﻿OBITUARY. 271 



There is a bibliography and a useful index. 



The book is exceedingly well illustrated, as in addition to sixteen 

 plates there are one hundred figures in the text. 



OBITUAEY. 



Jean Henri Fabre. 

 Born 1823. Died 1915. 

 The announcement of the death in October of Jean Henri Fabre 

 at the ripe age of ninety-two will have awakened emotions of regret 

 in the hearts of many Englishmen and Frenchmen, besides those of 

 all nations who are also entomologists. Fabre was one of the grand 

 old men of France. His name will ever be linked by me with that of 

 another of her grand old men. Mistral, the supreme poet-historian of 

 Provengal humanity, just as Fabre described the insect fairyland of 

 that delectable country. They were life-long neighbours, well-known 

 to one another, and friends, and both brought up under the same 

 blue sky of the Midi, though Fabre was actually native-born of Sainte 

 Leone in Aveyron. He received his first schooling at Vaucluse, in 

 the land of Petrarch, and proceeded thence to the management of 

 the primary school of Carpentras beneath the shadow of Mt. Ventoux 

 — Mistral's own town — or ever Avignon and Aries claimed hina for 

 their own to join that wonderful band of troubadours, the FeUbre, 

 who restored the langue d'oc to its rightful place in literature. And 

 just as the Pleiads of Provence starved body and back to possess 

 themselves of the wherewithal to study the poets beyond their ken, 

 so Fabre would sacrifice a whole month of his meagre MO a year to 

 purchase a first text-book on entomology. It was not until he had 

 passed his thirtieth year, however, that he proclaimed himself Master 

 of Arts in the great ''Ecole buissoniere " of Nature, where we, too, have 

 been privileged to sit as humble pupils. His first pubhshed work, I 

 beheve, is to be found in the ' Annales des Science Naturelles,' 1855- 

 58 ; and this later was extended in the ' Souvenirs Entomologiques,' 

 continued from 1879 onwards to 1907. His first published volume 

 is a ' Faune Avignonaise,' apparently interrupted by the war of 

 1870, and stopped with the first fascicule, " Insectes. Coleopt^res." 



Essentially an observer rather than a collector, he found ample 

 material to last a long life in the insects of all Orders occurring 

 within a modest radius of S6rignan — that land of red earth and 

 slanting olive orchards where the cicadas chirped their secrets to his 

 ears — "the roadside nightingale of the nymphs, who at mid-day 

 talks shrilly in the hills and the shady dells "—as to the other but 

 unknown poet who sang of them in Attica two thousand years ago. 



Fabre's works occupy no great space upon our bookshelves. 

 " Infinite riches in a Httle room," they have revealed the conscious 

 life of the insect to thousands who a generation since, perhaps, 

 grudged admiration for the loveliest butterfly, and regarded the field- 

 naturalist as a harmless, unintelligible lunatic. His essays, the epic 

 of entomology, have been translated into many languages, and it is 

 some consolation to reflect that in very old age he was relieved of 

 financial anxieties by an appreciative pubHc at home and abroad, as 

 well as by a grateful country. 



