Produced by Gerry Rising
THE LIFE OF THE FLY:
With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography
By J. Henri Fabre
Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Fellow of the Zoological Society of London
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
I THE HARMAS
II THE ANTHRAX
III ANOTHER PROBER (PERFORATOR)
IV LARVAL DIMORPHISM
V HEREDITY
VI MY SCHOOLING
VII THE POND
VIII THE CADDIS WORM
IX THE GREENBOTTLES
X THE GRAY FLESH FLIES
XI THE BUMBLEBEE FLY
XII MATHEMATICAL MEMORIES: NEWTON'S BINOMIAL THEOREM
XIII MATHEMATICAL MEMORIES: MY LITTLE TABLE
XIV THE BLUEBOTTLE: THE LAYING
XV THE BLUEBOTTLE: THE GRUB
XVI A PARASITE OF THE MAGGOT
XVII RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD
XVIII INSECTS AND MUSHROOMS
XIX A MEMORABLE LESSON
XX INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The present volume contains all the essays on flies, or Diptera, from
the Souvenirs entomologiques, to which I have added, in order to make
the dimensions uniform with those of the other volumes of the series,
the purely autobiographical essays comprised in the Souvenirs. These
essays, though they have no bearing upon the life of the fly, are
among the most interesting that Henri Fabre has written and will, I am
persuaded, make a special appeal to the reader. The chapter entitled The
Caddis Worm has been included as following directly upon The Pond.
Since publishing The Life of the Spider, I was much struck by a passage
in Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's stimulating work, The Childhood of Animals,
in which the secretary of the Zoological Society of London says: 'I have
attempted to avoid the use of terms familiar only to students of zoology
and to refrain from anatomical detail, but at the same time to refrain
from the irritating habit assuming that my readers have no knowledge, no
dictionaries and no other books.'
I began to wonder whether I had gone too far in simplifying the
terminology of the Fabre essays and in appending explanatory footnotes
to the inevitable number of outlandish names of insects. But my doubts
vanished when I thought upon Fabre's own words in the first chapter of
this book: 'If I write for men of learning, for philosophers...I write
above all things for the young. I want to make them love the natural
story which you make them hate; and that is why, while keeping strictly
to the domain of truth, I avoid your scientific prose, which too often,
alas, seems borrowed from some Iroquois idiom!'
And I can but apologize if I have been too lavish with my notes to this
chapter in particular, which introduces to us, as in a sort of litany,
a multitude of the insects studied by the author. For the rest, I have
continued my system of references to the earlier Fabre books, whether
translated by myself or others. Of the following essays, The Harmas has
appeared, under another title, in The Daily Mail; The Pond, Industrial
Chemistry and the two Chapters on the bluebottle in The English Review;
and The Harmas, The Pond and Industrial Chemistry in the New York
Bookman. The others are new to England and America, unless any of them
should be issued in newspapers or magazines between this date and the
publication of the book.
I wish once more to thank Miss Frances Rodwell for her assistance in the
details of my work and in the verification of the many references; and
my thanks are also due to Mr. Edward Cahen, who has been good enough to
revise the two chemistry chapters for me, and to Mr. W. S. Graff Baker,
who has performed the same kindly task towards the two chapters entitled
Mathematical Memories.--Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Chelsea, 8 July,
1913.
[Recorder's Note: Most Translator's Footnotes have been omitted from
this text, but some of his references to localities and insect names
are included in brackets. I apologize to English readers for changes to
American spelling.]
CHAPTER I. THE HARMAS
This is what I wished for, hoc erat in votis: a bit of land, oh, not so
very large, but fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a public way; an
abandoned, barren, sun scorched bit of land, favored by thistles and by
wasps and bees. Here, without fear of being troubled by the passersby, I
could consult the Ammophila and the Sphex [two digger or hunting wasps]
and engage in that difficult conversation whose questions and answers
have experiment for their language; here, without distant expeditions
that take up my time, without tiring rambles that strain my nerves,
I could contrive my plans of attack, lay my ambushes and watch their
effects at every hour of the day. Hoc erat in votis. Yes, this was my
wish, my dream, always cherished, always vanishing into the mists of the
future.
And it is no easy matter to acquire a laboratory in the open fields,
when harassed by a terrible anxiety about one's daily bread. For forty
years have I fought, with steadfast courage, against the paltry plagues
of life; and the long-wished-for laboratory has come at last. What it
has cost me in perseverance and relentless work I will not try to say.
It has come; and, with it--a more serious condition--perhaps a little
leisure. I say perhaps, for my leg is still hampered with a few links of
the convict's chain.
