Excerpt from Insect Life: Souvenirs of a Naturalist
This little volume introduces the work of a great French naturalist to the reader of English. Reaumur, another Frenchman, is the greatest naturalist devoting himself to the observation of insects the world has yet seen. His six quarto volumes - Memoires pour servir a l'histoire des insectes - were published between 1734 and 1742. J.-H. Fabre, who happily is still with us, is second only to Reaumur in this part of the great field of Natural History.
Though compatriots the two men are remarkably different in the nature of their genius. Reaumur, stately and slow, both discursive and diffuse. Fabre, - styled by Charles Darwin the immortal Fabre, - a most patient, indefatigable observer, ready to sacrifice everything to the carrying on of his work, but making deductions too rapidly from his observations, and taking a philosophical position from which he refuses to budge, even though he stand alone among the naturalists of this generation.
Fabre's great merit is his graphic portraiture of the living insect as it really is.
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