JEAN HENRI FABRE

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PREFACE

JEAN HENRI FABRE, author of the long series of “Souvenirs Entomologiques” from which these studies are taken, was a French school-teacher and scientist whose peculiar gift for the observation and description of insect life won for him the title of the “insects’ Homer.” A distinguished English critic says of him, “Fabre is the wisest man, and the best read in the book of nature, of whom the centuries have left us any record.” The fact that he was mainly self-taught, and that his life was an unending struggle with poverty and disappointment, increases our admiration for his wonderful achievements in natural science.

A very interesting account of his early years, given by himself, will be found in Chapter XVII of this volume. The salaries of rural teachers and professors were extremely small in France during the last century, and Fabre, who married young, could barely support his large family. Nature study was not in the school curriculum, and it was years before he could devote more than scanty spare hours to the work. At the age of thirty-two, however, he published the first volume of his insect studies. It attracted the attention of scientists and brought him a prize from the French Institute. Other volumes were published from time to time, but some of Fabre’s fellow scientists were displeased because the books were too interesting! They feared, said Fabre, “lest a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the truth.” He defended himself from this extraordinary complaint in a characteristic way.

“Come here, one and all of you,” he addressed his friends, the insects. “You, the sting-bearers, and you, the wing-cased armor-clads—take up my defense and bear witness in my favor. Tell of the intimate terms on which I live with you, of the patience with which I observe you, of the care with which I record your actions. Your evidence is unanimous; yes, my pages, though they bristle not with hollow formulas or learned smatterings, are the exact narrative of facts observed, neither more nor less; and whoso cares to question you in his turn will obtain the same replies.

“And then, my dear insects, if you cannot convince these good people, because you do not carry the weight of tedium, I, in my turn, will say to them:

“‘You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labor in a torture-chamber and dissecting-room, I make my observation under the blue sky to the song of the cicadas; you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life.... I write above all for the young. I want to make them love the natural history which you make them hate; and that is why, while keeping strictly in the domain of truth, I avoid your scientific prose, which too often, alas, seems borrowed from some Iroquois idiom.’”

Fabre, though an inspiring teacher, had no talent for pushing himself, and did not advance beyond an assistant professorship at a tiny salary. The other professors at Avignon, where he taught for twenty years, were jealous of him because his lectures on natural history attracted much attention, and nicknamed him “the Fly.” He was turned out of his house at short notice because the owners, two maiden ladies, had been influenced by his enemies, who considered his teachings in natural history irreligious. Many years later, the invaluable textbooks he had written were discontinued from use in the schools because they contained too much religion! A process which he invented for the extraction of dye from madder flowers, by which he hoped to make himself independent, proved unprofitable on account of the appearance on the market of the cheaper aniline dyes.

Though unknown during most of his lifetime to the world at large, Fabre through his writings gained the friendship of several celebrated men. Charles Darwin called him the “incomparable observer.” The Minister of Education in France invited him to Paris and had him made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and presented him to the Emperor, Napoleon III. He was offered the post of tutor to the Prince Imperial, but preferred his country life and original researches, even though they meant continued poverty.

At last, after forty years of drudgery, Fabre secured from his textbooks a small independent income, which released him from teaching and enabled him to buy at Serignan a house and garden of his own, and a small piece of waste ground, dedicated to thistles and insects—a “cursed ground,” he wrote, “which no one would have as a gift to sow with a pinch of turnip seed,” but “an earthly paradise for bees and wasps”—and, on that account, for him also.

“It is a little late, O my pretty insects,” he adds—he was at this time over sixty; “I greatly fear the peach is offered to me only when I am beginning to have no teeth wherewith to eat it.” He lived, however, to spend many years at his chosen studies.

During the last years of his life his fame spread, and in 1910, in his eighty-eighth year, some of his admirers arranged a jubilee celebration for him at Serignan. Many famous men attended, and letters and telegrams poured in from all parts of the world. He died five years later, at the age of ninety-two.

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