Was there not indeed a sufficiency of captivating matters all about him,
and beneath his very feet?
In his deep, sunny garden a thousand insects fly, creep, crawl, and hum,
and each relates its history to him. A golden gardener-beetle trots along
the path. Rose-beetles pass, in snoring flight, on every hand, the gold and
emerald of their elytra gleaming; now and again one of them alights for a
moment on the flowering head of a thistle; he seizes it carefully with the
tips of his nervous, pointed fingers, seems to caress it, speaks to it, and
then suddenly restores it to freedom.
Wasps are pillaging the centauries. On the blossoms of the camomile the
larvae of the Meloë are waiting for the Anthophorae to carry them off to
their cells, while around them roam the Cicindelae, their green bodies
"spotted with points of amaranth." At the bottom of the walls "the chilly
Psyche creeps slowly along under her cloak of tiny twigs." In the dead
bough of a lilac-tree the dark-hued Xylocopa, the wood-boring bee, is busy
tunnelling her gallery. In the shade of the rushes the Praying Mantis,
rustling the floating robe of her long tender green wings, "gazes alertly,
on the watch, her arms folded on her breast, her appearance that of one
praying," and paralyses the great grey locust, nailed to its place by fear.
Nothing here is insignificant; what the world would smile at or deride will
provide the sage with food for thought and reflection. "Nothing is trivial
in the majestic problem of nature; our laboratory acquaria are of less
value than the imprint which the shoe of a mule has left in the clay, when
the rain has filled the primitive basin, and life has peopled it with
marvels"; and the least fact offered us by chance on the most thoroughly
beaten track may possibly open prospects as vast as all the starry sky.
Tell yourself that everything in nature is a symbol of something like a
specimen of an abstruse cryptogram, all the characters of which conceal
some meaning. But when we have succeeded in deciphering these living texts,
and have grasped the allusion; when, beside the symbol, we have succeeded
in finding the commentary, then the most desolate corner of the earth
appears to the solitary seeker as a gallery full of the masterpieces of an
unsuspected art. Fabre puts into our hands the golden key which opens the
doors of this marvellous museum.
Let us consider the terebinth louse; it is just a little yellow mite; but
is it nothing else? Its genealogical history teaches us "by what amazing
essays of passion and variety the universal law which rules the
transmission of life is evolved. Here is neither father nor eggs; all these
mites are mothers; and the young are born living, just like their mothers."
To this end "almost the whole of the maternal substance is disintegrated
and renewed and conglobated to form the ovarium...the whole creature has
become an egg, which has, for its shell, the dry skin of the tiny creature,
and the microscope will show a whole world in formation...a nebulosity as
of white of egg, in which fresh centres of life are forming, as the suns
are condensed in the nebulae of the heavens." (7/1.)
What is this fleck of foam, like a drop of saliva, which we see in
springtime on the weeds of the meadows; among others on the spurge, when
its stems begin to shoot, and its sombre flowers open in the sunlight? "It
is the work of an insect. It is the shelter in which the Cicadellina
deposits her eggs. What a miraculous chemist! Her stiletto excels the
finest craft of the botanical anatomist" by its sovereign art of separating
the acrid poison which flows with the sap in the veins of the most venomous
plants, and extracting therefrom only an inoffensive fluid. (7/2.)
At every step the insects set us problems equally varied. The other
creatures are nearer to us; they resemble us in many respects. But insects,
almost the first-born of creation, form a world apart, and contain, in
their tiny bodies, as Réaumur has admirably said, "more parts than the most
gigantic animals." They have senses and faculties of their own, which
enable them to accomplish actions, which are doubtless very simply related
in reality, but which seem, to our minds, as extraordinary as the habits of
the inhabitants of Mars might, if by chance they were to descend in our
midst. We do not know how they hear, nor how they see through their
compound eyes, and our ignorance concerning the majority of their senses
still further increases the difficulty, which so often arrests us, of
interpreting their actions.
The tubercled Cerceris "finds by the hundred" and almost immediately a
species of weevil, the Cleona ophthalmica, on which it feeds its larvae,
and which the human eye, though it searches for hours, can scarcely find
anywhere. The eyes of the Cerceris are like magnifying glasses, veritable
microscopes, which immediately distinguish, in the vast field of nature, an
object that human vision is powerless to discover. (7/3.)
How does the Ammophila, hovering over the turf and investigating it far and
wide, in its search for a grey grub, contrive to discern the precise point
in the depth of the subsoil where the larva is slumbering in immobility?
"Neither touch nor sight can come into play, for the grub is sealed up in
its burrow at a depth of several inches; nor the scent, since it is
absolutely inodorous; nor the hearing, since its immobility is absolute
during the daytime." (7/4.)
The Processional caterpillar of the pine-trees, "endowed with an exquisite
hygrometric sensibility," is a barometer more infallible than that of the
physicists. "It foresees the tempests preparing afar, at enormous
distances, almost in the other hemisphere," and announces them several days
before the least sign of them appears on the horizon. (7/5.)