The wish is realized. It is a little late, O my pretty insects! I
greatly fear that the peach is offered to me when I am beginning to
have no teeth wherewith to eat it. Yes, it is a little late: the wide
horizons of the outset have shrunk into a low and stifling canopy, more
and more straitened day by day. Regretting nothing in the past, save
those whom I have lost; regretting nothing, not even my first youth;
hoping nothing either, I have reached the point at which, worn out by
the experience of things, we ask ourselves if life be worth the living.
Amid the ruins that surround me, one strip of wall remains standing,
immovable upon its solid base: my passion for scientific truth. Is that
enough, O my busy insects, to enable me to add yet a few seemly pages
to your history? Will my strength not cheat my good intentions? Why,
indeed, did I forsake you so long? Friends have reproached me for it.
Ah, tell them, tell those friends, who are yours as well as mine,
tell them that it was not forgetfulness on my part, not weariness, nor
neglect: I thought of you; I was convinced that the Cerceris [a digger
wasp] cave had more fair secrets to reveal to us, that the chase of the
Sphex held fresh surprises in store. But time failed me; I was alone,
deserted, struggling against misfortune. Before philosophizing, one had
to live. Tell them that; and they will pardon me.
Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the
solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a
page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression
of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only
on condition of being obscure. Come here, one and all of you--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 nor learned smatterings,
are the exact narrative of facts observed, neither more nor less; and
whoever cares to question you in his turn will, obtain the same replies.
And then, my dear insects, if you cannot convince those 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 observations 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. And why should I not complete
my thought: the boars have muddied the clear stream; natural history,
youth's glorious study, has, by dint of cellular improvements, become a
hateful and repulsive thing. Well, if I write for men of learning, for
philosophers, who, one day, will try to some extent to unravel the tough
problem of instinct, I write also, I write above all things for the
young. I want to make them love the natural history which you make them
hate; and that is why, while keeping strictly to the domain of truth, I
avoid your scientific prose, which too often, alas seems borrowed from
some Iroquois idiom.
But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the
bit of land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of living
entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in the
solitude of a little village. It is a harmas, the name given, in this
district [the country round Serignan, in Provence], to an untilled,
pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor
to repay the work of the plow; but the sheep passes there in spring,
when it has chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up.
My harmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth swamped by a
huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at cultivation:
I am told that vines once grew here. And, in fact, when we dig the
ground before planting a few trees, we turn up, here and there, remains
of the precious stock, half carbonized by time. The three pronged fork,
therefore, the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such
a soil as this, has entered here; and I am sorry, for the primitive
vegetation has disappeared. No more thyme, no more lavender, no more
clumps of kermes oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we
step by lengthening our stride a little. As these plants, especially the
first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a spoil
to forage, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground whence they
were driven by the fork.
What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that is
first dug up and then left for a long time to its own resources. We
have, in the first rank, the couch grass, that execrable weed which
three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating.
Next, in respect of number, come the centauries, grim looking one
and all, bristling with prickles or starry halberds. They are the
yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain centaury, the star thistle and
the rough centaury: the first predominates. Here and there, amid their
inextricable confusion, stands, like a chandelier with spreading, orange
flowers for lights, the fierce Spanish oyster plant, whose spikes are
strong as nails. Above it, towers the Illyrian cotton thistle, whose
straight and solitary stalk soars to a height of three to six feet and
ends in large pink tufts. Its armor hardly yields before that of the
oyster plant. Nor must we forget the lesser thistle tribe, with first
of all, the prickly or 'cruel' thistle, which is so well armed that the
plant collector knows not where to grasp it; next, the spear thistle,
with its ample foliage, ending each of its veins with a spear head;
lastly, the black knapweed, which gathers itself into a spiky knot.
In among these, in long lines armed with hooks, the shoots of the blue
dewberry creep along the ground. To visit the prickly thicket when the
Wasp goes foraging, you must wear boots that come to mid-leg or else
resign yourself to a smarting in the calves. As long as the ground
retains a few remnants of the vernal rains, this rude vegetation does
not lack a certain charm, when the pyramids of the oyster plant and the
slender branches of the cotton thistle rise above the wide carpet formed
by the yellow-flowered centaury saffron heads; but let the droughts of
summer come and we see but a desolate waste, which the flame of a match
would set ablaze from one end to the other. Such is, or rather was,
when I took possession of it, the Eden of bliss where I mean to live
henceforth alone with the insect. Forty years of desperate struggle have
won it for me.
Eden, I said; and, from the point of view that interests me, the
expression is not out of place. This cursed ground, which no one would
have had at a gift to sow with a pinch of turnip seed, is an earthly
paradise for the bees and wasps. Its mighty growth of thistles and
centauries draws them all to me from everywhere around. Never, in my
insect hunting memories, have I seen so large a population at a single
spot; all the trades have made it their rallying point. Here come
hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, weavers of cotton
goods, collectors of pieces cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower,
architects in pasteboard, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters
boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers handling
goldbeater's skin and many more.
