The Life of Jean Henri Fabre: The Entomologist, 1823-1910

In a few days' time naturalists, poets, and philosophers will repair in company to Sérignan, in the neighbourhood of Orange. What is calling them from every point of the intellectual horizon, from the most distant cities and capitals, to a little Provençal village? Moussu Fabré, they would tell you yonder, in a tone of respectful sympathy. But who is the Moussu Fabré thus cherished by the simplest as well as by the most cultivated minds? He is a sturdy old man of all but ninety years, who has spent almost the whole of his life in the company of Wasps, Bees, Gnats, Beetles, Spiders, and Ants, and has described the doings of these tiny creatures in a most wonderful fashion in ten large volumes entitled Souvenirs Entomologiques or Etudes sur l'Instinct et les Mœurs des Insectes. One might say of this achievement what the author of Lettres Persanes said of his book: Proles sine matre. It is a child without a mother. It is, in short, unprecedented. It has not its fellow, either in the Machal of Solomon, or the apologues of the old fabulists, or the treatises on natural history written by our modern scientists. The fabulists look to find man in the animal, which for them is little more than a pretext for comparisons and moral narratives, and the scientists commonly confine their curiosity to the dissection of the insect's organs, the analysis of its functions, and the classification of species. We might even say that the insect is the least of their cares, for, like Solomon, they delight in holding forth upon all the creatures upon the earth or in the heavens above, and all the plants "from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall" (1 Kings iv: 3233). Fabre, on the contrary, has eyes only for the insect. He observes it by and for itself, in the most trivial manifestations of its life: the living, active insect, with its labours and its habits, is the thing that interests him before all else, guiding his investigation of the infinite host of these tiny lives, which claim his attention on every hand; and in this world of insects wealth of artifice and capacities of the mental order seem to be in an inverse ratio to beauty of form and brilliance of colour. For this reason Fabre learns to disdain the magnificent Butterfly, applying himself by preference to the modest Fly: the two-winged Flies, which are relatives of our common House-fly, or the four-winged Flies, the numerous and infinitely various cousins of the Wasps and Bees; the Spiders, ugly indeed, but such skilful spinners, and even the Dung-beetles and Scarabæidæ of every species, those wonderful agents of terrestrial purification. In this singular world, which affords him the society which he prefers, he has gathered an ample harvest of unexpected facts and highly perplexing actions on the part of these little so-called inferior animals. No one has excelled him in detecting their slightest movements, and in surprising all the secrets of their lives. Darwin declared, and many others have repeated his words, that Fabre was "an incomparable observer." The verdict is all the more significant in that the French entomologist did not scruple to oppose his observations to the theories of the famous English naturalist.

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