whose inward reflection lights up his wondering
+countenance.
+
+Marius was not only rich in feeling and the gift of inner vision; he had
+also a marvellously correct ear. He was a member of the "Fanfare" of
+Sérignan, in which he played the big drum, and there was no one like him
+for keeping perfect time and for bringing out the clash of the cymbals.
+
+Charrasse was no less fervent a disciple; he worshipped science and all
+beautiful things; and he could even conceive a noble passion for his
+exhausting trade of school-teaching.
+
+Like Marius, he ate "a bitter bread"; and Fabre would get on with them all
+the better in that they, like himself, had lived a difficult life. "Man is
+like the medlar," he liked to tell them; "he is worth nothing until he has
+ripened a long time in the attic, on the straw."
+
+"L'homme est comme la nèfle, il n'est rien qui vaille
+S'il n'a mûri longtemps, au grenier, sur la paille."
+
+These humble companions afforded him the simple conversation which he likes
+so well; so natural, and so full of sympathy and common sense. They
+customarily spent Thursday and Sunday afternoons at the Harmas; but these
+beloved disciples might call at any hour; the master always welcomed them,
+even in the morning, even when he was entirely absorbed in his work and
+could not bear any one about him. They were his circle, his academy; he
+would read them the last chapter written in the morning; he shared his
+latest discoveries with them; he did not fear to ask advice of their
+"fertile ignorance." (15/12.)
+
+Charrasse was a "Félibre," versed in all the secrets of the Provençal
+idiom, of which he knew all the popular terms, the typical expressions and
+turns of speech; and Fabre loved to consult him, to read some charming
+verses which he had just discovered, or to recite some delightful rustic
+poem with which he had just been inspired; for in such occupations he found
+one of his favourite relaxations, giving free vent to his fancy, a loose
+rein to the poet that dwells within him. These poems the piety of his
+brother has preserved in the collection entitled "Oubreto." It is at such a
+moment that one should see his black eyes, full of fire; his power of
+mimicry and expression, his impassioned features, lit up by inspiration,
+truly idealized, almost transfigured, are at such times a thing to be
+remembered.
+
+Sometimes, again, in the shadow of the planes, on summer afternoons, when
+the cigales were falling silent; or in the winter, before the blazing
+fireplace, in that dining-room on the ground floor in which he welcomed his
+visitors; when out of doors the mistral was roaring and raging, or the rain
+clattering on the panes, the little circle was enlarged by certain new-
+comers, his nephews, nieces, a few intimates, of whom, a little later, I
+myself was often one. At such times his humour and imagination were given
+full play, and it was truly a rare pleasure to sit there, sipping a glass
+of mulled wine, during those delightful and earnest hours; to taste the
+charm of his smiling philosophy, his picturesque conversation, full of
+exact ideas, all the more profound in that they were founded on experience
+and pointed or adorned by proverbs, adages, and anecdotes. Thanks to the
+daily reading of the "Temps," which one of his friends regularly sends him,
+Fabre is in touch with all the ideas of the day, and expresses his judgment
+of them; for example, he does not conceal his scepticism with regard to
+certain modern inventions, such as the aeroplane, whose novelty rather
+disturbs his mind, and whose practical bearing seems to him to be on the
+whole somewhat limited.
+
+Thus even the most recent incidents find their way into the solitude of the
+Harmas and help to sustain the conversation.
+
+"The first time we resume our Sérignan evenings," he wrote to his nephew on
+the morrow of one of these intimate gatherings, "we will have a little chat
+about your Justinian, whom the recent drama of "Théodora" has just made the
+fashion. Do you know the history of that terrible hussy and her stupid
+husband? Perhaps not entirely; it is a treat I am keeping for you."
+(15/13.)
+
+The only subject which is hardly ever mentioned during these evenings at
+Sérignan is politics, although Fabre, strange as it may seem, was one year
+appointed to sit on the municipal council.
+
+The son of peasants, who has emerged from the people yet has always
+remained a peasant, has too keen a sense of injustice not to be a democrat;
+and how many young men has he not taught to emancipate themselves by
+knowledge? But above all he is proud of being a Frenchman; his mind, so
+lucid, so logical, which has never gone abroad in search of its own
+inspirations, and has never been influenced by any but those old French
+masters, François Dufour and Réaumur, and the old French classics, has
+always felt an instinctive repugnance, which it has never been able to
+overcome, for all those ideas which some are surreptitiously seeking to put
+forward in our midst in favour of some foreign trade-mark.
+
+Although his visit to the court of Napoleon III left him with a rather
+sympathetic idea of the Emperor, whose gentle, dreamy appearance he still
+likes to recall, he detested the Empire and the "brigand's trick" which
+established it.
+
+On the day of the proclamation of the Republic he was seen in the streets
+of Avignon in company with some of his pupils. He was agreeably surprised
+at the turn events had taken, and delighted by the unforeseen result of the
+war.
+
+A spirit as proud and independent as his was naturally the enemy of any
+species of servitude. State socialism of the equalitarian and communistic
+kind was to him no less horrifying. Was not Nature at hand, always to
+remind him of her eternal lessons?
+
+"Equality, a magnificent political label, but scarcely more! Where is it,
+this equality? In our societies shall we find even two persons exactly
+equal in vigour, health, intelligence, capacity for work, foresight, and so
+many other gifts which are the great factors of prosperity?...A single note
+does not make a harmony: we must have dissimilar notes; discords even,
+which, by their harshness, give value to the concords; human societies are
+harmonious only thus, by the concourse of dissimilarities." (15/14.)
+
+And what a puerile Utopia, what a disappointing illusion is that of
+communism! Let us see under what conditions, at the price of what
+sacrifices, nature here and there realizes it.
+
+Among the bees "twenty thousand renounce maternity and devote themselves to
+celibacy to raise the prodigious family of a single mother."
+
+Among the ants, the wasps, the termites "thousands and thousands remain
+incomplete and become humble auxiliaries of a few who are sexually gifted."
+
+Would you by chance reduce man to the life of the Processional
+caterpillars, content to nibble the pine-needles among which they live, and
+which, satisfied to march continually along the same tracks, find within
+reach an abundant, easy, and idle subsistence? All have the same size, the
+same strength, the same aptitudes. No initiative. "What one does the others
+do, with equal zeal, neither better nor worse." On the other hand, there is
+"no sex, no love." And what would be a society in which there was no work
+done for pleasure and from which love and the family were banished? What
+would be the effect upon its progress, its welfare, its happiness? Would
+not all that make the charm of life disappear for good? However imperfect
+our present society may be, however mysterious its destinies, it is not in
+socialism that Fabre foresees the perfection of future humanity, for to him
+the true humanity does not as yet exist; it is making its way, it is slowly
+progressing, and in this evolution he wishes with all his heart to believe.
+Modern humanity is as yet only a shapeless grimacing caricature, and its
+life is like a play written by madmen and played by drunken actors;
+according to those profound words of the great poet, with which his mind is
+in some sort imbued; which he often repeats, and which he has transcribed
+at the head of one of his last records as an epigraph and a constant
+reminder.
+
+And you who groan over the distressing problem of depopulation, lend an ear
+to the lesson of the Copris, "which trebles its customary batch of
+offspring in times of abundance, and in times of dearth imitates the
+artisan of the city who has only just enough to live on, or the bourgeois,
+whose numerous wants are more and more costly to satisfy, limiting the
+number of its offspring lest they should go in want, often reducing the
+number of its children to a single one." (15/15.)
+
+Instead of running after so many false appearances and false pleasures,
+learn to return to simpler tastes, to more rustic manners; free yourselves
+from a mass of factitious needs; steep yourself anew in the antique
+sobriety, whose desires were sager; return to the fields, the source of
+abundance, and the earth, the eternal foster-mother!
+
+And in this appeal to return to nature, which perhaps since the time of
+Rousseau has never been worded so eloquently, Fabre has in view if not the
+strong, the predestined, who are called elsewhere, and who are actuated by
+the sense of great tasks to be performed, at least all those of rural
+origin, all those for whom the love of the family, the daily task, and a
+peaceful heart are really the great things of life, the things that count,
+the things that suffice.
+
+He himself, although he was one of the strong, did not care to break any of
+the ties that bound him to his origins. Like the Osmia, "which retains a
+tenacious memory of its home," the beloved village of his childhood has
+never been effaced from his memory, and for a long time the desire to leave
+his bones there haunted him. His mind often returned to it; he thought that
+there, better than anywhere else, he would find peace; that it would please
+him to wander among the rocks, the trees, the stones which he had so loved,
+in the old days, and that all these things would recognize him too.
+
+One day, however, when I was begging him to make up his mind on this point-
+-it was one of those peaceful evenings which are troubled under the plane-
+trees only by the tinkling of the fountain--he confided to me that his
+beloved Sérignan had at last, in his secret preferences, obliterated the
+old longing. As he advanced in life, in fact, although he never forgot his
+rude natal countryside, he felt that new links were daily binding him more
+closely to those heaths and mountains on which his heart had been so often
+thrilled with the intense joy of discovery, and that it was indeed in this
+soil, to him so full of delight, amid its beautiful hymenoptera and
+scarabaei, that he would wish to be buried.
+
+Fabre is by no means the misanthrope that some have chosen to think him. He
+delights in the society of women, and knows how to welcome them gracefully;
+and more than any one he is sensitive to the pleasant and stimulating
+impressions produced by the conversation of cultivated people.