A wild bee, the Chalicodoma, and a wasp, the Cerceris, carried in the dark
far from their familiar pastures, to a distance of several miles, and
released in spots which they have never seen, cross vast and unknown spaces
with absolute certainty, and regain their nests; even after long absence,
and in spite of contrary winds and the most unexpected obstacles. It is not
memory that guides them, but a special faculty whose astonishing results we
must admit without attempting to explain them, so far removed are they from
our own psychology. (7/6.) But here is another example:
The Greater Peacock moths cross hills and valleys in the darkness, with a
heavy flight of wings spotted with inexplicable hieroglyphics. They hasten
from the remotest depths of the horizon to find their "sleeping beauties,"
drawn thereto by unknown odours, inappreciable by our senses, yet so
penetrating that the branch of almond on which the female has perched, and
which she has impregnated with her effluvium, exerts the same extraordinary
attraction. (7/7.)
Considering these creatures, we end by discovering more things than are
contained in all the philosophies...if we know how to look for them.
Among so many unimaginable phenomena, which bewilder us, "because there is
nothing analogous in us," we succeed in perceiving, here and there, a few
glimpses of day, which suddenly throw a singular light upon this black
labyrinth, in which the least secret we can surprise "enters perhaps more
directly into the profound enigma of our ends and our origins than the
secret of the most urgent and most closely studied of our passions." (7/8.)
Fabre explains by hypnosis one of those curious facts which have hitherto
been so poorly interpreted. When surprised by abnormal conditions, we see
insects suddenly fall over, drop to the ground, and lie as though struck by
lightning, gathering their limbs under their bodies. A shock, an unexpected
odour, a loud noise, plunges them instantly into a sort of lethargy, more
or less prolonged. The insect "feigns death," not because it simulates
death, but in reality because this MAGNETIC condition resembles that of
death. (7/9.) Now the Odynerus, the Anthidium, the Eucera, the Ammophila,
and all the hymenoptera which Fabre has observed sleeping at the fall of
night, "suspended in space solely by the strength of their mandibles, their
bodies tense, their limbs retracted, without exhaustion or collapse"; and
the larva of the Empusa, "which for some ten months hangs to a twig by its
limbs, head downwards": do not these present a surprising analogy with
those hypnotized persons who possess the faculty of remaining fixed in the
most painful poses, and of supporting the most unusual attitudes, for an
extremely long time; for instance, with one arm extended, or one foot
raised from the ground, without appearing to experience the least fatigue,
and with a persevering and unfaltering energy? (7/10.)
That the ex-schoolmaster was able to penetrate so far into this new world,
and that he has been able to interest us in so many fascinating problems,
was due to the fact that he had also "taken a wide bird's-eye view through
all the windows of creation." His universal capabilities, his immense
culture and almost encyclopaedic science have enabled him to utilize,
thanks to his studies, all the knowledge allied to his subject. He is not
one of those who understand only their speciality and who, knowing nothing
outside their own province and their particular labours, refuse to grasp at
anything beyond the narrow limits within which they stand installed.
All plants are to him so familiar that the flowers, for him, assume the
airs of living persons. But without a profound knowledge of botany, who
would hope to grasp the profound, perpetual, and intimate relations of the
plant and the insect?
He has turned over strata and interrogated the schistous deposits, whose
archives preserve the forms of vanished organizations, but "keep silence as
to the origin of the instincts." Bending over his reagents, he has sought
to discover, according to the phrase of a philosopher, those secret
retreats in which Nature is seated before her furnaces, in the depths of
her laboratory; following up the metamorphoses of matter even to the wings
of the Scarabaei, and observing how life, returning to her crucible the
debris and ashes of the organism, combines the elements anew, and from the
elements of the urine can derive, for example, by a simple displacement of
molecules, "all this dazzling magic of colours of innumerable shades: the
amethystine violet of Geotrupes, the emerald of the rose-beetle, the gilded
green of the Cantharides, the metallic lustre of the gardener-beetles, and
all the pomp of the Buprestes and the dung-beetles." (7/11.)
His books are steeped in all the ideas of modern physics. The highest
mathematical knowledge has been referred to with profit in his marvellous
description of the hunting-net of the Epeïra. Whose "terribly scientific"
combinations realize "the spiral logarithm of the geometers, so curious in
its properties" (7/12.); a splendid observation, in which Fabre makes us
admire, in the humble web of a spider, a masterpiece as astonishing and
incomprehensible as and even more sublime than the honeycomb.
This explains why Fabre has always energetically denied that he is properly
speaking an entomologist; and indeed the term appears often wrongly to
describe him. He loves, on the contrary, to call himself a naturalist; that
is, a biologist; biology being, by definition, the study of living
creatures considered as a whole and from every point of view. And as
nothing in life is isolated, as all things hold together, and as each part,
in all its relations, presents itself to the gaze of the observer under
innumerable aspects, one cannot be a true naturalist without being at the
same time a philosopher.
But it is not enough to know and to observe.
