We have now seen what entomology becomes in the hands of the admirable
Fabre. The vast poem of creation has never had a more familiar and luminous
interpreter, and you will nowhere find other work like his.
How far he outstrips Buffon and his descriptions of animals--so general, so
vague, so impersonal--his records unreliable and his entire erudition of a
second-hand quality!
It is with Réaumur that we are first of all tempted to compare him; and
some have chosen to see in him only one who has continued Réaumur's work.
In reality he has eagerly read Réaumur, although at heart he does not
really enjoy his writings; he has drunk from this fruitful source, but he
owes him no part of his own rich harvest.
But there are many affinities between them; they have many traits in
common, despite the points of difference between them.
The illustrious son of Rochelle was born, like Fabre, with a love of all
natural things, and before attacking the myriad problems of physics and
natural history, wherein he was to shine by so many curious discoveries, he
also had prepared himself by a profound study of mathematics.
Luckier than Fabre, however, Réaumur enjoyed not only the advantages of
birth, but all the material conditions necessary to his ardent intellectual
activity. Fortune overwhelmed her favourite with gifts, and played no small
part in his glory by enabling him, from an early age, to profit by his
leisure and to give a free rein to his ruling passions. He was no less
modest than the sage of Sérignan; self-effacing before others, says one of
his biographers, so that they were never made to feel his superiority.
(14/1.)
In the midst of the beautiful and spacious gardens at the end of the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where he finally made his home, he also contrived
to create for himself a Harmas after his own heart.
It was there that in the as yet virgin domain of entomology he unravelled
the riddle of the marvellous republic of the bees, and was able to expound
and interpret a large number of those tiny lives which every one had
hitherto despised, and which indeed they continued to despise until the
days of Fabre, or at least regarded as absolutely unimportant. He was the
first to venture to suspect their connection with much "that most nearly
concerns us," or to point out "all the singular conclusions" which may be
drawn therefrom. (14/2.)
How many details he has enshrined in his interesting "Memoirs," and how
many facts we may glean from this great master! He, like Fabre, had the
gift of charming a great number of his contemporaries. Tremblay, Bonnet,
and de Geer owed their vocations to Réaumur, not to speak of Huber, whose
genius he inspired.
A physicist before all, and accustomed to delicate and meticulous though
comparatively simple tasks, he had admirably foreseen the extraordinary
complication of these inquiries; so much so that, with the modesty of the
true scientist that he was, he regarded his own studies, even the most
substantial, as mere indications, intended to point the way to those that
followed him.
As methodical, in short, as the author of the "Souvenirs," the scrupulous
Réaumur wrote nothing that he himself had not proved or verified with the
greatest care; and we may be sure that all that he records of his personal
and immediate observations he has really seen with his own eyes.
In the wilderness of error he had, like Fabre, an infallible compass in his
extraordinary common sense; and, equally skilled in extracting from the
false the little particle of truth which it often contains, he was no less
fond of listening at the gate of legends, of tracing the source of
traditions; rightly considering that before deriding them as old-wives'
tales we should first probe in all directions into their origin and
foundation. (14/3.)
He was also tempted to experiment, and he well knew that in such problems
as those he attacked observation alone is often powerless to reveal
anything. It is enough to recall here one of the most promising and
unexpected of the discoveries which resulted from his experiments. Réaumur
was the first to conceive the ingenious idea of retarding the hatching of
insects' eggs by exposing them to cold, thus anticipating the application
of cold to animal life and the discoveries of Charles Tellier, whose more
illustrious forerunner he was; at the same time he discovered the secret of
prolonging, in a similar fashion, the larval existence of chrysalids during
a space of time infinitely superior to that of their normal cycle; and what
is more, he succeeded in making them live a lethargic life for years and
even for a long term of years, thus repeating at will the miracle of the
Seven Sleepers. (14/4.)
Too much occupied, however, with the smaller aspect of things, he had not
the art of forcing Nature to speak, and in the province of psychical
aptitudes he was barely able to rise above the facts.
As he was powerless to enter into real communion with the tiny creatures
which he observed, although his observations were conducted with religious
admiration; as he saw always only the outside of things, like a physicist
rather than a poet or psychologist, he contented himself with noting the
functioning of their organs, their methods of work, their properties, and
the changes which they undergo; he did not interpret their actions. The
mystery of the life which quivers within and around them eludes him. This
is why his books are such dry reading. He is like a bright garden full of
rare plants; but it is a monotonous garden, without life or art, without
distant vistas or wide perspectives. His works are somewhat diffuse and
full of repetitions; entire monographs, almost whole volumes, are devoted
to describing the emerging of a butterfly; but they form part of the
library of the curious lover of nature; they are consulted with interest,
and will always be referred to, but it cannot be said that they are read.
