The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



loud gobbling of the harassed birds had told her 

 of our wicked pranks. She would run up armed 

 with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! 

 And we had a good laugh too, behind the hedges, 

 which favoured our retreat! 



How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn 

 the secret of the Turkey's slumber? It was cer- 

 tainly not in our books. Coming from no one 

 knows where, indestructible as everything that en- 

 ters into children's games, it was handed down, 

 from time immemorial, from one initiate to an- 

 other. 



Things are just the same to-day in my village 

 of Serignan, where there are numbers of youthful 

 adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. 

 Science often has very humble beginnings. There 

 is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of 

 idle urchins is not the starting-point of our knowl- 

 edge of hypnosis. 1 



The incident of which we have just read 

 was the starting-point of the investigations 

 which Fabre was to undertake fifty years 

 later concerning the artificial sleep of birds 

 and insects. 



If he had hearkened only to his passion 

 for Nature, the schoolboy of Rodez would 

 soon have become one of the most ardent 

 disciples of the school of the woods; that is, 



1 Souvenirs, VII., pp. 29, 33. The Glow-Worm and 

 Other Beetles, chap, xv., "Suicide or Hypnosis?" 



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