Who is this one? An Anthidium [a tailor bee]. She scrapes the cobwebby
stalk of the yellow-flowered centaury and gathers a ball of wadding
which she carries off proudly in the tips of her mandibles. She will
turn it, under ground, into cotton felt satchels to hold the store of
honey and the egg. And these others, so eager for plunder? They are
Megachiles [leaf-cutting bees], carrying under their bellies their
black, white or blood red reaping brushes. They will leave the thistles
to visit the neighboring shrubs and there cut from the leaves oval
pieces which will be made into a fit receptacle to contain the harvest.
And these, clad in black velvet? They are Chalicodomae [mason bees], who
work with cement and gravel. We could easily find their masonry on the
stones in the harmas. And these noisily buzzing with a sudden flight?
They are the Anthophorae [wild bees], who live in the old walls and the
sunny banks of the neighborhood.
Now come the Osmiae. One stacks her cells in the spiral staircase of an
empty snail shell; another, attacking the pith of a dry bit of bramble,
obtains for her grubs a cylindrical lodging and divides it into floors
by means of partition walls; a third employs the natural channel of a
cut reed; a fourth is a rent-free tenant of the vacant galleries of
some mason bee. Here are the Macrocerae and the Eucerae, whose males are
proudly horned; the Dasypodae, who carry an ample brush of bristles on
their hind legs for a reaping implement; the Andrenae, so manifold in
species; the slender-bellied Halicti [all wild bees]. I omit a host of
others. If I tried to continue this record of the guests of my thistles,
it would muster almost the whole of the honey yielding tribe. A learned
entomologist of Bordeaux, Professor Perez, to whom I submit the naming
of my prizes, once asked me if I had any special means of hunting,
to send him so many rarities and even novelties. I am not at all an
experienced and, still less, a zealous hunter, for the insect interests
me much more when engaged in its work than when struck on a pin in a
cabinet. The whole secret of my hunting is reduced to my dense nursery
of thistles and centauries.
By a most fortunate chance, with this populous family of honey gatherers
was allied the whole hunting tribe. The builders' men had distributed
here and there in the harmas great mounds of sand and heaps of stones,
with a view to running up some surrounding walls. The work dragged on
slowly; and the materials found occupants from the first year. The mason
bees had chosen the interstices between the stones as a dormitory where
to pass the night, in serried groups. The powerful eyed lizard, who,
when close pressed, attacks both man and dog, wide mouthed, had selected
a cave wherein to lie in wait for the passing scarab [a dung beetle
also known as the sacred beetle]; the black-eared chat, garbed like a
Dominican, white-frocked with black wings, sat on the top stone,
singing his short rustic lay: his nest, with its sky blue eggs, must be
somewhere in the heap. The little Dominican disappeared with the loads
of stones. I regret him: he would have been a charming neighbor. The
eyed lizard I do not regret at all.
The sand sheltered a different colony. Here, the Bembeces [digger wasps]
were sweeping the threshold of their burrows, flinging a curve of dust
behind them; the Languedocian Sphex was dragging her Ephippigera [a
green grasshopper] by the antennae; a Stizus [a hunting wasp] was
storing her preserves of Cicadellae [froghoppers]. To my sorrow, the
masons ended by evicting the sporting tribe; but, should I ever wish to
recall it, I have but to renew the mounds of sand: they will soon all be
there.
Hunters that have not disappeared, their homes being different, are the
Ammophilae, whom I see fluttering, one in spring, the others in autumn,
along the garden walks and over the lawns, in search of a caterpillar;
the Pompili [digger or hunting wasp], who travel alertly, beating their
wings and rummaging in every corner in quest of a spider. The largest
of them waylays the Narbonne Lycosa [known also as the black-bellied
tarantula], whose burrow is not infrequent in the harmas. This burrow is
a vertical well, with a curb of fescue grass intertwined with silk. You
can see the eyes of the mighty Spider gleam at the bottom of the den
like little diamonds, an object of terror to most. What a prey and what
dangerous hunting for the Pompilus! And here, on a hot summer afternoon,
is the Amazon ant, who leaves her barrack rooms in long battalions and
marches far afield to hunt for slaves. We will follow her in her raids
when we find time. Here again, around a heap of grasses turned to mould,
are Scoliae [large hunting wasps] an inch and a half long, who fly
gracefully and dive into the heap, attracted by a rich prey, the grubs
of Lamellicorns, Orycotes and Ceotoniae [various beetles].