+
+He is no less fond of the arts, provided he finds in them a sincere
+interpretation of life. This is why the theatre, with its false values, its
+tinsel and affectation, has to him seemed a gross deformation of the
+reality, ever since the day when at Ajaccio he attended a performance of
+"Norma," in which the moon was represented by a round transparent disc, lit
+from behind by a lantern hanging at the end of a string, whose oscillation
+revealed by turns first the luminary and then the transparency. This was
+enough to disgust him for ever with the theatre and the opera, whose
+motionless choruses, contrasting with the sometimes frantic movement of the
+music, left him with a memory of an insane and illogical performance.
+
+Nevertheless, he adored music, of which he knew something, having learned
+it, as he learned his drawing, without a master; but he preferred the naive
+songs of the country, or the melody of a flute; to the most scholarly
+concert-music. (15/16.) In the intimacy of the modest chamber which serves
+as the family salon, with its few shabby and old-fashioned pieces of
+furniture, he plays on an indifferent harmonium little airs of his own
+composition, the subjects of which were at first suggested by his own
+poetry. Like Rollinat, Fabre rightly considers that music should complete,
+accentuate, and release that which poetry has perforce left incomplete or
+indefinite. This is why he makes the bise laugh and sing and roar; why he
+imitates the organ-tones of the wind in the pines, and seeks to reproduce
+some of the innumerable rhythms of nature; the frenzy of the lizard, the
+wriggling of the stickle-back, the jumping gait of the frog, the shrill hum
+of the mosquito, the complaint of the cricket, the moving of the Scarabaei,
+and the flight of the Libellulae.
+
+Too busy by day to find time for much reading, it was at night that he
+would shut himself up. Retiring early to his little chamber, with bare
+walls and bare tile floor, and a window opening to the garden, he would lie
+on his low bed, with curtains of green serge, and would often read far into
+the night.
+
+This philosopher, to whose books the philosophers of the future will resort
+for new theories and original ideas, refuses to have any commerce with
+other philosophers, disdaining their systems and preferring to go straight
+to the facts. Even when he took up Darwin's "Origin of Species" he did
+little more than open the book; so wearisome and uninteresting, he told me,
+did he find the reading of it. On the other hand, he is full of the ancient
+philosophers, and as he did not read them very extensively in his youth and
+middle age, he has returned to them finally with love and predilection for
+"these good old books." Unlike many thinkers of the day, he is persuaded
+that we cannot with impunity dispense with classic studies; and he rightly
+considers that science and the humanities are not rivals, but allies. Above
+all he has a particular affection for Virgil; one may say that he is
+steeped in his poetry; and he knows La Fontaine by heart. The style of the
+latter is curiously like his own, and Fabre owns himself as his disciple;
+certainly La Fontaine's is the most active influence which his work
+reveals. He has a profound acquaintance with Rabelais, who was always his
+"friend" and who constantly crops up in his conversation and his chance
+remarks.
+
+After these his intellectual foster-parents have been Courrier, Toussenel,
+of whom he is passionately fond, and Rousseau, of whom he cares for little
+but his "Lettres sur la botanique," full of such fresh impressions, in
+which we feel not the literary man but the "craftsman"; he also cherishes
+Michelet; so full of intuition, although he never handled actual things and
+knew nothing of the practice of the sciences; not learned, but overflowing
+with love; his magic pen, his powers of evocation, and his deft brushwork
+delight Fabre, despite the poverty and insufficiency of his fundamental
+facts (15/17.); sometimes Michelet had been his inspiration. The two do
+really resemble one another; Michelet was no less fitted than Fabre to play
+the confidant to Nature, and his heart was of the same mettle.
+
+Since I have spoken of his favourites, let me also speak of his dislikes;
+Racine, whom he cannot bear; Molière, whom he does not really like; Buffon,
+whom he frankly detests for his too fluent prose, his ostentatious style,
+and his vain rhetoric. The only naturalist whom he might really have
+delighted in, had he possessed his works and been able to read them at
+leisure, is Audubon, the enthusiastic painter of the birds of America. In
+him he felt the presence of a mind and a temper almost identical with his
+own.
+
+
+CHAPTER 16. TWILIGHT.
+
+How he has laboured in this solitude! For he considers that he is still far
+from having completed his task. He feels more and more that he has scarcely
+done more than sketch the history of this singular and almost unknown
+world. "The more I go forward," he wrote to his brother in 1903, "the more
+clearly I see that I have struck my pick into an inexhaustible vein, well
+worthy of being exploited." (16/1.)
+
+What studies he has undertaken, what observations he has carried out,
+"almost at the same time, the same moment!" His laboratory is crowded with
+these subjects of experiments. "As though I had a long future before me"--
+he was then just eighty years old--"I continue indefatigably my researches
+into the lives of these little creatures." (16/2.)
+
+Work in solitude seems to him, more and more, the only life possible, and
+he cannot even imagine any other.
+
+"The outer world scarcely tempts me at all; surrounded by my little family,
+it is enough for me to go into the woods from time to time, to listen to
+the fluting of the blackbirds. The very idea of the town disgusts me.
+Henceforth it would be impossible for me to live in the little cage of a
+citizen. Here I am, run wild, and I shall be so till the end." (16/3.)
+
+For him work has become more than ever an organic function, the true
+corollary of life. "Away with repose! For him who would spend his life
+properly there is nothing like work--so long as the machine will operate."
+
+Is this not the great law for all creatures so long as life lasts?
+
+Why should the man who has made a fortune, who has neither children nor
+relations, and who may die tomorrow, continue to work for himself alone, to
+employ his days and his energies in useless labours which will profit
+neither himself nor his kind?
+
+Ask of the Halictus, which, no longer capable of becoming a mother, makes
+herself guardian of a city, in order still to labour within the measure of
+her means.
+
+Ask of the Osmia, the Megachile, the Anthidium, which "with no maternal
+aim, for the sole joy of labour, strive to expend their forces in the
+accomplishment of their vain tasks, until the forces of life fail."
+
+Ask of the bee, which inaction leaves passive and melancholy so that she
+presently dies of weariness; of the Chalicodoma, so eager a worker that she
+will "let herself be crushed under the feet of the passer-by rather than
+abandon her task."
+
+Ask it of all nature, which knows neither halt nor repose, and who,
+according to the profound saying of Goethe "has pronounced her malediction
+upon all that retards or suspends her progress."
+
+Let us then labour, men and beasts, "so that we may sleep in peace; grubs
+and caterpillars in that torpor which prepares them for the transformation
+into moths and butterflies, and ourselves in the supreme slumber which
+dissolves life in order to renew it."
+
+Let us work, in order to nourish within ourselves that divine intuition
+thanks to which we leave our original impress upon nature; let us work, in
+order to bring our humble contribution to the general harmony of things, by
+our painful and meritorious labour; in order that we may associate
+ourselves with God, share in His creation, and embellish and adorn the
+earth and fill it with wonders. (16/4.)
+
+Forward then! always erect, even amid the tombs, to forget our griefs.
+Fabre finds no better consolation to offer his brother, who has lost almost
+in succession his wife and his eldest daughter:
+
+"Do not take it ill if I have not condoled with you on the subject of your
+recent losses. Tried so often by the bitterness of domestic grief, I know
+too well the inanity of such consolations to offer the like to my friends.
+Time alone does a little cicatrize such wounds; and, let us add, work. Let
+us keep on our feet and at work as long as we are able. I know no better
+tonic." (16/5.)
+
+And this exhortation to work, which recurs so often in the first letters of
+his youth, was to be the last word of the last volume which so splendidly
+terminates the incomparable series of his "Souvenirs": "Laboremus."
+
+...
+
+Age has killed neither his courage nor his energies, and he continues to
+work with the same zeal at nearly ninety years of age, and with as much
+eagerness as though he were destined to live for ever.
+
+Although his physical forces are failing him, although his limbs falter,
+his brain remains intact, and is giving us its last fruit in his studies on
+the Cabbage caterpillar and the Glow-worm, which mark a sudden
+rejuvenescence of thought on his part, and the commencement of a new cycle
+of studies, which promise to be of the greatest originality.
+
+To him the animal world has always been full of dizzy surprises, and the
+insects led him "into a new and barely suspected region, which is ALMOST
+ABSURD." (16/6.)
+
+The glow-worms, motionless on their twigs of thyme, light their lamps of an
+evening, in the cool of the beautiful summer nights. What do these fires
+signify? How explain the mystery of this phosphorescence? Why this slow
+combustion, "this species of respiration, more active than in the ordinary
+state"? and what is the oxidizable substance "which gives this white and
+gentle luminosity"? Is it a flame of love like that which lights the Agaric
+of the olive-tree "to celebrate its nuptials and the emission of its
+spores"? But what reason can the larva have for illuminating itself? Why is
+the egg, already enclosed in the secrecy of the ovaries, already luminous?
+
+"The soft light of the Agaric has confounded our ideas of optics; it does
+not refract, it does not form an image when passed through a lens, it does
+not affect ordinary photographic plates." (16/7.)
+
+But here are other miracles:
+
+"Another fungus, the Clathrix, with no trace of phosphorescence, affects
+photographic plates almost as quickly as would a ray of sunlight. The
+Clathrix tenebrosa does what the Agaricus olearius has no power to do."
