THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 383 



first volume of the Souvenirs, and the ten volumes he has left us 

 constitute his great contribution to our knowledge. 



In an appreciation of this character it is impossible to refer 

 individually to the two hundred and nineteen memoirs, as his 

 chapters really are, in the Souvenirs, much less to select from the 

 thousand and one inimitable word pictures he gives us, greatly as 

 one is tempted to do so. As the years passed by, his literary style 

 developed until it reached a beauty of description that cannot be 

 excelled in any language, and to appreciate it fully one must go 

 to the original memoirs, although the translations of the selected 

 essays, which are gradually being published, will serve to bring 

 his work to the attention of a wider audience than it has previously 

 enjoyed. 



Undoubtedly the outstanding feature of Fabre's work was his 

 contribution to our knowledge of insect behaviour, as I have 

 already stated. He was not content with mere observation, with 

 anatomical or physiological studies, but searched deeply for the 

 principles underlying the behaviour of the creatures with whom 

 he lived hour by hour and day by day: endeavouring to obtain, 

 as it were, the insect's point of view. He was constantly comparing 

 insects with men, and this anthropocentric attitude, no doubt, was 

 a source of danger. Nevertheless, the evidence he afforded as a 

 result of his painstaking work of the "pervasive mentality and 

 purposiveness," to use the words of a recent writer, is his main 

 contribution to the interpretation of animal behaviour. His belief 

 in instinct as a dominant and underivable factor fundamentally 

 different from intelligence, his strong vitalistic conception of the 

 organism, and his firm opposition to the ideas set forth by Darwin, 

 with whom he corresponded and for whom he conceived a real 

 affection, are leading cfiaracteristics of his work. Although he 

 assailed the"vast and luminous balloon"of evolution, as he called 

 it, his criticism jacked the constructive arguments one would have 

 desired from a close observer, and his intense conviction of the 

 fallacy of a mechanistic interpretation appears to have blinded him 

 to the possibility of an alternative interpretation of facts consistent 

 with the idea of evolution. 



C. Gordon Hewitt. 



