The Serignan Jubilee 



Serignan: "Who has taught each one its 

 trade, to the exclusion of any other, and 

 allotted the parts which they fill, as a rule 

 with a completeness unequalled, save by 

 ' their absolute unconsciousness of the goal 

 at which they are aiming?' This is a very 

 important problem: it is the problem of the 

 origin of things. Henri Fabre has no de- 

 sire to grapple with it. Living in perpetual 

 amazement, amid the miracles revealed by 

 his genius, he observes, but he does not ex- 

 plain." 



For the moment we can no longer sub- 

 scribe to the assertions of the learned Aca- 

 demician, 1 nor to his fashion of writing his- 

 tory, which is decidedly too free. The truth 

 is that Fabre, who delights in the pageant of 

 the living world, does not always confine him- 

 self to recording it; he readily passes from 

 the smallest details of observation to the 

 wide purviews of reason, and he is at times 

 as much a philosopher as a poet and a natu- 

 ralist. The truth is that he often considers 

 the question of the origins of life, and he 

 answers it unequivocally like the believer that 

 he is. It is enough to cite one passage among 

 others, a passage which testifies to a brief 

 uplifting of the heart that presupposes many 



1 M. E. Perrier is a Member of the Institut de France. 



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