The Hunting JVasps 



and for a quarter of a century performing 

 services of uncontested merit, was receiving 

 for himself and his family a stipend of six- 

 teen hundred francs, or less than the wages of 

 a groom in a decent establishment. Such was 

 the disgraceful parsimony of the day where 

 education was concerned ; such was the edict 

 of our government red-tape : I was an irregu- 

 lar, the offspring of my solitary studies. And 

 so I was forgetting the poverty and anxieties 

 of a professor's life, amid my books, when I 

 chanced to turn over the pages of an entomo- 

 logical essay that had fallen into my hands I 

 forget how. 



It was a monograph by the then father of 

 entomology, the venerable scientist Leon Du- 

 four,^ on the habits of a Wasp that hunted 

 Buprestis-beetles. Certainly, I had not waited 

 till then to interest myself in insects ; from 

 my early childhood I had delighted in Beetles, 

 Bees, and Butterflies ; as far back as I can 

 remember, I see myself in ecstasy before the 

 splendour of a Ground-beetle's wing-cases or 

 the wings of Papilio machaon, the Swallowtail. 

 The fire was laid ; the spark to kindle it was 



1 Leon Dufour (1780- 1865) was an army surgeon who served 

 with distinction in several campaigns and subsequently practised 

 as a doctor in the Landes. He attained great eminence as a 

 naturalist. Cf. The Life of the Spider, by J. Henri Fabre, translated 

 by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, chap. i. — Translator's Note. 



