The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



One might say of this achievement what 

 the author of Lettres Persanes said of his 

 book: Proles sine matre. It is a child with- 

 out a mother. It is, in short, unprecedented. 1 

 It has not its fellow, either in the Machal of 

 Solomon, or the apologues of the old fabu- 

 lists, or the treatises on natural history writ- 

 ten by our modern scientists. The fabulists 

 look to find man in the animal, which for 

 them is little more than a pretext for com- 

 parisons and moral narratives, and the sci- 

 entists commonly confine their curiosity to 

 the dissection of the insect's organs, the anal- 

 ysis of its functions, and the classification of 

 species. We might even say that the insect 

 is the least of their cares, for, like Solomon, 



tion by Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton in England and 

 Messrs. Dodd, Mead and Co. in the United States. The 

 arrangement of the essays has been altered in the Eng- 

 lish series. See also The Life and Love of the Insect, 

 translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (A. and C. 

 Black), Social Life in the Insect World, translated by 

 Bernard Miall (T. Fisher Unwin), and Wonders of In- 

 stinct, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and 

 Bernard Miall (T. Fisher Unwin).— B. M. 



1 It must in justice be admitted that Fabre had certain 

 precursors, among whom mention must be made of the 

 famous Reaumur and Leon Dufour, a physician who 

 lived in the Landes (died 1865), and who was the occa- 

 sion and the subject of his first entomological publica- 

 tion. This does not alter the fact that his great work 

 is not only absolutely original, but an achievement sui 

 generis which cannot be compared with the mere 

 sketches of his predecessors. 



2 



