>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 Epera 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 Epera 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 Raumur 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 Provenal singer, with that intuition which is the privilege of genius, has expressed in these melodious lines:

"Oh! pau de sn qu'em l'escaupre Furnant la mort, creson de saupre, La vertu de l'abiho e lou secrt do mu."

(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 Melodae 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 Epera, 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 Srignan, 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 Srignan 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 Frdric, "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'tre 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 Provenal 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.)