To be admitted to the spectacle of these tiny creatures, to become familiar
with their habits, to grasp the mysterious threads which connect them one
with another and with the vast universe: for this the cold and deliberate
vision of the specialist would often be insufficient. There is an art of
observation, and the gift of observation is a true function of that
constantly alert intelligence, continually dominated by the need of delving
untiringly down to the ultimate truth accessible, "allowing ourselves to
pass over nothing without seeking its reason, and habitually following up
every response with another question, until we come to the granite wall of
the Unknowable." Above all we need an ardent and interested sympathy, for
"we penetrate farther into the secret of things by the heart than by the
reason," as Toussenel has said; and "it is only by intuition that we can
know what life truly is," adds Bergson profoundly. (7/13.) Now Fabre loves
these little peoples and knows how to make us love them. How tenderly he
speaks of them; with what solicitude he observes them; with what love he
follows the progress of their nurslings; the young grubs wriggling in his
test-tubes, with doddering heads, are happy; and he himself is happy to see
them "well-fed and shining with health." He pities the bee stabbed by the
Philanthus "in the holy joys of labour." He sympathizes with the sufferings
of these little creatures and their hard labours. If, in his search for
ideas, he has to overturn their dwellings, "he repents of subjecting
maternal love to such tribulations," and if he is constrained to put them
to the question, to torment them in order to extract their secrets, he is
grieved to have provoked "such miseries!" (7/14.) Having provided for their
needs, and satisfied with the secrets which they have revealed to him, it
is not without regret and difficulty that he parts from them and restores
them "to the delights of liberty."
He is thoroughly convinced, moreover, that all the creatures that share the
face of the earth with us are accomplishing an august and appointed task.
He welcomes the swallows to his dwelling, even surrendering his workroom to
them, at the risk of jeopardizing his notes and books. He pleads for the
frog, and applies himself to setting forth his unknown qualities; he
rehabilitates the bat, the hedgehog, and the screech-owl, persecuted,
defamed, crushed, stoned, and crucified! (7/15.)
So intimate is the life which he leads among them all that he makes himself
truly their companion, and relates his own history in narrating theirs;
pleased to discover in their joys and sorrows his own trials and delights;
mingling in their annals his memories and his impressions; delightful
fragments of a childlike autobiography, encrusted in his learned work;
moving and delightful pages in which all the ingenuity of this noble mind
reveals itself with a touching sincerity, in which all the freshness of
this charming and so profoundly unworldly nature is seen as through a pure
crystal.
There is no real communion with nature without sentiment, without an
illuminating passion: often the sole and effectual grace which enables its
true meaning to appear. Neither taste, nor intelligence, nor logic, nor all
the science of the schools can suffice alone. To see further there is
needed something like a gift of correspondence, surpassing the limits of
observation and experience, which enables us to foresee and to divine the
profound secrets of life which lie beneath appearances. Those who are so
gifted have often only to open their eyes in order to grasp matters in
their true light.
A great observer is in reality a poet who imagines and creates. The
microscope, the magnifying glass, the scalpel, are as it were the strings
of a lyre. "The felicitous and fruitful hypothesis which constitutes
scientific invention is a gift of sentiment" in the words of Claude
Bernard; and of this king of physiology, who commenced by proving himself
in works of pure imagination, and whose genius finally took for its theme
the manifold variations of living flesh, of him too may we not say that he
has explored the labyrinths of life with "the torch of poetry in his hand"?
Similarly, do not the harmonious sequences which run through all the
admirable discoveries of Pasteur give us the sensation of a veritable and
gigantic poem?
In Fabre also it seems that the passion which he brings to all his patient
observations is in itself truly creative: "his heart beats with emotion,
the sweat drips from his brow to the soil, making mortar of the dust"; he
forgets food and drink, and "thus passes hours of oblivion in the happiness
of learning." I have seen him in his laboratory studying the spawning of
the bluebottle, when I, at his side, could scarcely support the horrible
stench which rose from the putrefying adders and lumps of meat; he,
however, was oblivious of the frightful odour, and his face was inundated
with smiles of delight.
Intelligence, then, must here be the servant of feeling and intuition; a
kind of primitive faculty, mysterious and instinctive, which alone makes a
great naturalist like Fabre, a great historian like Michelet, a great
physician like Boherhaave or Bretonneau.
These last are not always the most scholarly nor the most learned nor the
most patient, but they are those who possess in a high degree that special
vision, that gift, properly speaking poetic, which is known as the clinical
eye, which at the first glance perceives and confirms the diagnosis in all
its detail.
Fabre has a mind propitious to such processes; and if, by chance,
circumstances had directed his attention to medicine, that science which is
based upon an abundant provision of facts, but in which good sense and a
kind of divination play a still wider part, there is no doubt that he would
have been capable of becoming a shining light in this new arena.
He was full of admiration for that other illustrious Vauclusian, François
Raspail (7/16.), whose medical genius anticipated Pasteur and all the
conceptions of modern medicine. It would seem that he found in him his own
temper, his own fashion of seeing and representing things. He loved
Raspail's books and his prescriptions, full of reason and a most judicious
good sense, distrusting for himself and for his family the complicated
formulae and cunning remedies of an art too considered and still unproved.
