( exon ) 
reader may begin to find him unconvincing. Admirably 
honest though he was as a witness, he was also a rhetorician, 
and an advocate of particular views. One cannot but feel 
that he sometimes exaggerates (or at least over-emphasises) 
certain phenomena, and (though never actually suppressing 
them) lays small weight upon others, because all through his 
narrative he was obsessed by a desire to find the analogy 
between the insect’s saw and the human saw as complete as 
possible. Even where he recognises and admits real differences, 
he seems anxious to believe them to be non-essential. He 
might have shown, I think, from his own facts and figures, 
that to think of the implement as merely one kind of saw 
(however idealised gua saw) gives an inadequate and really 
unworthy conception of its actual powers, and adaptation to 
several quite different functions. But to show this, or to see 
it himself, seems simply not to have occurred to him. Other- 
wise, even if it had seemed to him to spoil his story, I believe 
he would have shown it! Besides this anthropomorphic bias, 
Réaumur was also a convinced and enthusiastic upholder of 
Teleology in the old sense of the word. Ido not know what 
were his precise theological views, but his attitude to ‘‘ Nature 
and Nature’s God ” was exactly that of the eighteenth-century 
Deists. 
Such, if I can judge it fairly, was the actual story which 
Réaumur introduced to the scientific world ; perfectly correct 
as to the facts, and told with great clearness and unusual full- 
ness of detail—for pure literary excellence scarcely ever 
paralleled, unless in our own times by the writings of Fabre— 
but soaring into highest eloquence, exactly when the narrator 
ceases to narrate, and begins to moralise and generalise. 
When, however, that story passed from the original author 
into the hands of translaters and compilers of text-books, who 
were themselves obsessed by the same ruling ideas as 
Réaumur, but were comparatively uninterested in the details 
qualifications, and explanations which he had so carefully in- 
troduced into his own story—not unnaturally they fastened 
on everything in it which was most striking and satisfactory 
to their own mental tastes (the rhetoric, the hyperboles, the 
strained analogies and so forth), while they omitted, as though 
