FIELD AND STUDY 



ing his place, that the peasants, as they go to and 

 fro, from their work, tap their heads significantly 

 to one another, and exclaim, "Pecdire !" 



Fabre reveals a world at our feet which we rarely 

 or never see, but which is in many ways a copy in 

 miniature of the human world in which we live — 

 its arts, its economies, its thefts, its murders, its 

 struggles, its competitions, its failures, its provi- 

 dences, its love of home and of offspring, and its 

 relations to time and chance. Of the insects he says: 



They become past-masters in a host of industries for 

 the sake of a family which their faceted eyes never be- 

 hold and which, nevertheless, the maternal foresight 

 knows quite well. One becomes a manufacturer of cotton 

 goods and mills cotton-wool bottles ;i another sets up as a 

 basket-maker and weaves hampers but of scraps of flow- 

 ers; a third turns mason and builds rooms of cement and 

 domes of road-metal; a fourth starts a pottery works, in 

 which the clay is kneaded into shapely vases and jars and 

 bulging pots; yet another adopts the calling of a pitman 

 and digs mysterious warm, moist passages underground. 

 A thousand trades similar to ours and often even un- 

 known to our industrial system are employed in the prep- 

 aration of the abode. Next come the victuals of the ex- 

 pected nurslings: piles of honey, loaves of pollen, stores 

 of preserved game, cunningly paralyzed. In such works as 

 these, having the future of the family for their exclusive 

 object, the highest manifestations of the instinct are dis- 

 played under the impulse of maternity. 



Fabre convinces himself and his reader that the 

 insects do not reason, yet he reveals in them some- 

 130 



