iv PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE 75 



Lupin or Sherlock Holmes of fiction. There are winged 

 and wingless females both producing live young without 

 any eggs or the intervention of the male, winged insects 

 which produce no young, and eggs from which young 

 emerge ; and the problem was to find the clue which 

 connected these various threads into a skein of evidence. 

 Leeuwenhoek, Reaumur and Bonnet were the chief 

 detectives in this case, and their work, though unknown 

 to the world at large, claims the admiration of all who 

 will consider it. 



The mantle of the French naturalist, Reaumur, fell 

 upon J. H. Fabre, and in these two faithful observers 

 France can claim possession of the greatest students 

 of insect-life the world has ever seen. Fabre, born in 

 poverty and earning for himself and family a salary of 

 64 a year as a schoolmaster, " less," as he says, " than 

 a groom in a well-to-do household," produced works 

 on the habits of insects which stand by themselves, 

 whether we consider them as science or literature. So 

 long ago as 1871, Darwin, in his Descent of Man, referred 

 to Fabre as " that inimitable observer," and Maurice 

 Maeterlinck has happily named him " The Insects' 

 Homer." In his Souvenirs Entomologiques, Fabre re- 

 corded in ten volumes the results of fifty years of 

 observation, study and experiment on living insects of 

 the South of France. 



In 1843, when eighteen years of age, Fabre, with his 

 teacher's certificate, was appointed to take charge of a 

 primary school at Carpentras, at a salary of 28 a year. 

 He there met for the first time the black mason-bee 

 which makes nests of clay on pebbles or a wall and fills 

 them with honey. Reaumur dedicated one of his 

 studies to this interesting insect, but Fabre did not then 

 know of it. He spent a month's salary in the purchase 