+(16/8.)
+
+And if the beacon of the Glow-worm recalls the light of the Agaric, the
+Clathrix reminds us of another insect, the Greater Peacock moth.
+
+In the obscurity of a dark chamber this splendid moth emits phantasmal
+radiations, perhaps intermittent and reserved for the season of nuptials,
+signals invisible to us, and perceptible only to those children of the
+night, who may have found this means to communicate one with another, to
+call one another in the darkness, and to speak with one another. (16/9.)
+
+Such are the interesting subjects which only yesterday were occupying this
+great worker; the occult properties, the radiant energies of organic
+matter; of phosphorescence, of light, the living symbols of the great
+universal Eros.
+
+But embarrassment long ago succeeded the ephemeral prosperity which marked
+the first years of his installation at Sérignan, and that period of plenty
+was followed by a period of difficulty, almost of indigence. His class-
+books, which had succeeded marvellously, and from which the royalties had
+quickly attained to nearly 640 pounds sterling, which was the average
+figure for nearly ten years, were then no longer in vogue. Already the
+times had changed. France was in the crisis of the anti-clerical fever.
+Fabre made frequent allusions in his books of a spiritual nature, and many
+primary inspectors could not forgive what they regarded as a blemish.
+
+We must also mention the keen competition caused by the appearance of
+similar books, usually counterfeit, and the more harmful for that; and as
+their adoption depended entirely on the caprice of commissions or the
+choice of interested persons, those of Fabre were gradually ceasing to
+sell.
+
+It was from 1894 especially that their popularity declined so rapidly:
+
+"Despite all my efforts here I am more anxious than ever about the future,"
+he wrote to his publisher on the 27th of January, 1899; "two more of my
+books are about to disappear, a prelude to total shipwreck...I begin to
+despair." (16/10.)
+
+He was not the man to have saved much money; numerous charges were always
+imposing themselves on him, and his first wife, careless of expenditure,
+had been somewhat extravagant.
+
+While his position as teacher deteriorated his "Souvenirs" brought him
+little more than a nominal profit; for to most people he was still
+completely unknown among the potentates who monopolize the attention of the
+crowd.
+
+"Work such as a Réaumur might be proud of will leave me a beggar, that goes
+without saying, but at least I shall have left my grain of sand. I would
+long ago have given up in despair, had I not, to give me courage, the
+continual research after truth in the little world whose historian I have
+become. I am hoarding ideas, and I make shift to live as I can." (16/11.)
+
+Yet his reputation had long ago crossed the frontiers of his country. He
+had been a corresponding member of the Institute of France since 1887, and
+a Petit d'Ormoy prizeman. (16/12.) He was a member of the most celebrated
+foreign academies, and the entomological societies of the chief capitals of
+Europe; but his fame had not passed the walls of these academies and the
+narrow boundaries of the little world of professional biologists and
+philosophers.
+
+Even in these circles, where he was almost exclusively read and
+appreciated, he was little known, and although he was much admired,
+although he was readily given credit for his admirable talent and
+exceptional knowledge, his readers were far from realizing the real powers
+of this world of life which he has called into being. His books are of
+those whose fertilizing virtues remain long hidden, to shine only at a
+distance, when much frothy writing, that has made a sudden noise in its
+time, has fallen into oblivion.
+
+Every two or three years, after much fond polishing, he would open the door
+to yet another volume which was ready to go forth; adding astonishing
+chapters of the history of insects, wonderful fragments of animal
+psychology, but always obtaining only the same circumscribed success; that
+is, exciting no public curiosity, and remaining unperceived in the midst of
+general indifference.
+
+His books interested only a select class, who, it is true, welcomed them
+eagerly, and read them with wonder and delight. If they excited the
+curiosity of a few philosophers, of scientists and inquirers, and here and
+there determined a vocation, still more, perhaps, did they charm writers
+and poets; they consoled Rostand at the end of a serious illness, their
+virtue, in some sort healing, procuring him both moral repose and a
+delightful relaxation. (16/13.) For all these, we may say, he has been one
+of those ten or twelve authors whom one would wish to take with one into a
+long exile, were they reduced to choosing no more before leaving
+civilization for ever.
+
+Yet we must admit that this work has certain undeniable faults. The title,
+in the first place, has nothing alluring about it, and is calculated to
+deter rather than to attract purchasers, by evoking vague ideas of
+repulsive studies, too arduous or too special.
+
+People have no idea of the wonderful fairyland concealed by this unpopular
+title; no conception that these records are intended, not merely for the
+scientist pure and simple, but in reality for every one.
+
+Moreover, the first few volumes were in no way seductive. They boasted not
+the most elementary drawings to help the reader; not the slightest woodcut
+to give a direct idea of the insects described; of their shape, aspect, or
+physiognomy; and a simple sketch, however poor, is often worth more than
+long and laborious descriptions. The first volumes especially, printed
+economically, at the least possible expense, were not outwardly attractive.
+
+It is also true that he had never founded any great hopes on the sale of
+such works.
+
+Very few people are really interested in the lower animals, and Fabre has
+been reproached with wasting his time over "childish histories, unworthy of
+serious attention and unlikely to make money," of wasting in frivolous
+occupations the time which is passing so quickly and can never return. And
+why should he have still further wasted so many precious hours in executing
+minute drawings whose reproduction would have involved an expenditure which
+his publisher would not dare to venture upon, and which he himself could
+not afford?
+
+For this universal inquirer was well fitted for such a task, and all these
+creatures which he had depicted he is capable of representing with brush
+and pencil as faithfully as with his pen. He had it in him to be not only a
+writer, but an excellent draughtsman, and even a great painter. He has
+reproduced in water-colour, with loving care, the decorations of the
+specimens of prehistoric pottery which his excavations have revealed, and
+which he has endeavoured to reconstruct, with all the science of an
+archaeologist. He has displayed the same skill in water-colour in that
+astonishing iconography, in which he has detailed, with marvellous
+accuracy, all the peculiarities of the mycological flora of the olive-
+growing districts. (16/14.)
+
+As for those "paltry figures" insufficient or flagrantly incorrect in
+drawing, with which many people are satisfied, he regards them as
+"intolerable" in his own books, and as absolutely contradicting the
+rigorous accuracy of his text. (16/15.)
+
+Of late years photography and the skill of his son Paul have supplied this
+deficiency. He taught his son to fix the insects on the sensitive plate in
+their true attitudes, in the reality of their most instantaneous gestures.
+However valuable such documents may be, how much we should prefer fine
+drawings, giving relief not only to forms and colours, but also to the most
+characteristic features and the whole living physiognomy of the creature!
+This is the function of art; but the great artist that was in Fabre was
+capable in this domain of rivalling the magical talent of an Audubon.
+
+Such work was relinquished, although so many romances of nature, so much
+dishonest patch-work, won the applause due to success.
+
+Fabre fell more and more into a state bordering on indigence, and finally
+he was quite forgotten. An opponent of evolution, he was out of the
+fashion. The encyclopaedias barely mentioned him. Lamarckians and
+Darwinians, who still made so much noise in the world, ignored him; and no
+one came now to open the gate behind which was ageing, in obscurity and
+deserted, "one of the loftiest and purest geniuses which the civilized
+world at that moment possessed; one of the most learned naturalists and one
+of the most marvellous of poets in the modern and truly legitimate sense of
+the word." (16/16.)
+
+In the department of Vaucluse, where he lived for more than sixty years, in
+Avignon itself, where he had taught for twenty years, the prefect Belleudy,
+who had succeeded in approaching him, was astonished and distressed to find
+"so great a mind so little known"; for even those about him scarcely knew
+his name. (16/17.)
+
+But what matter! The hermit of Sérignan was not discouraged; he was
+disturbed only by the failure of his strength, and the fear that he could
+not much longer exercise that divine faculty which had always consoled him
+for all his sorrows and his disappointments. He could scarcely drag his
+weary limbs across the pebbles of his Harmas; but he bore his eighty-seven
+years with a fine disdain for age and its failings, and although the fire
+of his glance and that whole, eager countenance still expressed his passion
+for the truth, his abrupt gestures, touched with irony, his simple bearing,
+and the extreme modesty of his whole person, spoke sufficiently of his
+profound indifference toward outside contingencies, for the baubles of fame
+and all the stupidities of life.
+
+At a few miles' distance, in another village, that other great peasant,
+Mistral, the singer of Provence, the poet of love and joy, the minstrel of
+rustic labour and antique faiths, was pursuing, amid the homage of his
+apotheosis, the incredible cycle of his splendid existence.
+
+This glory had come to him suddenly; this fame "whose first glances are
+sweeter than the fires of dawn," and which was never to desert him for
+fifty long years.
+
+The wind of favour which had sweetened his youth continued to propel him in
+full sail. He had only to show himself to be at once surrounded,
+felicitated, worshipped; and his mere presence would sway a crowd as the
+black peaks of the high cypresses are swayed by the great wind that bears
+his name. Like Fabre, he had remained faithful to his native soil; that
+soil which the great naturalist had never been able to leave without at
+once longing impatiently to return to its dusty olives where the cigale
+sings, its ilex trees and its thickets; and so he lived far from the
+cities, in a quiet village, with the same horizon of plains and hills that
+were balmy with thyme, leading in his little home an equal life full of
+wisdom and simplicity.
