466 PEATTIE 



inspiration, and for an analytical study of his methods. Fabre, remember, was 

 a man who never wrote anything except popularly. His most profound studies 

 were written in popular style, and this threw the formal entomologists of 

 France so badly off that it took them about forty years to realize that he was 

 worthy of the privilege of associating his name with theirs. Even Pasteur 

 thought Fabre was just a peasant-schoolmaster-scribbler, and it was Darwin 

 who was the first to realize his greatness. The important point about Fabre 

 as a model is that he regards the reader as neither above him nor beneath 

 him; he looks him squarely in the eye. He doesn't hoard his pearls, either, 

 but immediately turns out his pockets in front of us. He is, above all, never 

 omniscient. He tells us frankly of his bewilderment, his ignorance, his mistakes 

 (which he sometimes did not know were mistakes). He tells us of his children 

 and of his neighbors, two-legged, six-legged, eight-legged, and myriapod, and 

 of how he was dismissed from his position as schoolmaster because what he 

 taught was denounced as corrupting the innocence and piety of youth — the 

 same charge that was brought against Socrates, you'll recall. What Fabre 

 was forced to drink was not poison hemlock but the bitter lees of ostracism 

 and poverty. 



But what Fabre is communicating to his readers, young and old, is a sense 

 of the wonder and beauty in all things. When he was teaching algebra and 

 geometry to a room full of bored teen-agers, ready to make trouble for him 

 the moment he lost their interest, and was armed only with a piece of chalk, 

 he told them of the "desperate curve of the hyperbola." If this sounds to you 

 like purple prose, then you are entitled to say so, but I am willing to gamble 

 that the phrase, once heard, will never be forgotten. I could not, today, 

 define a hyperbolic curve without cheating by looking in the dictionary, but 

 I shall forever be able to remember its course, because of Fabre's description 

 of it. 



I began this paper with a quotation from Shakespeare, who was never 

 afraid of purple prose and indeed slung reams of it through all his plays. 

 I am going to close with a quotation from a botanist who will express far 

 better than I could do, and in quite un-purple but also unequivocal words, 

 what he believed to be the relationship of popularization to the discipline of 

 botany as a whole. 



I quote from pages 3 and 4 of The Living Plant, by William F. Ganong. 

 "An important phase of Botanical Education . . . will be the production of 

 works, on the Natural History of Plants, which will set forth, with a com- 

 bination of scientific accuracy and literary charm, not only the technical and 

 economic aspects of plant life, but also those historical, legendary, and imag- 

 inative aspects which give to a study its widest human interest. Indeed, the 

 production of such works may be viewed as the logical aim of all botanical 

 study." 



