The Hunting Wasps 



services of uncontested merit, was receiving 

 for himself and his family a stipend of six- 

 teen hundred francs, or less than the wages of 

 a groom in a decent establishment. Such was 

 the disgraceful parsimony of the day where 

 education was concerned; such was the edict 

 of our government red-tape : I was an irregu- 

 lar, the offspring of my solitary studies. And 

 so I was forgetting the poverty and anxieties 

 of a professor's life, amid my books, when I 

 chanced to turn over the pages of an entomo- 

 logical essay that had fallen into my hands I 

 forget how. 



It was a monograph by the then father of 

 entomology, the venerable scientist Leon Du- 

 four,^ on the habits of a Wasp that hunted 

 Buprestis-beetles. Certainly, I had not 

 waited till then to interest myself in insects; 

 from my early childhood, I had delighted in 

 Beetles, Bees and Butterflies; as far back as 

 I can remember, I see myself in ecstasy be- 

 fore the splendour of a Ground-beetle's wing- 

 cases or the wings of Papilio machaon, the 



^Leon Dufour (1780-1865) was an army surgeon who 

 served with distinction in several campaigns and sub- 

 sequently practised as a doctor in the Landes. He at- 

 tained great eminence as a naturalist. Cf. The Life of 

 the Spider: by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander 

 Teixeira de Mattos, chap. i. — Translator's Note. 