+
+The hermit of Sérignan was the Lucretius of this Provence, which had
+already found its Virgil. With a very different vision, each had the same
+rustic tastes, the same love of the free spaces of wild nature and the
+scenes of rural life. But Mistral, wherever he looked, saw human life as
+happy and simple, through the prism of his creative imagination and the
+optimism of his happy life. Fabre, on the contrary, behind the sombre
+realities which he studied, saw only the ferocious engagement of confused
+living forces, and a frightful tragedy.
+
+Thus their two lives, which were like parallel lines, never meeting, were
+in keeping with their work. And while Mistral, still young and triumphant
+despite the years, was at Maillane overwhelmed with honours and
+consideration, the poor great man of Sérignan lived an obscure and
+inglorious existence.
+
+He had the greatest trouble to live and rear his family, and almost his
+sole income consisted of an uncertain sum of 120 pounds sterling annually,
+which he had for some years received, in the guise of a pension, by the
+generosity of the Institute, as the Gegner prize.
+
+Finally his situation was so precarious that he decided to sell to a museum
+that magnificent collection of water-colour plates in which he had
+represented, life-size and with an astonishing truth of colour, all the
+fungi which grow in Provence.
+
+He wrote to Mistral on the subject, after the visit which the latter paid
+him in the spring of 1908: the only visit of the kind. Before meeting in
+Saint-Estelle, the Paradise of the Félibres, they had wished not to die
+before at least meeting on this earth.
+
+Fabre wrote to mistral the following letter, which I owe to the kindness of
+the great poet:--
+
+"I have never thought of profiting by my humble fungoid water-
+colours...Fate will perhaps decide otherwise.
+
+"In this connection, permit me to make a confession, to which your nobility
+of character encourages me. Until latterly I had lived modestly on the
+product of my school-books. To-day the weathercock has turned to another
+quarter, and my books no longer sell. So here I am, more than ever in the
+grip of that terrible problem of daily bread. If you think, then, that with
+your help and that of your friends, my poor pictures might help me a
+little, I have decided to let them go, but not without bitterness. It is
+like tearing off a piece of my skin, and I still hold to this old skin,
+shabby as it may be; a little for my own sake, much more for my family's,
+and much more again for the sake of my entomological studies, studies which
+I feel obliged to pursue, persuaded that for a long time to come no one
+will care to resume them, so ungrateful is the calling." (16/18.)
+
+At the instigation of the poet the prefect Belleudy took it upon him to
+intercede with the Minister, from whom he finally wrung a grant of 40
+pounds sterling, "in encouragement of the sciences." Finally he ventured to
+reveal the situation to the General Council of Vaucluse, and to require it
+to contribute at least its share, in order to ensure a peaceful and decent
+old age to a man who was not only the greatest celebrity of the department,
+but also one of the highest glories of the nation. He pleaded so well and
+so nobly that the assembly granted Fabre an annual sum of 20 pounds
+sterling, "as the public homage which his compatriots pay to his lofty
+science and HIS EXCESSIVE MODESTY." (16/19.) At the same time, in a
+generous impulse, the Council placed at his disposal all the scientific
+equipment of the departmental laboratory of agricultural analysis, which
+was no longer used; there was indeed talk of suppressing it.
+
+Now that the burden of his days weighed so heavily on him, and his task was
+virtually finished, everything, by the customary irony of things, was
+coming his way simultaneously: not only what was necessary and
+indispensable, but even something that was superfluous.
+
+So one day all these delicate instruments, useless to a biologist who by
+the very nature of his labours had done without them all his life, and had
+never wearied of denying their utility, arrived at Sérignan. He did not
+possess even one modest thermometer; and as for the superb microscope over
+which he so often bent, the only costly instrument in his rustic
+laboratory, it was a precious present which, at the instigation of Duruy,
+Dumas the chemist had given him years before; but a simple lens very often
+sufficed him. "The secrets of life," he somewhere writes, "are to be
+obtained by simple, makeshift, inexpensive means. What did the best results
+of my inquiry into instinct cost me? Only time, and above all, patience."
+
+It was then that a few of his disciples, finally affected by such
+abandonment, decided to celebrate his jubilee, hoping thus to reveal both
+his name and his wonderful books to the crowd that knew nothing of him.
+(16/20.)
+
+It was time; a little longer, and, according to his racy phrase, "the
+violins would have come too late." The old master is daily nearer his
+decline; his sight, once so piercing, is now so obscured that he can barely
+see to sign his name, in a small, tremulous hand, confused and illegible.
+His muscles are so feeble now that he can walk only in short steps, on his
+wife's arm, leaning on a cane; and he would soon be piteously exhausted
+were not some seat available within immediate reach. Very soon now he will
+no longer hope to make the tour of this Harmas, which his feet have trodden
+daily for thirty years. In this failure of the body, all that survives are
+the two sparkling cavities of his eyes and his extraordinary memory.
+
+But he is far from being mournful: he feels only an immense lassitude, and
+an infinite regret that perhaps he will not be able to bring his series of
+"Souvenirs" to the point he had desired; not wishing to die until he has
+pushed his career as far as is in his power; without having worked, on his
+feet, until the very hour when the light of this world is suddenly
+withdrawn, and his eyes open upon the infinite life, beyond the infinite
+worlds of space.
+
+The festival took place on the 3rd of April of the year 1910, and was
+touching in its simplicity.
+
+What an unforgettable day in the life of Fabre! That morning the gate of
+the Harmas was left open to all, and many of the people of Sérignan who
+invaded the garden were able to look for the first time on the face of
+their fellow-citizen, who had so long lived among them, and whom they had
+now, to their astonishment, discovered.
+
+But among the crowd of friends and admirers who, coming from all parts,
+pressed around the little pink house, the most amazed of all was Marius,
+the blind cabinet-maker, unable to contain his intense delight at the
+sudden burning of so much incense before his idol, for to him it had seemed
+that this day of apotheosis would never dawn!
+
+For nothing was certain, although the day of the jubilee had long been
+fixed. In the first place there had been serious defections in the ranks of
+the official personages who were to take part in the ceremony. Then the
+weather was terrible for the time of year; the spring had commenced
+gloomily, a season of floods and catastrophes. But on this morning the rain
+of days had ceased to fall, and suddenly the sun appeared.
+
+Among other compliments and marks of homage the old man was presented with
+a golden plaque, on one side of which Sicard, who stood revealed as a
+master of the burin, had engraved his portrait with rare fidelity. The
+reverse was resplendent with one of the most beautiful syntheses which the
+history of art has known; a surprising allegory, in which the imagination
+of the artist evoked the man of science, the singer of the insects, the
+landscape which had seen the birth of so many little lives, and the village
+amid the olive-trees, in front of the sun-steeped Ventoux.
+
+At this festival, the jubilee of a scientist, the scientists were least
+numerous.
+
+The banquet was given in the large room of a cafe in the midst of Sérignan;
+in order, no doubt, that in this humble life even glory should be modest.
+
+As Fabre could not walk, he was helped into the carriage of ceremony, which
+was sent expressly from Orange, and the little procession, which was
+swelled by the municipal choral society, spurred on by Marius, moved slowly
+off along the sole central street.
+
+It was a great family repast: one of those love-feasts in which all
+communicate in a single thought.
+
+Edmond Perrier brought the naturalist the homage of the Institute, and
+expressed in unaffected terms the just admiration which he himself felt.
+The better to praise him, he gave a summary of his admirable career, and
+his immortal work. At the evocation of this long past of labour Fabre
+regretted his poor vanished joys, "the sole moments of happiness in his
+life."
+
+Moved to tears, by his memories and by the simple and pious homage at last
+rendered to his genius, he wept, and many, seeing him weep, wept with him.
+
+Others spoke in the name of the great anonymous crowd of friends, of all
+those who had found a source of infinite enjoyment in his works. At the
+same time the greatest writers, the greatest poets sent on the same day, at
+the same hour, their salutation or eloquent messages to the "Virgil of the
+insects" (16/21.), to the "good magician who knew the language of the
+myriad little creatures of the fields." (16/22.)
+
+Doubtless he would sooner or later have received full justice; but without
+this circumstance it is permissible to add that the end of his life would
+have passed amidst the completest oblivion, and that he would have taken
+leave of the world without attracting any particular attention. His death
+would have occurred unperceived, and when the little vault of Vaison stone,
+up in the small square enclosure of pebbles which serves as the village
+cemetery, where those he has loved await him, came to be opened for the
+last time, they would hardly have troubled to close it again.
+
+Yet the honours paid him were far from being such as he merited.
+
+Why, at this jubilee of the greatest of the entomologists, was not a single
+appointed representative of entomology present? (16/22.)
+
+The fact is that the majority of those who "amid the living seek only for
+corpses," according to the expression of Bacon, unwilling to see in Fabre
+anything more than an imaginative writer, and being themselves incapable of
+understanding the beautiful and of distinguishing it in the true,
+reproached him, perhaps with more jealousy than conviction, with having
+introduced literature into the domains of science.
+
+Other entomological specialists accuse him of presenting in the guise of
+science discoveries which have been made by others. But in the first place,
+as he has read very little, he certainly did not know all that had been
+done by others; and what matter if he had discovered nothing essential
+concerning this or that insect if the result of his study of it has been to
+impregnate it with something new, or to touch it with the breath of life?
