Fabre's Writings 



The study of the heavenly bodies in par- 

 ticular has this inestimable result: " The 

 things that we are told by stellar astronomy 

 overwhelm the understanding and leave no 

 room in our minds except for an impulse of 

 religious wonder at the author of these mar- 

 vels, the God whose unlimited power has peo- 

 pled the abysses of space with immeasurable 

 heaps of suns." x But the divine work " per- 

 haps appears more marvellous still in the 

 infinity of littleness than in the infinity of mag- 

 nitude: Magnus in magnis f it has been said 

 of God, maximus in minimis." 2 This fine 

 saying is verified and more or less explicitly 

 confirmed in a thousand passages of the 

 Souvenirs. 



Fabre's works of popularisation are very 

 numerous: they include no less than seventy 

 to eighty volumes; they embrace all the ele- 

 ments of the sciences learned and taught by 

 the author: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, 

 trigonometry, mechanics, physics, chemistry, 

 etc.; but their principal aim was to teach the 

 natural sciences, which furnish the material of 

 more than fifty volumes intended for the 

 primary or secondary degree of education. 



1 Cours elementaire d'Astronomie, p. 272, 7th edition. 



2 Op. cit., " Avertissement ou Avant-Propos du Direc- 

 teur de la collection, couronnee par 1'Academie fran- 

 c,aise." 



303 



