This little volume introduces the work of a great French naturalist

Insect life: Souvenirs of a naturalist by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. PREFACE

PREFACE

This little volume introduces the work of a great French naturalist to the reader of English. Réaumur, another Frenchman, is the greatest naturalist devoting himself to the observation of insects the world has yet seen. His six quarto volumes—Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes—were published between 1734 and 1742. J.-H. Fabre, who happily is still with us, is second only to Réaumur in this part of the great field of Natural History.

Though compatriots the two men are remarkably different in the nature of their genius. Réaumur, stately and slow, both discursive and diffuse. Fabre,—styled by Charles Darwin the immortal Fabre,—a most patient, indefatigable observer, ready to sacrifice everything to the carrying on of his work, but making deductions too rapidly from his observations, and taking a philosophical position from which he refuses to budge, even though he stand alone among the naturalists of this generation.

Fabre’s great merit is his graphic portraiture of the living insect as it really is. This proves to be very different from insect life as it is usually supposed to be by the uninstructed, and as it is only too frequently represented to be in books. In the volume now offered to the reader he is almost entirely concerned with the instinct of Hymenoptera, the highest of the insect world in this respect. His studies of this subject have been continued in several other volumes, and he has also included in the series the results of many years of observation of the habits of other and very different insects.

His philosophical position may be briefly stated to be a determined refusal to recognise evolution as a legitimate idea. In this we may think him wrong; but it must be admitted that his views form a valuable antithesis to those of the many evolutionists who take the position that all that remains for the naturalist to do is to repeat the words Natural Selection and variation, and declare that thereby we understand the Cosmos.

Fabre is a difficult writer to translate. Probably no one has ever written on this subject with equal brilliancy and vivacity. But he is the most Gallic of Frenchmen. If his words are literally translated, they scarcely make English; if freely translated, the charm of his diction is too easily missed.

We hope that this volume may induce the student to read Fabre’s subsequent volumes.1 Taken altogether they are, if not superior, at least not inferior to this one—preferred simply because it is the first of the series.

In his works there is a good deal of delightful autobiography. Starting as a child amidst the direst poverty, he has become a highly accomplished man, a great naturalist, a brilliant writer; and he has done this with a complete contempt for money, and a great indifference to the other rewards that Society is ready to bestow for such work.

D. SHARP.

Cambridge, 20th August 1901.

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