+
+Others, finally, who wished to see with their own eyes the proof of his
+statements, have reproached him with a few errors; but he observed so
+skilfully that these errors, if any have really slipped into his books,
+cannot be very serious.
+
+He was one of the glories of the University, but it failed to add to the
+brilliance of this ceremony, and it is to be regretted that the Government
+could not amid its temporary preoccupations have done with all the
+spontaneity that might have been looked for the one thing which might on
+this memorable date have atoned for its unjust obliviousness. Since Duruy
+had created Fabre a chevalier of the Empire more than forty years had gone
+by, and in this long interval Fabre was absolutely ignored by the
+authorities. While the State daily raises so many commonplace men to the
+highest honours, it was afterwards needful to procure the intervention of
+influential persons, to justify his worth and to prove his deserts, in
+order to obtain his promotion through one degree of rank in that Legion of
+Honour which his eminent services had so long adorned.
+
+This tardy reparation at least had the result of shedding a twilight of
+glory over the evening of his life, and from that day he suddenly appeared
+in his true place and took his rank as a man of the first order. Everybody
+began to read him, and presently no one was willing to seem ignorant of
+him, for more of his "Souvenirs entomologiques" were sold in a few months
+than had been disposed of in more than twenty years. (16/24.)
+
+At last Fabre experienced not only glory and renown, but also popularity.
+This was only justice, for his is essentially a popular genius. Has he not
+striven all his life to place the marvels of science within reach of all?
+And has he not written above all for the children of the people?
+
+So at last people have learned the way to the Harmas; they go thither now
+in crowds, to visit the enclosure and the modest laboratory, as to a
+veritable place of pilgrimage which attracts from afar many fervent
+admirers.
+
+Some, it is true, go thither to see him simply as an object of curiosity;
+but even among these there are those who on returning thence, full of
+enthusiasm for what they have seen, find the flowers of the fields more
+sweet and fragile, and the wild fragrance of the woods and hedges more
+voluptuous, and the green of the trees more tender. They have learnt to
+look at the earth and to "kneel in the grass."
+
+Scientists come to chat with the scientist. Others come to salute the
+primary schoolman, the lay instructor, the great pedagogue whose glory is
+reflected upon all the primary schools of France.
+
+Those who cannot visit him write, telling him of all the pleasure which
+they owe him, thanking him for long and delightful hours passed in the
+reading of his books, expressing the hope that he may yet live many years,
+and still further increase the number of his "Souvenirs."
+
+Some ask him a host of questions relating to entomology or philosophy;
+others ask him for impossible answers to some of the fascinating and
+mysterious problems which he has expounded; women confide in him their
+little private griefs or their intimate sorrows, a naive form of homage;
+but a thousand times more touching than any other, and one that shows how
+profound has been the beneficent influence of his books upon certain
+isolated minds, and what consolation can be derived from science when it
+finds a sufficiently eloquent voice to interpret it.
+
+As he can work no longer, these visits now fill his life, formally so
+occupied; and in the midst of all the sympathy extended to him he is
+sensible, not of the twilight, but of a sunrise; he feels that his work has
+been good, that an infinity of minds are learning through him to regard
+plants and animals with greater affection; and that the consideration of
+men, finally directed upon his work, will not readily exhaust it, for it is
+one of the Bibles of Nature.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES.
+
+NOTES TO INTRODUCTION.
+
+Introduction/1. Letters to his brother, 1898-1900.
+
+Introduction/2. I have made some valuable "finds" here; among other pieces
+cited the fragment on "Playthings," the curious description of the
+"Eclipse," and the poem on "Number" are here published for the first time.
+
+Introduction/3. This negligence in the matter of correspondence is not
+least among the causes which have mitigated against his popularity.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 1.
+
+1/1. "It is a country that has very little charm." To his brother, 18th
+August, 1846.
+
+1/2. "Practicien, homme d'affaires ou de chicane": roughly, "practitioner,
+man of business or law": so his father is described in his birth
+certificate.
+
+1/3. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 2nd series, chapter 4, and 7th series,
+chapter 19.
+
+1/4. Id., 8th series, chapter 8.
+
+1/5. To his brother, 15th August, 1896.
+
+1/6. Id. "As brothers, we are one only; but in virtue of our different
+tastes we are two, and I am amused and interested where you might well be
+bored."
+
+1/7. Frédéric Fabre, like his brother, an ex-scholar of the normal primary
+school of Vaucluse, was first of all teacher at Lapalud (Vaucluse), then
+professor in the communal college of Orange. He was director of the primary
+school attached to the normal school of Avignon, where he voluntarily
+retired from teaching in 1859. He then became, successively, secretary to
+the Chamber of Commerce of Avignon, director of the Vaucluse Docks, and
+finally director of the Crillon Canal, which position he still occupies
+(December, 1912).
+
+1/8. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series, chapter 9.
+
+1/9. Among his innumerable manuscripts I have found a vast number of little
+poems, which date from this period.
+
+1/10. It was then that he gave up his position to his brother Frédéric, who
+had continually followed closely in his steps, and who in turn had just
+obtained the qualification of pupil-teacher and bursar (August, 1842).
+
+1/11. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10 series, chapter 21.
+
+1/12. To his brother, 2nd and 9th of June, 1851.
+
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 2.
+
+2/1. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 1st series, chapter 20, and 9th series,
+chapter 13.
+
+2/2. Id., 6th series, chapter 21.
+
+2/3. To his brother, from Ajaccio, 10th June, 1850.
+
+2/4. Id., id.
+
+2/5. Id., from Carpentras, 15th August, 1846.
+
+2/6. Id., from Ajaccio, 10th June, 1850.
+
+2/7. Id., from Carpentras, 15th August, 1846.
+
+2/8. Id., id.
+
+2/9. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 1st series, chapter 14.
+
+2/10. To his brother, from Carpentras, 3rd September, 1848.
+
+2/11. Id., 8th September, 1848.
+
+2/12. Id., id.
+
+2/13. Id., 3rd September, 1848.
+
+2/14. Id., id.
+
+2/15. Letter to the Rector of the Nîmes Academy, 29th September, 1848.
+
+2/16. To his brother, 29th September, 1848.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 3.
+
+3/1. To his father, from Ajaccio, 14th April, 1850.
+
+3/2. To his brother, from Ajaccio, 1851.
+
+3/3. To his brother, from Ajaccio, 9th June, 1851.
+"I have set to work upon a conchology of Corsica, which I hope soon to
+publish."
+
+3/4. The Helix Raspaillii.
+
+3/5. To his brother, from Ajaccio, 10th June, 1850.
+
+3/6. Id., id.
+
+3/7. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 9th series, chapter 14.
+
+3/8. Number, (Le Nombre--ARITHMOS), poem, Ajaccio, September, 1852.
+
+3/9. To his brother, from Ajaccio, 2nd June, 1851.
+
+3/10. Id., 10th October, 1852, and "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series,
+chapter 21.
+
+3/11. Fr. Mistral, "Mémoires."
+Moquin-Tandon, born at Montpellier, was professor of Natural History at
+Marseilles, at Toulouse, and in Paris.
+
+3/12. To his brother, from Ajaccio, 10th October, 1852.
+
+3/13. Id.
+
+3/14. To his brother, from Carpentras, 3rd December, 1851.
+"Our crossing was atrocious. Never have I seen so terrible a sea, and that
+the packet-boat was not broken up by the force of the waves must have been
+due to the fact that our time had not yet come. On two or three occasions I
+thought my last moment was at hand; I leave you to imagine what a terrible
+experience I had. In ordinary weather the packet by which we travelled
+makes the voyage from Ajaccio to Marseilles in about eighteen hours; it is
+said to be the fastest steamer on the Mediterranean. On this occasion it
+took three days and two nights."
+
+3/15. January, 1853.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 4.
+
+4/1. To his brother, from Avignon, 1st August, 1854.
+"I have arrived at Toulouse, where I have passed the best examination one
+could possibly wish. I have been accepted as licentiate with the most
+flattering compliments, and the expenses of the examination should be
+returned to me. The examination was of a higher level than I had expected."
+
+4/2. To M. -- (of the Institute), from Avignon, 1854.
+(Letter communicated to M. Belleudy, prefect of Vaucluse, by M. Vollon,
+painter.)
+
+4/3. Id.
+
+4/4. To his brother, from Ajaccio, 10th October, 1852.
+
+4/5. Observations concerning the habits of the Cerceris and the cause of
+the long preservation of the coleoptera with which it provisions its
+larvae.--"Annales de Sc. natur.," 4th series, 1855.
+
+4/6. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series, chapter 22.
+
+4/7. "I had only one idea: to free myself, to leave the lycée, where, not
+being a fellow, I was treated as a subordinate. An inspector-general told
+me frankly one day, 'You will never amount to anything if you are not a
+fellow' (agrégé). 'These distinctions disgust me,' I replied."
+(Conversations.)
+
+4/8. To his brother, from Ajaccio, 14th January, 1850.
+
+4/9. Inquiries respecting the tubercles of Himantoglossum hircinum. Thesis
+in Botany, 1855.
+
+4/10. Inquiries respecting the anatomy of the reproductive organs, and the
+developments of the Myriapoda. Thesis in Zoology, 1855.
+
+4/11. Prize for experimental physiology, 1856.
+
+4/12. Letter to Léon Dufour, 1st February, 1857.
