78 JEAN-HENRI FABRE 



Fabre is to be found in his peculiar views concerning instinct, 

 views that were prevalent enough in the early part of the nine- 

 teenth century but are singularly foreign to the psychology and 

 theoretical biology of the present day. He not only declined to 

 accept the doctrine of evolution but vigorously attacked it in 

 more than one of his essays, although many of his criticisms 

 so far overshoot the mark that one reads them with amazement. 

 It must be remembered, of course, that Fabre was nearly 36 

 years old when the ' Origin of Species " appeared. He was 

 not, therefore, like the naturalists of the present generation, 

 suckled, so to speak, at the breasts of evolutionary doctrine, and 

 his life-long lack of contact with biological speculation kept him 

 from viewing the phenomena of instinct from a genetic stand- 

 point. But even in his chosen field, the study of instinct, he 

 confined himself to a comparatively circumscribed group of 

 phenomena. He worked only on a series of insects selected from 

 his immediate environment and for certain peculiar reasons took 

 little interest in the social species, (ants, social bees and wasps) 

 which are, nevertheless, abundant in southern France. His 

 studies on these forms are limited to an essay on the amazon 

 ant (Polyergus -rujescens) and a few essays on wasps (Vespa 

 vulgaris). He seems to have borne a grudge against the ants 

 because they so often entered his breeding cages and killed the 

 insects with which he was experimenting. There were also other 

 and more weighty reasons for this neglect of the very insects 

 which naturally suggest a genetic interpretation of instinct. 

 Fabre believed that instinct manifests itself in its purest form 

 in the solitary species. He was, moreover, greatly impressed by 

 its fixity and mechanical aspect, and his rigid training in physics, 

 chemistry and mathematics and his keen analytical ability prob- 

 ably biased him in favor of views which have grown more and 

 more repugnant to modern biologists. He had a strong tendency 

 to schematize his observations and to ignore the variability of 

 instinct. This tendency has been pointed out by several obser- 

 vers and is most clearly marked in his classic work on the 

 solitary wasps. 



Although Fabre suffered in the estimation of many biologists 

 on account of the theoretical views which he elaborated and 

 very stubbornly upheld through the course of a long life in 

 voluntary isolation from the great current of biological thought, 