At Carpentras, while his first-born, Émile, was hovering between life and
death, and the physician who came to see him, "being at the end of his
resources," did nothing more for him and soon ceased to come, thinking that
the child would not last till the morrow, Fabre flew to the works of
Raspail.
"I searched to discover what his malady was. I found it, and he was treated
day and night accordingly. To-day he is convalescent; and his appetite has
returned. I believe he is saved, and I shall say, like Ambroise Paré, 'I
have nursed him; God has cured him.'" (7/17.)
The episode which he relates, when, at the primary school of Avignon, a
retort had just burst, "spurting in all directions its contents of
vitriol," right in the midst of the suddenly interrupted chemistry lesson,
and when, thanks to his prompt action, he saved the sight of one of his
comrades, does honour to his initiative and presence of mind. (7/18.)
While "all physicians should bow before the facts which he excels in
discovering" (7/19.), he has also been able to make direct application of
the marvels of entomology to some of the problems of hygiene and medicine.
He has shown that the irritant poison secreted by certain caterpillars,
"which sets the fingers which handle them on fire," is nothing but a waste
product of the organism, a derivative of uric acid; he does not hesitate to
perform painful experiments on himself in order to furnish the proof of his
theory; and he explains thus the curious cases of dermatitis which are
often observed among silkworm-breeders. (7/20.) He proves the uselessness
of our meat-safes of metallic gauze, intended to preserve meat against
contamination, and the efficacy of a mere envelope of paper, not only to
preserve meat from flies, but also our garments from the clothes-moth.
(7/21.) He recommends the curious Provençal recipe, which consists in
boiling suspected mushrooms in salt and water before eating them. Finally
he suggests to members of the medical profession that they might perhaps
extract heroic remedies from these treacherous vegetables. (7/22.)
He had need of that indefinite leisure which had hitherto been so wholly
lacking, for the events of ephemeral lives occur at indeterminate hours, at
unexpected moments, and are of brief duration.
So, attentive to their least movements, Fabre goes forth to observe them at
the earliest break of day, in the red dawn, when the bee "pops her head out
of her attic window to see what the weather is," and the spiders of the
thickets lie in wait under the whorls of their nets, "which the tears of
night have changed into chaplets of dewdrops, whose magic jewellery,
sparkling in the sun," is already attracting moths and midges.
Seated for hours before a sprig of terebinth, his eye, armed with the
magnifying glass, follows the slow manoeuvres of the terebinth louse, whose
proboscis "cunningly distils the venom which causes the leaf to swell and
produces those enormous tumours, those misshapen and monstrous galls, in
which the young pass their period of slumber."
He watches at night, by the dim light of a lantern, to copy the Scolopendra
at her task, seeking to surprise the secret of her eggs (7/23.); to observe
the Cione constructing her capsule of goldbeater's skin, or the
Processional caterpillars travelling head to tail along their satin trail,
extinguishing his candle only when sleep at last sets his eyelids blinking.
He will wake early to witness the fairy-like resurrection of the silkworm
moth (7/24.); "in order not to lose the moment when the nymph bursts her
swaddling-bands," or when the wing of the locust issues from its sheath and
"commences to sprout"; no spectacle in the world is more wonderful than the
sight of "this extraordinary anatomy in process of formation," the
unrolling of these "bundles of tissue, cunningly folded and reduced to the
smallest possible compass" in the insignificant alar stumps, which
gradually unfold "like an immense set of sails," like the "body-linen of
the princess" of the fairy-tale, which was contained in one single hemp-
seed. (7/25.)
In his Harmas he is like a stranger discovering an unknown world; "like a
kindly giant from Sirius, holding a magnifying glass to his eye, retaining
his breath, lest it should overturn and sweep away the pigmies which he is
observing."
His passion for interrogating the Sphinx of life, everywhere and at all
moments, sufficed to fill his days from one end of the year to the other.
When some distant subject interested him, even on the most scorching days,
he would put "his lunch in his pocket, an apple and a crust of bread," and
sit out in the hot sunlight, accompanied by his dog, Vasco, Tom, or Rabbit;
fearing only that some importunate third person might come between nature
and himself.
When he walked in his garden he would let nothing escape him; witness those
precise notes of an eclipse of the sun, and of the effects which that
phenomenon produces upon animal life as a whole.
While his children followed the progress of the moon across the sun through
a pane of smoked glass, he attentively observed all that occurred in the
countryside.
"It is four; the day grows pale; the temperature is fresher; the cocks
crow, surprised by this kind of twilight which comes before the hour. A few
dogs are baying...The swallows, numerous before, have all disappeared...a
couple have taken refuge in my study, one window of which is open...when
the normal light returns they will come outdoors once more...The
nightingale, which had so long importuned me by his interminable song, is
silent at last (7/26.); the black-capped skylarks, which were warbling
continually, are suddenly still...only the young house-sparrows under the
tiles of the roof are mournfully chirping...Peace and silence, the daylight
more than half gone...In the Harmas I can no longer see the insects flying;
I find only one bee pillaging the rosemary; all life has disappeared.