+
+4/13. "The Origin of Species," 1857 (?), translated by Barbier, page 15.
+
+4/14. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 1st series, chapter 1, and 5th series,
+chapter 1.
+
+4/15. Id., 1st series, chapter 16.
+
+4/16. Id., 1st series, chapter one.
+
+4/17. Henry Devillario, magistrate at Carpentras, where he performed his
+duties as juge d'instruction until his death. A notable collector and
+distinguished publicist.
+Dr. Bordone, to-day at Frontignan. Vayssières, professor of Zoology in the
+faculty of sciences at Marseilles.
+
+4/18. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 1st series, chapter 13.
+
+4/19. He was subject in his youth to violent headaches, "which sometimes
+developed into a cerebral fever," as well as strange nervous troubles: "A
+few days ago I was attacked, at night, with a sudden nervous illness, of a
+terrifying nature, which I have not as yet been able to identify." To his
+brother, 3rd September, 1848.
+Severe disappointment or annoyance always had a great effect upon him; on
+the occasion of his first marriage he fell into a sort of cataleptic
+condition as a result of the opposition of his parents and relations, who
+sought to oppose it. (Conversations with his brother.)
+
+4/20. "Souvenirs entomologiques" 9th series, chapter 23.
+
+4/21. Id., 10th series, chapter 22.
+
+4/22. Letter to Lèon Dufour, 1st February, 1857.
+"Steps have been taken to obtain for me the post of drawing-master (maître
+des travaux graphiques). If they succeed, thanks to the little talent I
+have for drawing, my salary will reach a reasonable figure, 120 pounds
+sterling, and I can then, by giving up these abominable private lessons,
+cultivate rather more seriously the studies into which you have initiated
+me." Communicated by M. Achard.
+
+4/23. "Souvenirs entomologiques" 10th series, chapter 22.
+
+4/24. Oubreto Prouvençalo. La Cigale et la Fourmi.
+
+4/25. Lavisse. A minister. Victor Duruy.
+
+4/26. Letter to the municipal councillors of Avignon.
+
+4/27. J. Stuart Mill, "Autobiography," chapter 6.
+
+4/28. I have visited this house; nothing, at all events outside, has
+changed in the least.
+
+4/29. Mill collaborated in his "Flore du Vaucluse": "A virtuous man whose
+recent loss we shall all deplore joined his efforts to mine in this
+undertaking." Letter to the Mayor of Avignon, 1st December, 1833,
+communicated by M. Félix Achard.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 5.
+
+5/1. "Chimie agricole."
+
+5/2. "Le Ciel." Lectures et Leçons pour tous.
+
+5/3. "La Terre." Lectures et Leçons pour tous.
+
+5/4. "La Chimie de l'oncle Paul." Lectures courantes pour toutes les
+écoles.
+
+5/5. "Histoire de la bûche."
+
+5/6. "Les jouets. Le Toton" (manuscript).
+The primitive fountain, the "antique appliance" transmitted by inheritance,
+"the invention perhaps of some little unemployed herd-boy," consisted
+originally of three apertures and three straws; two similar apertures on
+one side, with two short straws, which dipped into the water, and a single
+orifice on the other side for the longer straw which delivered the water.
+Happening one day to use only two straws, one on each side, the little
+Fabre perceived that the device worked just as well, and "so, quite
+unconsciously, without thinking of it, I discovered the syphon, the true
+syphon of the physicist." Loco cit.
+
+5/7. "The chemistry course is a great success at home." To his brother,
+from Orange, 1875.
+
+5/8. To his son Émile, 4th November, 1879.
+"The household; discussions as to domestic economy for use in girls'
+schools."
+
+5/9. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 2nd series, chapter 1.
+
+5/10. To the Mayor of Avignon, 1st December, 1873. Communicated by M. Félix
+Achard.
+
+5/11. Letter to his brother, 1875.
+
+5/12. Id.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 6.
+
+6/1. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 2nd series, chapter 1. "L'Harmas."
+
+6/2. Id., 6th series, chapter 5.
+
+6/3. The Lumbricus phosporeus of Dugés. Fabre had already clearly perceived
+that this curious phenomenon of phosphorescence appears at birth, and he
+saw in it a process of oxidation, a species of respiration, especially
+active in certain tissues.
+Letter to Léon Dufour, 1st February, 1857. Communicated by M. Félix Achard.
+
+6/4. To his brother, from Carpentras, 15th August, 1846.
+
+6/5. He died at the age of 96.
+
+6/6. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 1st series, chapter 21.
+
+6/7. To his son Émile, 4th November, 1879.
+
+6/8. To Henry Devillario, 30th March, 1883.
+
+6/9. Id., 17th December, 1888.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 7.
+
+7/1. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 8th series, chapter 12.
+
+7/2. Id., 7th series, chapter 16.
+
+7/3. Id., 1st series, chapter 4.
+
+7/4. Id., 2nd series, chapter 3.
+
+7/5. Id., 6th series, chapter 21.
+
+7/6. Id., 1st series, chapter 19, and 2nd series, chapter 7.
+
+7/7. Id., 7th series, chapter 23.
+
+7/8. Maeterlinck, "The Bee."
+
+7/9. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 7th series, chapter 2.
+
+7/10. Id., 8th series, chapter 22.
+
+7/11. Id., 6th series, chapter 6.
+
+7/12. Id., 9th series, chapter 10.
+
+7/13. Bergson, "l'Evolution créatrice."
+
+7/14. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series, chapter 6.
+
+7/15. "Les Serviteurs" and "Les Auxiliaires."
+
+7/16. François Raspail, born at Carpentras in 1794, was also a professor at
+the college of Carpentras.
+
+7/17. To his brother, 3rd September, 1848.
+The improvement did not last long; the child died finally a short time
+afterwards.
+
+7/18. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series, chapter 21.
+
+7/19. Ed. Perrier. Private letter, 27th October, 1909.
+"He is the finest of all our observers, and all scientists should bow to
+the facts which he excels in discovering."
+
+7/20. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 6th series, chapter 25.
+
+7/21. Id., 10th series, chapter 16.
+
+7/22. Id., 10th series, chapter 20.
+
+7/23. Manuscripts, unpublished observations.
+
+7/24. A common spectacle in Provence, but one which Fabre never wearied of
+seeing.
+
+7/25. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 6th series, chapter 17.
+
+7/26. We know that the great naturalist was far from being charmed by the
+song of the nightingale.
+
+7/27. Manuscripts, unpublished observation. These remarks deal with the
+solar eclipse of 28th May, 1900.
+
+7/28. Among the insects which he has observed there are many which are not
+always sufficiently characterized. "Insectes coléoptères observes aux
+environs d'Avignon." Avignon, pub. Seguin, 1870.
+
+7/29. Coleoptera observed in the neighbourhood of Avignon. A catalogue now
+very scarce, a copy of which I owe to the kindness of Dr. Chobaut, of
+Avignon.
+
+7/30. Nomina si nescis, perit et cognitio rerum.
+
+7/31. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 4th series, chapter 11.
+
+7/32. Id., 9th series, chapter 19.
+
+7/33. Id., 1st series, chapter 9.
+
+7/34. "Jenner's Legend of the isolation of the young Cuckoo in the nest,"
+by Xavier Raspail, "Bull. de la Soc. Zool. de France," 1903.
+
+7/35. "Souvenirs entomologiques" 1st series, passim.
+
+7/36. Id., 4th series, chapter 14.
+
+7/37. Id., 1st series, chapter 7.
+
+7/38. Id., 2nd series, chapter 2.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 8.
+
+8/1. "Souvenirs entomologiques" 1st series, chapter 2.
+
+8/2. Bergson, "l'Evolution créatrice."
+
+8/3. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 2nd series, chapter 4.
+
+8/4. Id., 5th series, chapter 8.
+
+8/5. Id., 9th series, chapter 3.
+
+8/6. Id., 1st series, chapter 22.
+
+8/7. Id., 4th series, chapter 3.
+
+8/8. Id., 4th series, chapter 3.
+
+8/9. Id., 4th and 1st series, chapter 19.
+
+8/10. Id., 9th series, chapter 24.
+
+8/11. Id., 10th series, chapter 5.
+
+8/12. Id., 4th series, chapter 6.
+
+8/13. Id., 9th series, chapter 16.
+
+8/14. Id., 2nd series, chapter 5.
+
+8/15. Id., 5th series, chapter 7.
+
+8/16. Id., 6th series, chapter 8.
+
+8/17. Id., 3rd series, chapters 17, 18, 19 and 20.
+
+8/18. Id., 2nd series, chapter 15.
+
+8/19. Id., 3rd series, chapter 11.
+
+8/20. Emerson.
+
+8/21. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 4th series, chapter 9.
+
+8/22. Unpublished observations.
+
+8/23. "Mireille," 3rd canto.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 9.
+
+9/1. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 8th series, chapter 21.
+
+9/2. "Les Ravageurs," chapter 34, agriculture.
+
+9/3. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series, chapter 12.
+
+9/4. Id., 1st series, chapter 2, and 10th series, chapter 13.
+
+9/5. Id., 2nd series, chapter 17.
+
+9/6. Id., 7th series, chapter 20.
+
+9/7. Id., 2nd series, chapter 4.
+
+9/8. At novitas mundi nec frigora dura ciebat,
+Nec nimios aestus.
