JEAN-HENRI FABRE 77 



was one of the profoundest admirations of his life, people who 

 had never devoted five minutes of their lives to studying an 

 insect, began to" sit up and take notice. 



Whenever there is complaint of the neglect of a genius by the 

 world, it is well to scrutinize the behavior of the genius. If 

 we do this in Fabre's case we shall have little difficulty in ac- 

 counting for the neglect from which he suffered, both on the 

 part of the general public and the scientific fraternity. Fabre 

 and his publisher are undoubtedly responsible for much of the 

 popular neglect. The title of the great work, " Souvenirs Ento- 

 mologiques," is inept, to say the least; the ten volumes were 

 unattractively printed and inadequately illustrated and the 

 arrangement of the articles in the series might have been much 

 better. All rights of translation, even of extracts, were, 

 moreover, rigidly withheld till very recently. When Fabre be- 

 came more generally known these faults were corrected by the 

 publication of selected essays in more pleasing volumes and 

 under more appropriate titles, such as "La Vie des Insectes " 

 and ' Moeurs des Insectes," an arrangement which has been 

 followed in the English translations now displayed in all our 

 bookstores. 



The reserved and unsympathetic attitude of entomologists 

 towards Fabre was very largely due to the fact that he was 

 a crotchety and opinionated recluse, who seems never to have 

 made the slightest attempt to enter into friendly personal or 

 epistolary relations with other entomologists, who never men- 

 tioned and probably never read the work of his contempora- 

 ries, who lost no opportunity of holding up to ridicule some of 

 the most important entomological studies, such as insect tax- 

 onomy, and who repeated investigations that had been made 

 by others, without intimating and evidently without knowing 

 that such investigations had long been known to the ento- 

 mological world. He failed to realize that entomologists are 

 more human than the objects of their studies and that " wer 

 Liebe ernten will, muss Liebe saen." It is not surprising, there- 

 fore that there was no afflux of entomologists to Serignan to 

 celebrate his jubilee. While their presence might have been 

 commendable, we can hardly blame them, under the circum- 

 stances, for staying at home. 



Another reason for the attitude of entomologists towards 



