CHAPTER I 

 MY WORK AND MY WORKSHOP 



WE all have our own talents, our special gifts. Some- 

 times these gifts seem to come to us from our 

 forefathers, but more often it is difficult to trace 

 their origin. 



A goatherd, perhaps, amuses himself by counting little 

 pebbles and doing sums with them. He becomes an astound- 

 ingly quick reckoner, and in the end is a professor of mathe- 

 matics. Another boy, at an age when most of us care only 

 for play, leaves his schoolfellows at their games and listens 

 to the imaginary sounds of an organ, a secret concert heard 

 by him alone. He has a genius for music. A third so small, 

 perhaps, that he cannot eat his bread and jam without smear- 

 ing his face takes a keen delight in fashioning clay into little 

 figures that are amazingly lifelike. If he be fortunate he will 

 some day be a famous sculptor. 



To talk about oneself is hateful, I know, but perhaps I may 

 be allowed to do so for a moment, in order to introduce 

 myself and my studies. 



From my earliest childhood I have felt drawn towards 

 the things of Nature. It would be ridiculous to suppose 

 that this gift, this love of observing plants and insects, was 

 inherited from my ancestors, who were uneducated people of 

 the soil and observed little but their own cows and sheep. 

 Of my four grandparents only one ever opened a book, and 

 even he was very uncertain about his spelling. Nor do I 

 owe anything to a scientific training. Without masters, 

 without guides, often without books, I have gone forward 

 with one aim always before me : to add a few pages to the 

 history of insects. 