"Only a weevil, the Lixus," which he is observing in a cage, "continues,
step by step, without the slightest emotion, his amorous by-play, as though
nothing unusual were happening...The nightingale and the skylark may be
silent, oppressed by fear; the bee may re-enter her hive; but is a weevil
to be upset because the sun threatens to go out?" (7/27.)
He was no less curious concerning the resurrection of the sun, and every
time he made an excursion to the Ventoux he was careful not to miss this
spectacle; setting out at an early hour from the foot of the mountain, so
that he might see the dawn grow bright from the summit of its rocky mass;
then the sun, suddenly rising in the morning breeze, and setting fire,
little by little, to the Alps of Dauphiné and the hills of Comtat; and the
Rhône, far below, slender as a silver thread.
He took infinite pleasure too in drinking his fill of the sublime terrors
of the thunderstorm, which he regarded as one of the most magnificent
spectacles which nature can offer; not content with observing it through
glass, he would open wide the windows at night the better to enjoy the
phosphorescence of the atmosphere, the conflagration of the clouds, the
bursts of thunder, and all the solemn pomp with which the great purifying
phenomenon manifests itself.
But pure observation, as practised by his predecessors, Réaumur and Huber,
is often insufficient, or "furnishes only a glimpse of matters."
He had recourse, therefore, to artificial observation of the kind known as
experimentation, and we may say that Fabre was really the first to employ
the experimental method in the study of the minds of animals.
Near the field of observation, therefore, is the naturalist's workshop,
"the animal laboratory," in which such inductions as may be suggested by
the doings and the movements of the insects "which roam at liberty amidst
the thyme and lavender" are subjected to the test of experiment. It is a
great, silent, isolated room, brilliantly lighted by two windows facing
south, upon the garden, one at least of which is always kept open that the
insects may come and go at liberty.
In the glass-topped boxes of pine which occupy almost the entire height of
the whitewashed walls are carefully arranged the collections so patiently
amassed; all the entomological fauna of the South of France, and the sea-
shells of the Mediterranean; an abundant wealth also of divers rarities;
numismatical treasures and fragments of pottery and other prehistorical
documents, of which the numerous ossuaries in the neighbourhood of
Sérignan, scattered here and there upon the hills, contain many specimens.
At the top, crowning the facade of glass-topped cases like an immense
frieze, is the colossal herbarium, the first volumes of which go back to
the early youth of their owner; all the flora, both of the Midi and the
North, those of the plains and those of the mountains, and all the algae of
fresh and salt water.
But it must not be supposed that Fabre attaches any great value to these
collections, enormous though the sum of labour which they represent. To him
they have been a means of education, a means of organizing and arranging
his knowledge, and not of satisfying an idle curiosity; not the amusement
of one content with the rind of things. In order to identify at first sight
such specimens as one encounters and proposes to examine, one must first of
all learn to observe and to see thoroughly, and to school the eyes in the
colours and forms peculiar to each individual species.
One may fairly complain of Réaumur, for example, that his knowledge was
uncertain and incomplete. Too often he leaves his readers undecided as to
the nature of the species whose habits he describes. Fabre himself, by dint
of criticizing with so much humour the abuse of classifications, has
sometimes allowed himself to fall into the same fault. (7/28.) He has taken
good care, however, not to neglect the systematic study of species; witness
his "Flora of the Vaucluse" and that careful catalogue of Avignon which he
has not disdained to republish. (7/29.) The truth is that "if we do not
know their names the knowledge of the things escapes us" (7/30.), and he
was profoundly conscious of the truth of this precept of the great
Linnaeus.
The middle of the room is entirely occupied by a great table of walnut-
wood, on which are arranged bottles, test-tubes, and old sardine-boxes,
which Fabre employs in order to watch the evolution of a thousand nameless
or doubtful eggs, to observe the labours of their larvae, the creation and
the hatching of cocoons, and the little miracles of metamorphosis, "after a
germination more wonderful than that of the acorn which makes the oak."
Covers of metallic gauze resting on earthenware saucers full of sand, a few
carboys and flower-pots or sweetmeat jars closed with a square of glass;
these serve as observation or experimental cages in which the progress and
the actions of "these tiny living machines" can be examined.
Fabre has revealed himself as a psychologist without rival, of a consummate
skill in the difficult and delicate art of experimentation; the art of
making the insect speak, of putting questions to it, of forcing it to
betray its secrets; for experiment is "the only method which can throw any
light upon the nature of instincts."
His resources being slender and his mind inventive, he has ingeniously
supplemented the poverty of his equipment, and has discovered less costly
and less complex means of conducting his experiments; knowing the secret of
extracting the sublimest truth from clumsy combinations of "trivial,
peasant-made articles."
He has succeeded, in his rustic laboratory, in applying the rigorous rules
of investigation and experimentation established by the great biologists.
He has therefore been able to establish his beautiful observations in a
manner so indisputable that those who come after him and are tempted to
study the same things can but arrive at the same results, and derive
inspiration from his researches.