+Lucretius, "De Natura rerum."
+
+9/9. In this connection see the excellent introduction written by M. Edmond
+Perrier to serve as preface to the work of M. de Romanes: "l'Intelligence
+des animaux."
+
+9/10. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 8th series, chapter 20.
+
+9/11. To Henry Devillario, 30th March, 1883.
+
+9/12. To Henry Devillario, 12th May, 1883.
+
+9/13. To his brother, 1900.
+
+9/14. Letters to his brother.
+"I am not sulking; far from it...I have no lack of ink and paper; I am too
+careful of them to lack them; but I do lack time...So you still think I am
+sulking because I do not reply! But imagine, my dear and petulant brother,
+that for several weeks I have been pursuing, with unequalled persistence,
+some abominable conic problems proposed at the fellowship examination, and
+once I have mounted my hobby-horse, good-bye to letters, good-bye to
+replies, goodbye to everything." (Carpentras, 27th November, 1848.)
+"You are right, seven times right to storm at me, to grumble at my silence,
+and I admit, in all contrition, that I am the worst correspondent you could
+find. To force myself to write a letter is to place myself on the rack, as
+well you know...But why do you get it into your head, why do you tell me,
+that I disdain you, that I forget you, that I ignore you, you, my best
+friend?...For my silence blame only the multiplicity of tasks, which often
+surpasses, not my courage, but my strength and my time." (Ajaccio, 1st
+June, 1851.)
+
+9/15. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series, chapter 8.
+
+9/16. Id., 9th series, chapter 2.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 10.
+
+10/1. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 1st series, chapter 21.
+
+10/2. Id., 9th series, chapter 2.
+
+10/3. Id., 10th series, chapter 4.
+
+10/4. Montaigne's Essays.
+
+10/5. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 8th series, chapter 17.
+
+10/6. "Les Ravageurs."
+
+10/7. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series, chapter 18, and "Merveilles
+de l'instinct: la Chenille du chou."
+
+10/8. Id., 8th series, chapter 17.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 11.
+
+11/1. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 3rd series, chapter 8.
+
+11/2. Id., 2nd series, chapter 14 et seq.
+
+11/3. Id., 6th series, chapter 9.
+
+11/4. Id., 5th series, chapter 19.
+
+11/5. Tolstoy: "All that the human heart contains of evil should disappear
+at the contact of nature, that most immediate expression of the beautiful
+and the good." ("The Invaders.")
+
+11/6. The "Livre d'histoires" and "Chimie agricole."
+
+11/7. "Oubreto Provençalo. La Bise."
+
+11/8. Id., "Le Semeur."
+
+11/9. Id., "Le Crapaud."
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 12.
+
+12/1. "Oubreto Provençalo. Le Maréchal."
+
+12/2. "Oubreto Provençalo."
+
+12/3. In this connection see the admirable passage in Sainte-Beuve's "Port-
+Royal," Book 2, chapter 14.
+
+12/4. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 4th series, chapter 1.
+
+12/5. Id., 1st series, chapter 17.
+
+12/6. Id., 7th series, chapter 8.
+
+12/7. Id., 7th series, chapter 10.
+
+12/8. Id., 8th series, chapter 8.
+
+12/9. Id., 8th series, chapter 20.
+
+12/10. Id., 6th series, chapter 14.
+
+12/11. Id., 8th series, chapter 18.
+
+12/12. Id., 10th series, chapter 8.
+
+12/13. Id., 10th series, chapter 6.
+
+12/14. Id., 5th series, chapter 22.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 13.
+
+13/1. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 10th series, chapter 17.
+
+13/2. Id., 9th series, chapter 4, "l'Exode des arignées" (the Exodus of the
+Spiders), and chapter 5, "l'Araignée crabe" (the Crab Spider).
+
+13/3. Id., 5th series, chapter 17.
+
+13/4. Id., 3rd series, chapter 8.
+
+13/5. Id., 6th series, chapter 14.
+"Oubreto. Le Grillon," and unpublished verses.
+
+13/6. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 2nd series, chapter 16.
+
+13/7. Id., 9th series, chapter 21.
+
+13/8. "Les Merveilles de l'instinct: le Ver luisant" (Marvels of Instinct:
+the Glow-worm).
+
+13/9. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 2nd series, chapter 12.
+
+13/10. Id., 8th series, chapter 22, and 9th series, chapter 11.
+
+13/11. Id., 5th series, chapter 18.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 14.
+
+14/1. Grandjean de Fouchy: eulogy of Réaumur, in "Recueils de l'Acad.des
+sciences," volume 157 H, page 201, and Preface to the "Lettres inédites de
+Réaumur," by G. Musset.
+
+14/2. "Mémoires," passim, and volume 2, 1st mémoire.
+
+14/3. Id., volume 3, 3rd mémoire.
+
+14/4. Id., volume 2, 1st mémoire.
+Ch. Tellier, "Le Frigorifique" (Refrigeration), story of a modern
+invention, chapter 23; cold applied to the animal kingdom.
+
+14/5. Léon Dufour: "Journal de sa vie."
+Souvenirs and impressions of travel in the Pyrenees to Gavarnie, Héas, the
+"Montagnes maudites," etc. Entomological excursions on the dunes of
+Biscarosse and Arcachon.
+
+14/6. Id., direction of entomological studies.
+
+14/7. "Souvenirs entomologiques" 2nd series, chapter 1: "L'Harmas."
+
+14/8. Id., 5th series, chapter 11.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 15.
+
+15/1. Louis Charrasse, private letter, 20th February, 1912, and "Le Bassin
+du Rhône," March, 1911.
+
+15/2. "Oubreto. Le Crapaud."
+
+15/3. It was only in the afternoon that he devoted himself, when needful,
+to microscopic researches, on account of the better inclination of the
+light.
+
+15/4. He lost it at the end of last spring.
+
+15/5. "Les Serviteurs. Le Canard."
+
+15/6. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 1st series, chapter 13: an ascent of Mont
+Ventoux.
+
+15/7. The name given to Christmas in Provence.
+
+15/8. Louis Charrasse, private letters.
+
+15/9. Id.
+
+15/10. 1888-1892.
+
+15/11. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 2nd series, chapter 2.
+
+15/12. Louis Charrasse, private letter.
+
+15/13. Letter to his nephew, Antonin Fabre, 4th January, 1885.
+
+15/14. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 6th series, chapter 19.
+
+15/15. Id., 6th series, chapter 2.
+
+15/16. Id., 6th series, chapter 11.
+
+15/17. Conversations.
+
+NOTES TO CHAPTER 16.
+
+16/1. Letter to his brother, 4th February, 1900.
+
+16/2. To his brother, 18th July, 1908. At this time the eighth volume of
+his "Souvenirs" had just appeared, and the ninth was in hand.
+
+16/3. Id.
+
+16/4. "Chimie agricole."
+
+16/5. To his brother, 10th October, 1898.
+
+16/6. Private letter, 30th March, 1908.
+
+16/7. Id.
+
+16/8. Id.
+
+16/9. Unpublished experiments.
+
+16/10. To Charles Delagrave, 27th January, 1899.
+
+16/11. To his brother, 4th February, 1900.
+
+16/12. This prize was awarded to Fabre in 1899. The amount of the prize is
+400 pounds sterling. It is one of the chief prizes of the Institute.
+
+16/13. Edmond Rostand. Private letter, 7th April, 1910: "His books have
+been my delight during a very long convalescence."
+
+16/14. This magnificent atlas, the gem of Fabre's collections, comprises
+nearly 700 plates, and a large body of explanatory and descriptive matter.
+
+16/15. To Charles Delagrave, undated.
+
+16/16. Maeterlinck. Private letter, 17th November, 1909.
+"Les 4 Chemins,
+"Grasse (Alpes-Maritimes).
+"You overwhelm me with pleasure and do me the greatest honour in allowing
+my name to be inscribed among those of the committee which proposes to
+celebrate the jubilee of Henri Fabre...Henri Fabre is, indeed, one of the
+chiefest and purest glories that the civilized world at present possesses;
+one of the most learned naturalists and the most wonderful of poets in the
+modern and truly legitimate sense of the word. I cannot tell you how
+delighted I am by the chance you offer me of expressing in this way one of
+the profoundest admirations of my life."
+
+16/17. J. Belleudy, prefect of Vaucluse. Private letter, 29th September,
+1909.
+"It pains me to see so great a mind, so eminent a scientist, such a master
+of French literature, so little known. Two years ago, when the Gegner prize
+was awarded to him, I felt that I must speak of him to certain of those
+about me; and they had hardly heard his name!"
+
+16/18. Letter to Frédéric Mistral, 4th July, 1908.
+
+16/19. Council General of Vaucluse, session of August, 1908. The words of
+the recorder, M. Lacour, mayor of Orange, to-day deputy for Vaucluse, a
+personal friend and ardent admirer of the old master.
+
+16/20. Edmond Rostand. Private letter, 20th November, 1909.
+"I am, sir, not only greatly touched, but also and above all delighted that
+you have thought of including me among the friends who wish to fete Henri
+Fabre. Thanks for having considered that my name would assist your
+undertaking. The "Souvenirs entomologiques" have long ago made me intimate
+with his charming, profound, and moving genius. I owe them an infinity of
+delightful hours. Perhaps also I ought to thank them for having encouraged
+one of my sons to pursue the vocation which he entered. If, in order to
+honour Henri Fabre, you run the pious risk of disturbing, for a moment, the
+studious retreat in which, for so many years, he has pursued his life and
+his work, it is an act of justice toward this great scientist, who thinks
+as a philosopher, sees as an artist, and feels and expresses himself as a
+poet."
