JEAN-HENRI FABRE 75 



like Socrates, he implicitly obeyed the voice of his daemon 

 almost to the hour of his death. Falling ill with malaria at 

 Ajaccio he was compelled to return to France, and in 1853 

 was appointed assistant professor of physics at the lycee of 

 Avignon. This post he held for nearly 20 years (till 1871), 

 without advancement ^ and with a salary not exceeding £64! 

 During this period he made some of his most important obser- 

 vations. The written accounts of his work, contributed to the 

 " Annales des Sciences Naturelles ' include a study of the 

 habits of the solitary wasp Cerceris and of the cause of the 

 long conservation of the beetles on which it feeds (1855), notes 

 on the life-history of Cerceris, Bembex and Sitaris (1856), fol- 

 lowed by his classic memoir on the hypermetamorphosis and 

 habits of Sitaris (1858) and studies on the role of adipose tissue 

 in the urinary secretion of insects (1862). 



In 1871 he left the lycee of Avignon to devote the remainder 

 of his life to the study of instinct in insects. He moved to 

 Serignan, a hamlet near Orange, not far from Avignon. Here 

 he lived henceforth and worked as a hermit and here he died, 

 in a little cottage on a plot of ground called the " harmas," a 

 beautiful description of which is given in the opening chapter 

 of the second series of " Souvenirs." 1 During the early years 

 of his residence at Serignan he was compelled to devote much 

 time to writing text-books on natural history subjects for the 

 purpose of keeping the wolf from the door. It will probably 

 be found that these little books were the forerunners of the 

 modern " nature books." He also continued to contribute scien- 

 tific articles to the " Annales des Sciences." Two of these, on 

 the habits and parthenogenesis of some bees of the genus Halic- 

 tus (1880) and one on the repartition of the sexes in the Hymen- 

 optera (1884) are of unusual interest. But the great work 

 accomplished at Serignan is embodied in the ten volumes of 

 the " Souvenirs." Anything like an adequate review of this 

 monumental work would require much time and labor. Only 

 the entomologist who has endeavored to work out complicated 

 insect life-histories will fully appreciate Fabre's powers as an 

 observer and will not be greatly surprised to learn that during 

 the course of years he wore a groove in the stone floor of his 



translated by A. T. de Mattos in the "Life of the Fly," Dodd, Mead & Co. 

 1913. 



