BOOKS.
HENRI FABER*
THE full Life of Henri Fabre may yet remain to be written, and if so, it will probably contain much of the material of the Memoirs which, we gather from M. Fabre's preface to this book, have not been more than begun But here, at all events, is a careful and affectionate appreciation of the great naturalist and his work, which may serve well as an introduction to further biography. It suffers under two disadvantages : it has been written in the lifetime of its subject, and it is pre- seated to the English reader in a translation. It is thus less critical than it might be, and there is a certain sense of separa- tion as we read ; we can see and understand plainly enough, but we are looking through a glass. Mr. Miall cannot bring us quite close, and he cannot, or rather he does not, give us the words and the voice; be might, perhaps, have set down the original French more often. However, he is translating what is in its own way, too, a translation; and he possibly may have found himself differing here and there from Dr. Legros. That would be, of course, in matters of inference or in estimating a comparison ; the scanty, simple facts of the biography are plain for all to read. Fabre has been one of the greatest of investigators working under the gravest dis- advantages. Born in 1823, he began life as a poor boy, and was compelled to accept a wretched salary as a school teacher. He was in such straits in later life that, friendless and misunder- stood, confronted with the simple task of engaging fresh lodgings, he found himself obliged to appeal for help to John Stuart Mill. At that time Mill was living at Avignon, to be near the tomb of his wife, and he had been attracted to Fabre as one possessing tastes like his own; he lent Fabre one hundred and twenty pounds, which in time was duly repaid, but which, coming when it did, enabled Fabre to cut himself free from the life of the /yeee at Avignon, and to settle down to do the work nearest his heart. It was the turning- point of his life; bet life for him, with all his reputation, never brought freedom from pecuniary difficulty. There was a brief period of prosperity while his educational class-books were popular, but the public taste changed, and the story of his old age became the same as that of his youth—continual investigation of fact in the field he had chosen, with per- petual uncertainty as to means of livelihood for himself and his family.
Fabre was a friend of Mill and an admirer of Darwin, but he had little knowledge of their work or of that of other men of science. He ignored hypotheses, and occupied himself solely with immediate observation of facts. Indeed, although he had a real affection and admiration for Darwin as a man, he could not read his books. He found the Origin of Species wearisome and uninteresting, and could do little more than open the book. As for the theory of evolution, his attitude was merely agnostic. "How did a miserable grub acquire its marvellous knowledge ? " he asks. "Are its habits, its aptitudes, and its industries, the integration of the infinitely little, acquired by successive experiments on the limitless path of time ? " Fabre would not hazard an answer. All he would do was to accumulate facts and to set riddles to the theorists. Take, for instance, the theory of mimicry. According to the evolutionists, certain insects would utilize their resemblance to others in order to conceal themselves and to introduce them- selves as parasites into their dwellings. Is that the case with the Volucella, a large fly striped like a wasp P Is the Volucella unmolested in the wasps' nest because of its protecting resemblance ? That would fit in with the theory, but the fact is that the Volucella grubs, instead of concealing themselves, "come and go openly upon the combs, although every stranger is immediately massacred and thrown out." What the grubs actually do is to visit each chamber of the wasps' larvae, and by plunging in the forepart of their bodies
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"provoke the emission of that fluid excrement of which the larvae, owing to their oloistration, contain an extreme reserve." In fact, they are nurses to the wasps' babies. What a discon- certing conclusion! exclaims Fabre. Or take, again, the case of the larvae of the Sitaris, a small beetle which is a parasite of the Anthophora bee. The glob of the Sitaris transfers itself from the male to the female Anthophora when the Anthophora is about to lay her eggs, gets itself carried to the gallery where the egg is to be laid, falls with the egg upon the surface of the honey intended for the bee grub, and thus acquires both home and food. Having done so, it goes through four moults before it becomes adult. These are merely external transformations, but they ate singularly different ; "the insect, which was clear-sighted, becomes blind; it loses its feet, to recover them later; its slender body becomes ventripotent; hard, it grows soft; its mandibles, at first steely, become hollowed out apoonwise, each modification of con- formation having its motive in a fresh modification of the conditions of the creature's life." How explain these strange successive existences ? How can the insect "receive education by example" Fabre attempts no explanation, but spends twenty-five years in accumulating the facts which go to make up this problem of hyper-metamorphosis.
But facts are not all. The genius of Fabre touches his notebook and transmutes it into an epic. The study of insects led him, he writes in a private letter, " into a new and barely suspected region, which is almost absurd." Courtiers, princes, lovers, poisoners, executioners, ogres—he finds more in the insect world than in all the fairy tales. Some of the passages referred to in this book deserve to be read in the French original, but AL Fabre and M. Legros are to be congratulated, in any case, upon their English translator. Take the description of the Praying Mantis, "that demoniac creature which alone among the insects turns its head to gaze." Let a great grasshopper chance to come by ; "the Mantis follows it with its glance, glides between the leaves, and suddenly rises up before it" ; then
"Assumes its spectral pose, which terrifies and fascinates the prey; the wing-covers open, the wings spring to their full width, forming a vast pyramid which dominates the back ; a sort of swishing sound is heard, like the hiss of a startled adder ; the murderous forelimbs open to their full extent, forming a cross with the body, and exhibiting the axillae ornamented with eyes vaguely resembling those of the peacock's tail, part of the panoply of war, concealed upon ordinary occasions. These are only exhibited when the creature makes itself terrible and superb for battle. Then the two grappling-hooks are thrown ; the fangs strike, the double scythes close together and hold the victim as in a vice."
Fabre, we are told, bad some idea of writing a Golden Book of the bridals and wedding festivals of the insects. What a book it would have been, with passages such as this of the " pale scorpions, with short-sighted eyes," which on arid hill- sides, where the doubtful rays of the moon pierce the storm- clouds, "display their strange faces, and two by two, hand in hand, stalk in measured paces amid the tufts of lavender! How tell their joys, their ecstasies, that no human language can express . . . !" To read is to speculate on the methods of the writer, which are here described by Dr. Legros in some extremely interesting pages. Fabre could not sit down to write at a given moment. Seated and motionless, hie mind became a blank. He was compelled to more or he could not think ; he tramped " like a circuaborse " round the table of his laboratory, and in thirty years wore a track in the tiles of the floor. Only when the words were quivering to live could he sit down to his little walnutwood table, "jest big enough to hold the inkstand, a halfpenny bottle, and his open notebook," and there he filled book after book with writing so small as almost to need a magnifying-glass. These pages, describing his methods of transcribing and interpreting his observed facts, can but increase the regret that we are seemingly to be denied the Memoirs from M. Fabre's own hand. He is "done with wide horizons," he tells us in his preface, and that decision mast remain.
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