What subjects for study! And there are more to come. The house was as
utterly deserted as the ground. When man was gone and peace assured, the
animal hastily seized on everything. The warbler took up his abode in
the lilac shrubs; the greenfinch settled in the thick shelter of the
cypresses; the sparrow carted rags and straw under every slate; the
Serin finch, whose downy nest is no bigger than half an apricot, came
and chirped in the plane tree tops; the Scops made a habit of uttering
his monotonous, piping note here, of an evening; the bird of Pallas
Athene, the owl, came hurrying along to hoot and hiss.
In front of the house is a large pond, fed by the aqueduct that supplies
the village pumps with water. Here, from half a mile and more around,
come the frogs and Toads in the lovers' season. The natterjack,
sometimes as large as a plate, with a narrow stripe of yellow down his
back, makes his appointments here to take his bath; when the evening
twilight falls, we see hopping along the edge the midwife toad, the
male, who carries a cluster of eggs, the size of peppercorns, wrapped
round his hindlegs: the genial paterfamilias has brought his precious
packet from afar, to leave it in the water and afterwards retire under
some flat stone, whence he will emit a sound like a tinkling bell.
Lastly, when not croaking amid the foliage, the tree frogs indulge in
the most graceful dives. And so, in May, as soon as it is dark, the
pond becomes a deafening orchestra: it is impossible to talk at table,
impossible to sleep. We had to remedy this by means perhaps a little
too rigorous. What could we do? He who tries to sleep and cannot needs
becomes ruthless.
Bolder still, the wasp has taken possession of the dwelling house. On my
door sill, in a soil of rubbish, nestles the white-banded Sphex: when
I go indoors, I must be careful not to damage her burrows, not to tread
upon the miner absorbed in her work. It is quite a quarter of a century
since I last saw the saucy cricket hunter. When I made her acquaintance,
I used to visit her at a few miles' distance: each time, it meant an
expedition under the blazing August sun. Today, I find her at my door;
we are intimate neighbors. The embrasure of the closed window provides
an apartment of a mild temperature for the Pelopaeus [a mason wasp]. The
earth-built nest is fixed against the freestone wall. To enter her home,
the spider huntress uses a little hole left open by accident in the
shutters. On the moldings of the Venetian blinds, a few stray mason
bees build their group of cells; inside the outer shutters, left ajar, a
Eumenes [a mason wasp] constructs her little earthen dome, surmounted by
a short, bell-mouthed neck. The common wasp and the Polistes [a solitary
wasp] are my dinner guests: they visit my table to see if the grapes
served are as ripe as they look.
Here, surely--and the list is far from complete--is a company both
numerous and select, whose conversation will not fail to charm my
solitude, if I succeed in drawing it out. My dear beasts of former days,
my old friends, and others, more recent acquaintances, all are here,
hunting, foraging, building in close proximity. Besides, should we wish
to vary the scene of observation, the mountain [Ventoux] is but a
few hundred steps away, with its tangle of arbutus, rock roses and
arborescent heather; with its sandy spaces dear to the Bembeces; with
its marly slopes exploited by different wasps and bees. And that is why,
foreseeing these riches, I have abandoned the town for the village and
come to Serignan to weed my turnips and water my lettuces.
Laboratories are being founded, at great expense, on our Atlantic and
Mediterranean coasts, where people cut up small sea animals, of but
meager interest to us; they spend a fortune on powerful microscopes,
delicate dissecting instruments, engines of capture, boats, fishing
crews, aquariums, to find out how the yolk of an Annelid's egg is
constructed, a question whereof I have never yet been able to grasp the
full importance; and they scorn the little land animal, which lives
in constant touch with us, which provides universal psychology with
documents of inestimable value, which too often threatens the public
wealth by destroying our crops. When shall we have an entomological
laboratory for the study not of the dead insect, steeped in alcohol, but
of the living insect; a laboratory having for its object the instinct,
the habits, the manner of living, the work, the struggles, the
propagation of that little world, with which agriculture and philosophy
have most seriously to reckon?
To know thoroughly the history of the destroyer of our vines might
perhaps be more important than to know how this or that nerve fiber of
a Cirriped [sea animals with hair-like legs, including the barnacles and
acorn shells] ends; to establish by experiment the line of demarcation
between intellect and instinct; to prove, by comparing facts in the
zoological progression, whether human reason be an irreducible faculty
or not: all this ought surely to take precedence of the number of joints
in a Crustacean's antenna. These enormous questions would need an army
of workers; and we have not one. The fashion is all for the Mollusk
and the Zoophytes [plant-like sea animals, including starfishes,
jellyfishes, sea anemones and sponges]. The depths of the sea are
explored with many drag nets; the soil which we tread is consistently
disregarded. While waiting for the fashion to change, I open my harmas
laboratory of living entomology; and this laboratory shall not cost the
ratepayers one farthing.