To note with care all the details of a phenomenon is the first essential,
so that others may afterwards refer to them and profit by them; the
difficult thing is to interpret them, to discover the circumstances, the
whys and wherefores, the consequences, and the connecting links.
But a single fact observed by chance at the wayside, and which would not
even attract the attention of another, will be instantly luminous to this
searching understanding, it will suggest questions unforeseen, and will
evoke, by anticipation, preconceived ideas and sudden flashes of intuition,
which will necessitate the test of experiment.
Why, for example, does the Philanthus, that slender wasp, which captures
the honey-bee upon the blossoms in order to feed her larvae; why, before
she carries her prey to her offspring, does she "outrage the dying insect,"
by squeezing its crop in order to empty it of honey, in which she appears
to delight, and does indeed actually delight?
"The bandit greedily takes in her mouth the extended and sugared tongue of
the dead insect; then once more she presses the neck and the thorax, and
once more applies the pressure of her abdomen to the honey-sac of the bee.
The honey oozes forth and is instantly licked up. Thus the bee is gradually
compelled to disgorge the contents of the crop. This atrocious meal lasts
often half an hour and longer, until the last trace of honey has
disappeared."
The detailed answer is obtained by experiment, which perfectly explains
this "odious feast," the excuse for which is simply maternity. The
Philanthus knows, instinctively, without having learned it, that honey,
which is her ordinary fare, is, by a very singular "inversion," a mortal
poison to her larvae. (7/31.)
As an accomplished physiologist, Fabre conducts all kinds of experiments.
Behind the wires of his cages, he provokes the moving spectacle of the
scorpion at grip with the whole entomological fauna, in order to test the
effects of its terrible venom upon various species; and thus he discovers
the strange immunity of larvae; the virus, "the reagent of a transcendent
chemistry, distinguishes the flesh of the larva from that of the adult; it
is harmless to the former, but mortal to the latter"; a fresh proof that
"metamorphosis modifies the substance of the organism to the point of
changing its most intimate properties." (7/32.)
You may judge from this that he knows through and through the history of
the creatures which form the subjects of his faithful narratives. He is
informed of the smallest events of their lives. He possesses a calendar of
their births; he records their chronology and the succession of
generations; he has noted their methods of work, examined their diet, and
recorded their meals. He discovers the motives which dictate their
peculiarities of choice; why the Cerceris, for instance, among all the
victims at its disposal, never selects anything but the Buprestis and the
weevils. He is familiar too with their tactics of warfare and their methods
of conflict.
His gaze has penetrated even the most hidden dwellings; those in which the
Halictus "varnishes her cells and makes the round loaf which is to receive
the egg"; in which, under the cover of cocoons, murderous grubs devour
slumbering nymphs; even the depths of the soil are not hidden from him, for
there, thanks to his artifices, he has surprised the astonishing secret of
the Minotaur.
He sifts all doubtful stories; anecdotes, statements of supposed habits;
all that is incoherent, or ill observed, or misinterpreted; all the cliches
which the makers of books pass from hand to hand.
In place of repetition he gives us laws, constant facts, fixed rules.
With incomparable skill, he repeats and tests the ancient experiments of
Réaumur.
He is not content to show us that Erasmus Darwin is mistaken; he points out
how it is that he has fallen into error. (7/33.)
He sets himself to decipher the meaning of old tales, skilfully disengaging
the little parcel of truth which usually lies beneath a mass of incorrect
or even false statements. He criticises La Fontaine, and questions the
statements of Horus Apollo and Pliny. From a mass of undigested knowledge
he has created the living science of entomology, which had received from
Réaumur a first breath of vitality, in such wise that each individual
creature is presented in his work with its precise expression and the
absolute truth of its character and attitudes; the inhabitants of the woods
and fields, whether those which feed upon the crops or those which live in
the crevices of the rocks, or the obscure workers that crawl upon the
earth; all those which have a secret to tell or something to teach us; the
Cigale, so different from the insect of the Fable; and above all that
beetle whose name had hitherto been encountered arrayed in the most
fantastic legends, the famous Scarabaeus sacer of the tombs, which Fabre
preferred to place at the head of his epic as an agreeable prologue,
although the inquiry relative to his amazing feats belongs chronologically
to a comparatively recent period of his career.
How moderate he is in such suppositions as he ventures; how cautious when
his persistent patience has at last struck against "the inaccessible wall
of the Unknowable"! Then, with admirable frankness, tranquil and sincere,
he simply owns that "he does not know," unlike so many others, whose
uncritical minds are contented with a fragmentary vision, and run so far
ahead of the facts that they can only promote indefinite illusion and
error.
One is surprised indeed to remark how few even of the most learned and
well-informed of men have a real aptitude for observation, and a highly
instructive book might be written concerning the discrepancies and the weak
points in our knowledge. If they were subjected to a sufficiently severe
test, how threadbare would appear many of those problems which nature and
the world present, and which are regarded as resolved!
How long, for instance, was needed to destroy the legend of the cuckoo,
incessantly repeated down to the days of Xavier Raspail, and to us so
familiar; to elucidate its history, and to set it in its true light!
