The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



others: "The eternal question, if one does 

 not rise above the doctrine of dust to dust: 

 how did the insect acquire so discerning an 

 art?" And the following lines from the 

 close of the same chapter: " The pill-maker's 

 work confronts the reflective mind with a 

 serious problem. It offers us these alter- 

 natives: either we must grant the flattened 

 cranium of the Dung-beetle the distinguished 

 honour of having solved for itself the geo- 

 metrical problem of the alimentary pill, or 

 we must refer it to a harmony that governs 

 all things beneath the eye of an Intelligence 

 which, knowing all things, has provided for 

 all?"^ 



And indeed, when we consider closely, with 

 the author of the Souvenirs, all the prodigies 

 of art, all the marks of ingenuity displayed 

 by these sorry creatures, so inept in other re- 

 spects, then, whatever hypothesis we may 

 prefer as to the formation of species, 

 whether with Fabre we believe them fixed 

 and unchanging, or whether with Gaudry ^ 



1 Souvenirs, VI., pp. 76, 97 ; The Gloiv-ivorm, chap. ix. 



2 M. Albert Gaudry is a sometime professor of pal- 

 aeontology in the Museum of Natural History, who, by 

 virtue of his palaeontological discoveries and works, has 

 acquired a great authority in the scientific world. His 

 Enchainements du Monde Animal dans les Temps Geolo- 

 giqties is especially valued and often cited. Gaudry, who 

 is a good Catholic as well as a scientist of the first rank, 



8 



