JEAN-HENRI FABRE 79 



we are bound to confess that in some very important matters 

 his vision was clearer than that of his contemporaries. He alone 

 realized the great significance of the study of animal behavior 

 at a time when other biologists were absorbed in purely morpho- 

 logical work. No better proof of this statement can be given 

 than the concluding paragraphs of the first essay in the second 

 series of the " Souvenirs " published in 1882. I quote from de 

 Mattos' translation (pp. 2.6 and 27) : ' Laboratories are being 

 founded, at great expense, on our Atlantic and Mediterranean 

 coasts, where people cut up small sea-animals, of but meagre 

 interest to us; they spend a fortune on powerful microscopes, 

 delicate dissecting instruments, engines of capture, boats, fishing 

 crews, aquariums, to find out how the yolk of an Annelid's egg 

 is constructed, a question whereof I have never yet been able 

 to grasp the full importance; and they scorn the little land- 

 animal, which lives in constant touch with us, which provides 

 universal psychology with documents of inestimable value, which 

 too often threatens the public wealth by destroying our crops. 

 When shall we have an entomological laboratory for the study 

 not of the dead insect, steeped in alcohol, but of the living 

 insect; a laboratory having for its object the instinct, the habits, 

 the manner of living, the work, the struggles, the propagation of 

 that little world, with which agriculture and philosophy have 

 most seriously to reckon ? 



" To know thoroughly the history of the destroyer of our 

 vines might perhaps be more important than to know how this 

 or that nerve-fibre of a Cirriped ends ; to establish by experiment 

 the line of demarcation between intellect and instinct; to prove, 

 by comparing facts in the zoological progression, whether human 

 reason be an irreducible faculty or not; all this ought surely to 

 take precedence of the number of joints in a Crustacean's an- 

 tenna. These enormous questions would need an army of work- 

 ers, and we have not one. The fashion is all for the Mollusc 

 and the Zoophytes. The depths of the sea are explored with 

 many drag-nets; the soil which we tread is consistently dis- 

 regarded. While waiting for the fashion to change, I open my 

 harmas laboratory of living entomology; and this laboratory 

 shall not cost the ratepayers a farthing." 



Not only was Fabre the first to realize the full importance 

 of a scientific study of animal behavior but he was the first 