(7/34.)
It is by means of such data as these that a science is founded, for
theories decay, and only well-observed facts remain irrefragable. With
stones such as these, which are hewn by the great artisan, the structures
of the future will be built, and our own science, perhaps, will one day be
refashioned.
For this reason Fabre's books are an education for all those who wish to
devote themselves to observation; a manual of mental discipline, a true
"essay upon method," which should be read by every naturalist, and the most
interesting, instructive, familiar and delightful course of training that
has ever been known.
On the other hand, it is impossible to conceive what labour this delicate
work demands; what perseverance Fabre has required painfully to extract one
grain of gold; to glean and unite the definite factors, the positive
documents, which served as foundations for each of his essays; lucid,
limpid, and captivating as the most delightful of fairy-tales. We are
charmed, fascinated, and astonished; we see nothing of the groping advance,
the checks, and all the toil and the patience demanded. We do not suspect
the long waiting, the hesitation, the desperate length of the inquiries.
For example, to establish the curious relations which exist between the
wasps and the Volucellae, what long and repeated experiments were needful!
His notebooks, in which he records, from day to day, all that he sees, are
evidence of this. What watches in the alley of lilacs, year after year, to
decipher the mechanism and the mode of construction of the hunting-net of
the Epeïra! Some of these histories, like that of the hyper-metamorphosis
of the Meloë, were only completed as the result of twenty-five years of
assiduous inquiry, while forty years were required to complete that of the
Scarabaeus sacer, for his observation of it was always partial; it is
almost always impossible to divine what one cannot see from the little that
one does see; and as a rule one must return to the same point over and over
again in order to fill up lacunae.
The majority of the insects which Fabre has studied are solitary, and are
only to be encountered singly, scattered over wide areas of country. Some
live only in determined spots, and not elsewhere, such as the famous
Cerceris, or the yellow-winged Sphex, of which no trace is to be found
beyond the limits of the Carpentras countryside.
The proper season must be watched for; one must be ready at any moment to
profit by a lucky chance, and resign oneself to interminable watches at the
bottom of a ravine, or keep on the alert for hours under a fiery sun. Often
the chance goes by, or the trail followed proves false; but the season is
over, and one must wait for the return of another spring. The trade of
observer in many cases resembles the exhausting labours of the Sisyphus
beetle, painfully pushing his pellet up a rough and stony path; so that the
team halts and staggers at every moment, the load spills over and rolls
away, and all has to be commenced over again.
We can now cast back, in order to consider at leisure the immortal study
which marked the beginning of his fame, with the greater interest and
profit in that Fabre has been able, during his retirement, to generalize
and extend his discovery. (7/35.)
Let us first of all note how the observation which Dufour had made of the
nest of the Cerceris was transformed in his hands, and what developments he
was able to evolve therefrom.
Since they have been definitely established by Fabre these curious facts
have been well-known. They form perhaps the greatest prodigy presented by
entomology, that science so full of marvels.
These wasps nourish themselves only on the nectar of flowers; but their
larvae, which they will never behold, must have fresh and succulent flesh
still palpitating with life.
The insect digs a tunnel in the soil, in which she places her eggs, and
having provisioned the cell with selected game--cricket, spider,
caterpillar, or beetle--she finally closes the entrance, which she does not
again cross.
Like nearly all insects, the young wasp is born in the larval state, and
from the moment of its hatching to the end of its growth--that is to say,
for a period of many days--the grub enclosed in its cell can look for no
help from without.
Here then is a fascinating problem: either the victims deposited by the
mother are dead, and desiccation or putrefaction attacks them promptly, or
else they are living, as indeed the larvae require; but then "what will
become of this fragile creature, which a mere nothing will destroy, shut in
the narrow chamber of the burrow among vigorous beetles, for weeks on end
working their long spurred legs; or at grips with a monstrous caterpillar
making play with its flanks and mandibles, rolling and unrolling its
tortuous folds?"
Such is the thrilling mystery of which Fabre discovered the key.
With inconceivable ingenuity, the victim is seized and thrown to the
ground, and the wasp plunges her sting, not at random into the body, which
would involve the risk of death, but at determined points, exactly into the
seat of those invisible nervous ganglions whose mechanism commands the
various movements of the creature.
Immediately after these subtle wounds the prey is paralysed throughout its
body; its members appear to be disarticulated, "as though all the springs
were broken"; the true corpse is not more motionless.
But the wound is not mortal; not only does the insect continue to live, but
it has acquired the strange prerogative of being able to live for a very
long period without taking any nourishment, thanks precisely to the
condition of immobility, in some sort vegetative, which paralysis confers
upon it.
When the hour strikes the hungry larva will find its favourite meat served
to its liking; and it will attack this defenceless prey with all the
circumspection of a refined eater; "with an exquisitely delicate art,
nibbling the viscera of its victim little by little, with an infallible
method; the less essential parts first of all, and only in the last
instance those which are necessary to life. Here then is an
incomprehensible spectacle; the spectacle of an animal which, eaten alive,
mouthful by mouthful, during nearly a fortnight, is hollowed out, grows
less and less, and finally collapses," while retaining to the end its
succulence and its freshness.