After Réaumur, according to the dictum of the great Latreille, entomology
was confined to a wearisome and interminable nomenclature, and if we except
the Hubers, two unparalleled observers, although limited and circumscribed,
the only writer who filled the interregnum between Réaumur and Fabre was
Léon Dufour.
In the quiet little town whither he went to succeed his father, this
military surgeon, turned country doctor, lived a busy and useful life.
While occupied with his humble patients, whom he preferred to regard merely
as an interesting clinic, and while keeping the daily record of his medical
observations, he felt irresistibly drawn "to ferret in all the holes and
corners of the soil, to turn over every stone, large or small; to shrink
from no fatigue, no difficulty; to scale the highest peaks, the steepest
cliffs, to brave a thousand dangers, in order to discover an insect or a
plant. (14/5.)
A disciple of Latreille, he shone above all as an impassioned descriptive
writer.
No one was more skilled in determining a species, in dissecting the head of
a fly or the entrails of a grub, and no spectacle in the world was for him
so fascinating as the triple life of the insect; those magical
metamorphoses, which he justly considered as one of the most astonishing
phenomena in creation. (14/6.)
He saw further than Réaumur, and burned with the same fire as Fabre, for he
also had the makings of a great poet. His curiosity had assembled enormous
collections, but he considered, as Fabre considered, that collecting is
"only the barren contemplation of a vast ossuary which speaks only to the
eyes, and not to the mind or imagination," and that the true history of
insects should be that of their habits, their industries, their battles,
their loves, and their private and social life; that one must "search
everywhere, on the ground, under the soil, in the waters, in the air, under
the bark of trees, in the depth of the woods, in the sands of the desert,
and even on and in the bodies of animals."
Was not this in reality the ambitious programme which Fabre was later to
propose to himself when he entered into his Harmas and founded his living
laboratory of entomology; he also having set himself as his exclusive
object the study of "the insects, the habits of life, the labours, the
struggles and the propagation of this little world, which agriculture and
philosophy should closely consider"? (14/7.)
Dufour also had admirably grasped the place of the insect in the general
harmony of the universe, and he clearly perceived that parasitism, that
imbrication of mutually usurping lives, is "a law of equilibration, whose
object is to set a limit to the excessive multiplication of individuals of
the same type," that the parasites are predestined to an imprescriptible
mission, and that this mysterious law "defies all explanation."
On the other hand, he did not become very intimate with these tiny peoples;
his attention was dispersed over too many points; perhaps he was
fundamentally incapable of concentrating himself for a long period upon a
circumscribed object; perhaps he lacked that first condition of genius,
patience, so essential to such researches: although he enriched science by
an infinite multitude of precious facts and has recorded a quantity of
details concerning the habits of insects, he did not succeed in
representing any one of these innumerable little minds. He had an intense
feeling for nature, but he was not able to interpret it, and his immense
volume of work, scattered through nearly three hundred monographs, remains
ineffective.
Let us compare with his work the vast epic of the "Souvenirs." We become
familiar with the whole life of the least insect, and all its unending
related circumstances; we obtain sudden glimpses of insight into our own
organization, with its abysses and its lacunae, and also into those rich
provinces or faculties which we are only beginning to suspect in the depths
of our unconscious activity.
In the evening twilight, after the vast andante of the cicadae is hushed,
at the hour when the shining glow-worms "light their blue fires," and the
"pale Italian cricket, delirious with its nocturnal madness, chirrups among
the rosemary thickets," while in the distance sounds the melodious tinkle
of the bell-ringer frogs, replying from one hiding-place to another, the
old master shows us that profound and mysterious magic with which matter is
endowed by the faintest glimmer of life.
He shows us the intimate connection of things, the universal harmony which
so intimately allies all creatures; and he shows us also that everywhere
and all around us, in the smallest object, poetry exists like a hidden
flame, if only we know how to seek it.
And in revealing so many marvellous energies in even the lowest creatures,
he helps us to divine the infinity of phenomena still unguessed-at, which
the subtlety of the unknowable force which thrills through the whole
universe hides from us under the most trivial appearances.
For he has not told everything; this incommensurable region, which had
hitherto remained unworked, is far from being exhausted.
How many unknown and hidden things are still left to be gleaned! There will
be a harvest for all. Remember that "even the humblest species either has
no history, or the little that has been written concerning it calls for
serious revision" (14/8.); that a single bush, such as the bramble,
suffices to rear more than fifty species of insects, and that each species,
according to the just observation of Réaumur, "has its habits, its tricks
of cunning, its customs, its industries, its art, its architecture, its
different instincts, and its individual genius."
What a stupendous alphabet to decipher, of which we have as yet only
commenced to read the first few letters! When we are able to read it almost
entirely, when observers are more numerous and have concerted their
efforts, mutually illuminating, completing and correcting one another,
then, and then only, we shall succeed, if not in resolving some of those
high problems which have never ceased to interest mankind, at least in
seizing some reflected knowledge of ourselves, and in seeing a little
farther into the kingdom of the mind.