6 THE WONDERS OF INSTINCT 



hateful and repulsive thing. Well, if I write for men of 

 learning, for philosophers, who, one day, will try to some 

 extent to unravel the tough problem of instinct, I write 

 also, I write above all things, for the young, I want to 

 make them love the natural history which you make them 

 hate; and that is why, while keeping strictly to the do- 

 main of truth, I avoid your scientific prose, which too 

 often, alas, seems borrowed from some Iroquois idiom! " 



But this is not my business for the moment : I want to 

 speak of the bit of land long cherished in my plans to 

 form a laboratory of living entomology, the bit of land 

 which I have at last obtained in the solitude of a little 

 village. It is a harmas, the name given in this district, 1 

 to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation 

 of the thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of the 

 plow, but the Sheep passes there in spring, when it has 

 chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up. 



My harmas, however, because of its modicum of red 

 earth swamped by a huge mass of stones, has received a 

 rough first attempt at cultivation: I am told that vines 

 once grew here. And, in fact, when we dig the ground 

 before planting a few trees, we turn up, here and there, 

 remains of the precious stock, half -carbonized by time. 

 The three-pronged fork, therefore, the only implement 

 of husbandry that can penetrate such a soil as this, has 

 entered here; and I am sorry, for the primitive vege- 

 tation has disappeared. No more thyme, no more laven- 

 der, no more clumps of kermes-oaks, the dwarf oak that 

 forms forests across which we step by lengthening our 



1 The country round Serignan, in Provence. — Translator's Note. 