The fact is that the mother has taken care to deposit her egg "at a point
always the same" in the region which her sting has rendered insensible, so
that the first mouthfuls are only feebly resented. But as the enemy goes
deeper and deeper "it sometimes happens that the cricket, bitten to the
quick, attempts to retaliate; but it only succeeds in opening and closing
the pincers of its mandibles on the empty air, or in uselessly waving its
antennae." Vain efforts: "for now the voracious beast has bitten deep into
the spot, and can with impunity ransack the entrails." What a slow and
horrible agony for the paralysed victim, should some glimmer of
consciousness still linger in its puny brain! What a terrible nightmare for
the little field-cricket, suddenly plunged into the den of the Sphex, so
far from the sunlit tuft of thyme which sheltered its retreat!
To paralyse without killing, "to deliver the prey to the larvae inert but
living": that is the end to be attained; only the method varies according
to the species of the hunter and the structure of the prey; thus the
Cerceris, which attacks the coleoptera, and the Scolia, which preys upon
the larvae of the rose-beetle, sting them only once and in a single place,
because there is concentrated the mass of the motor ganglions.
The Pompilus, which selects a spider for its victim, no less than the
redoubtable Tarantula, knows that its quarry "has two nervous centres which
animate respectively the movements of the limbs and those of the terrible
fangs; hence the two stabs of the sting." (7/36.)
The Sphex plunges her dagger three times into the breast of the cricket,
because she knows, by an intuition that we cannot comprehend, that the
locomotor innervation of the cricket is actuated by three nervous centres,
which lie wide apart. (7/37.)
Finally, the Ammophila, "the highest manifestation of the logic of
instinct, whose profound knowledge leaves us confounded, stabs the
caterpillar in nine places, because the body of the victim with which it
feeds its larvae is a series of rings, set end to end, each of which
possesses its little independent nervous centre." (7/38.)
This is not all; the genius of the Sphex is not yet at the end of its
foresight. You have doubtless heard of the comatose state into which the
wounded fall when, after a fracture of the skull, the brain is compressed
by a violent haemorrhage or a bony splinter. The physiologists imitate this
process of nature when they wish, for example, to obtain, in animals under
experiment, a state of complete immobility. But did the first surgeon who
thought of trepanning the skull in order to exert on the brain, by means of
a sponge, a certain degree of compression, ever imagine that an analogous
procedure had long been employed in the insect world, and that these clumsy
methods were merely child's play beside the astonishing feats of the
Unconscious?
For the stab in the thoracic ganglions, however efficacious, is often
insufficient. Although the six limbs are paralysed, although the victim
cannot move, its mandibles, "pointed, sharp, serrated, which close like a
pair of scissors, still remain a menace to the tyrant; they might at least,
by gripping the surrounding grasses, oppose a more or less effectual
resistance to the process of carrying off." So the preceding manoeuvres are
consummated by a kind of garrotting; that is, the insect "takes care to
compress the brain of its victim, but so as to avoid wounding it; producing
only a stupor, a simple torpor, a passing lethargy." Is not the ingenious
observer justified in concluding that "this is alarmingly scientific"?
Between the dry statements of Dufour, which served Fabre as his original
theme, and the unaccustomed wealth of this vast physiological poetry, what
a distance has been covered!
How far have we outstripped this barren matter, these shapeless sketches!
Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the
Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an
inventory of the nest of a Cerceris.
For him the Buprestes were dead, and their state of preservation was
explained simply as a kind of embalming, due to some special action of the
venom of the Hymenoptera.
These facts, therefore, were stated as simple curiosities.
Fabre proved that these victims possessed all the attributes of life
excepting movement, by provoking contractions in their members under the
influence of various stimulants, and by keeping them alive artificially for
an indefinite period.
On the other hand, he demonstrated the comparative innocuousness of the
venom of these wasps, some of which, like the great Cerceris or the
beautiful and formidable Scolia, alarm by their enormous size and their
terrifying aspect; so that the conservation of the prey could not be due to
any occult quality, to some more or less active antiseptic virtue of the
venomous fluid, but simply to the precision of the stab and the miraculous
deftness of the "surgeon."
He also pointed out the fact that the sting of the insect is able
immediately to dissociate the nervous system of the vegetative life from
that of the correlative life, sparing the former, and taking care not to
wound the abdomen, which contains the ganglions of the great sympathetic
nerve, while it annihilates the latter, which is more or less concentrated
along the ventral face of the thoracic region.
He completed this splendid demonstration, not only by provoking under his
own eyes the "murderous manoeuvres, the intimate and passionate drama," but
also by reproducing experimentally all these astonishing phenomena;
expounding their mechanism and their variations with a logic and lucidity,
an art and sagacity which raise this marvellous observation, one of the
most beautiful known to science, to the height of the most immortal
discoveries of physiology. Claude Bernard, in his celebrated experiments,
certainly exhibited no greater invention, no truer genius.