76 JEAN-HENRI FABRE 



laboratory by walking around his table. The complete eluci- 

 dation of some of the life-histories, like that of the sacred scara- 

 baeus, required observations extending over a period of nearly 

 forty years. 



The newspapers and magazines have made us familiar with 

 the romance of the closing years of Fatjre's life. Mistral, the 

 Provencal poet, Maeterlinck and Rostand are said to have dis- 

 covered Fabre and to have called the attention of the world 

 to his destitute condition. According to a well-known French 

 magazine, 'In 1910 he was revealed to the people; a group 

 of litterateurs and savants conceived the idea of offering this 

 modest, almost unknown man a plaque to perpetuate the memory 

 of his work. Two years later his ninetieth birthday was cele- 

 brated by a ceremony at which the Institut was represented, 

 and somewhat later the President of the Republic paid him a 

 visit." ' Why," asks Le Gros at the close of his account of 

 the celebration of 1910, " at this jubilee of the greatest of ento- 

 mologists, was not a single appointed representative of ento- 

 mology present ? " And he goes on to say: ' The fact is that 

 the majority of those who 'amid the living seek only for corpses', 

 according to the expression of Bacon, unwilling to see in 

 Fabre anything more than an imaginative writer, and being 

 themselves incapable of understanding the beautiful and of dis- 

 tinguishing it in the true, reproached him, perhaps with more 

 jealousy than conviction, with having introduced literature into 

 the domains of science." This is an unfair statement of the 

 case. Fabre has long been known to naturalists and especially 

 to entomologists and many of them, from Darwin to the Peck- 

 hams and Forel have referred to his work in terms of the greatest 

 admiration. It is only the litterati and general public who have 

 just discovered Fabre, and it is not difficult to account for this 

 belated appreciation. Insects are so peculiarly organized and 

 offer to the casual observer so few points of contact with the 

 general trend of human interests that even the magic style of 

 a Fabre failed to elicit a widespread desire to know about their 

 activities. But when a great writer like Maeterlinck announced 

 that, " Henri Fabre is one of the greatest and purest glories in 

 the present possession of the civilized world, one of the most 

 erudite naturalists and the most marvellous poet in a modern 

 and truly legitimate sense of the word," and added that Fabre 