+Romain Rolland. Private letter, 7th January, 1910.
+"You cannot imagine what pleasure you have given me by requesting me to
+associate myself in the glorification of J.H. Fabre. He is one of the
+Frenchmen whom I most admire. The impassioned patience of his ingenious
+observations delights me as much as the masterpieces of art. For years I
+have read and loved his books. During my last holidays, of three volumes
+that I travelled with two were volumes of his "Souvenirs entomologiques."
+You will honour me and delight me by counting me as one of you."
+
+16/21. Edmond Rostand. Telegram.
+
+16/22. Romain Rolland.
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+Achard, M.
+
+Agaricus, luminosity of.
+
+"Agricultural Chemistry."
+
+Ajaccio, Fabre at.
+
+Ammophila.
+
+Anthidium.
+
+Anthophora.
+
+Anthrax.
+
+Arachne clotho.
+
+Arachnoids, cannibalism of.
+
+Audubon.
+
+Avignon, Fabre at.
+suggested agronomic station at.
+
+Balaninus.
+
+Balzac.
+
+Bees.
+
+Belleudy, M.
+
+Bembex.
+
+Bergson.
+
+Bernard, Claude.
+
+Blanchard.
+
+Blue fly.
+
+Bombyx.
+
+Bordone.
+
+Bossuet.
+
+Bourdon.
+
+Buffon.
+
+Buprestis.
+
+Calendal.
+
+Calendar-beetle.
+
+Calosoma sycophanta.
+
+Candolle, de.
+
+Cannibalism.
+
+Cantharides.
+
+Cantharis, courtship of.
+
+Capricornis.
+
+Carabidae.
+
+Carpentras.
+fauna of.
+
+Caterpillars, poisonous.
+
+Centipedes.
+
+Cerceris.
+
+Chalcidia.
+
+Chalicodoma.
+
+Charrasse, Louis.
+
+Chermes.
+
+Cicada (Cigale).
+
+Cicadelina.
+
+Cicindela.
+
+Cione.
+
+Clathrix.
+
+Clythris.
+
+Clytus.
+
+Cleona opthalmica.
+
+Coincidence in life of parasites.
+
+Coleoptera of Avignon.
+
+Conchology, Fabre studies.
+
+Copris.
+
+Corsica.
+
+Courrier.
+
+Crickets, courtship of.
+
+Crioceris.
+
+Cuckoo.
+
+Curves, properties of.
+
+Darwin, Charles, Fabre an opponent of.
+praises Fabre.
+corresponds with Fabre.
+
+Darwin, Erasmus.
+
+Decticus.
+
+Delagrave, Charles.
+
+Dermestes.
+
+Devillario, Henry.
+
+Dorthesia.
+
+Dufour, Léon.
+
+Dumas.
+
+Dung-beetles.
+
+Duruy, Victor.
+sends for Fabre to attend Court.
+fall of.
+
+Dyticus.
+
+"Earth, The."
+
+Eclipse of sun.
+
+Education in France.
+
+Ephippigera.
+
+Epeïra.
+
+Emerson.
+
+Empusa.
+
+Ergatus.
+
+Eucera.
+
+Eumenes.
+
+Evil.
+
+Evolution.
+
+Fabre, Aglaë.
+
+Fabre, Antoine.
+
+Fabre, Antonia.
+
+Fabre, Antonin.
+
+Fabre, Émile.
+
+Fabre, Frédéric.
+
+Fabre, Henri.
+birthplace.
+childhood.
+boyhood.
+school days.
+a primary teacher.
+marriage and loss of first child.
+professor of physics at Ajaccio.
+professor at Avignon.
+takes up entomology.
+salary.
+poverty.
+as teacher.
+character.
+his pupils.
+goes to Court and is decorated.
+writes textbooks for schools.
+portraits of.
+meets J.S. Mill.
+denounced for subversive teaching.
+evicted.
+settles at Orange, money difficulties solved by Mill.
+breaks with the University.
+continues his series of textbooks.
+repays Mill money lent.
+dismissed from Requien Museum.
+researches concerning madder.
+leaves Orange.
+work at Sérignan.
+second marriage.
+his workshop.
+methods of work.
+attitude toward evolution.
+corresponds with Darwin.
+ideas as to origin of species.
+methods of work.
+compared with Réaumur.
+life at Sérignan.
+love of music.
+old age.
+poverty.
+jubilee celebrated.
+
+Fabre, Henri, of Avignon.
+
+Fabre, Jules.
+
+Fabre, Paul.
+
+Fabre, Mme (mother of Henri).
+
+Fabre, Mme (1st wife).
+
+Fabre, Mme (2nd wife).
+
+Fabre, Mme Antoine.
+
+Favier.
+
+Female education.
+
+Frog, bellringer.
+
+Gadfly.
+
+Gegner prize.
+
+Geometry, Fabre's love of.
+
+Geotrupes.
+
+Glow-worm.
+
+Goat caterpillar.
+
+Goethe.
+
+Grasshopper.
+
+Halictus.
+
+Harmas, the.
+
+Heat, takes place of food.
+
+Helix raspaillii.
+
+Hemerobius, curious garment of.
+
+Horace.
+
+Horn-beetle.
+
+Horus Apollo.
+
+Huber.
+
+Hugo, Victor.
+
+Hyper-metamorphism.
+
+Instinct.
+
+Intelligence, function of.
+
+Janin, Jules.
+
+Jullian.
+
+Jussieu, de.
+
+La Fontaine.
+
+Lamarck.
+
+Lapalud.
+
+Latreille.
+
+Larra.
+
+Leibnitz.
+
+Leucopsis.
+
+Libellula.
+
+Linnaeus.
+
+Locust.
+
+"Log, Story of the."
+
+Lycosa.
+
+Madder, Fabre's researches concerning.
+
+Magendie.
+
+Malaval.
+
+Mantis.
+
+Maquis, the Corsican.
+
+Marius.
+
+Mason-bee.
+
+Medicine, Fabre's inclination toward.
+
+Megachile.
+
+Meloë.
+
+Michelet.
+
+Mill, J.S.
+helps Fabre in difficulties.
+death of.
+
+Mill, Mrs.
+
+Millipedes.
+
+Mimicry.
+
+Mind, of animals.
+
+Minotaurus.
+
+Mistral.
+corresponds with Fabre.
+
+Mitscherlich.
+
+Montyon prize.
+
+Moquin-Tandon.
+
+Mushrooms, recipe for cooking.
+
+Napoleon III.
+
+Necrophorus.
+
+Number, properties of.
+poem.
+
+Odynerus.
+
+Oniticella.
+
+Onthophagus.
+
+Orange, Fabre at.
+
+Orchids, Fabre on.
+
+"Origin of Species."
+
+Orthoptera, primitive.
+
+Osmia, control of sex.
+courtship of.
+
+Pasteur.
+
+Peacock moth.
+
+Pelopaeus.
+
+Perrier, Ed.
+
+Philanthus.
+
+Phryganea.
+
+Pieris.
+
+"Plant, The."
+
+Pliny.
+
+Poems, Fabre's.
+
+Polygons, properties of.
+
+Pompilus.
+
+Potato.
+
+Processional caterpillar.
+
+Psyche.
+
+Rabelais.
+
+Raspail.
+
+Racine.
+
+Réaumur.
+compared with Fabre.
+
+Requien of Avignon.
+
+Requien Museum.
+
+Rhynchites.
+
+Ricard, Pierre, schoolmaster.
+
+Rose-beetle.
+
+Roumanille.
+
+Saint-Léons.
+
+Saprinidae.
+
+Sarcophagus.
+
+Scarabaeus sacer.
+
+Scolia.
+
+Scolopendra.
+
+Scorpion.
+
+Sérignan.
+Fabre settles at.
+evenings at.
+
+Sicard's portraits of Fabre.
+
+Silkworm moth.
+
+Sisyphus.
+
+Sitaris.
+
+"Sky, The."
+
+"Souvenirs entomologiques."
+
+Spaeriaceae.
+
+Sphex.
+
+Spiders, aeronautic.
+
+Sport, Fabre's love of.
+
+Staphylinus.
+
+Tachina.
+
+Tachinarius.
+
+Tachytes.
+
+Tarantula.
+
+Taylor, Harriett (Mrs. J.S. Mill).
+
+Taylor, Miss.
+
+Terebinth louse.
+
+Theophrastus.
+
+Thomisus.
+
+Tolstoy.
+
+Toussenel.
+
+Trox.
+
+Vanessa.
+
+"Vaucluse, Flora of the."
+
+Vaucluse, General Council of, grants Fabre a pension.
+
+Vayssières, M.
+
+Ventoux Alp.
+banquet on the.
+
+Vezins.
+
+Villard, Marie (Mme Henri Fabre).
+
+Virgil.
+
+Volucella.
+
+Wasps' nest in winter.
+
+Weevils, sloe.
+poplar.
+acorn and poplar.
+
+Woodland bug.
+
+Xylocopa.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Fabre, Poet of Science by Legros
+