For him the bat is a rat that has grown wings; the cuckoo is a sparrow-hawk that has retired from business; the slug, a snail which, through advancing age, has lost its shell; the night-jar, the etraoucho-grepaou, as he calls it, is an old toad which, having developed a passion for milk, has grown feathers in order to enter the folds and milk the goats. It would be impossible to get these fantastic ideas out of his head. Favier is, as will be seen, an evolutionist after his fashion, and a daring evolutionist. Nothing gives him pause in tracing the descent of animals. He has a reply for everything: this comes from that. If you ask why, he replies: “See how like they are!”
Shall we reproach him for these insanities when we hear scientists acclaiming the pithecanthropos as the precursor of man, led astray as they are by the formation of the monkey? Shall we reject the metamorphoses of the chavucho-grapaou when there are men who will seriously tell us that in the present condition of science it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some vaguely sketched monkey? Of the two transformations Favier’s seems to me the more admissible. A painter, a friend of mine, the brother of the great musician, Félicien David, imparted to me one day his reflections concerning the human structure. “Vé, moun bel ami,” he said, “vé: l’homé a lou dintré d’un por et [[284]]lou déforo d’uno mounino” (Man has the inside of a pig and the outside of a monkey). I recommend the painter’s jest to those who wish to derive man from the wild boar, when the monkey is out of fashion. According to David the descent is confirmed by internal resemblances: “L’homé a lou dintré d’un por.”
And, therefore, the naturalist proceeds to make some wise reflections which we owe in the first place to Favier:
Let us avoid generalisations that are not founded upon sufficiently numerous and solid foundations. Where these foundations are lacking the child is the great generaliser.
For him the feathered race means just the bird, and the reptile family the snake, without other differences than those of magnitude. Ignorant of everything, he generalises to the utmost, simplifying in his inability to see the complex. Later on he will learn that the Sparrow is not the Bullfinch, that the Linnet is not the Greenfinch; he will particularise, and he will do so more and more daily as his faculty of observation is more widely exercised. At first he saw nothing but resemblances, now he sees differences, but not yet so clearly as to avoid incongruous comparisons and zoological solecisms like those which my gardener utters.[5] [[285]]
This chapter was to have taken the form of a letter addressed to Charles Darwin, the illustrious naturalist who now lies buried beside Newton in Westminster Abbey. It was my task to report to him the result of some experiments which he had suggested to me in the course of our correspondence: a very pleasant task, for, though facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and his scientific honesty. I was drafting my letter when the sad news reached me: Darwin was dead:[6] after searching the mighty question of origins, he was now grappling with the last and darkest problem of the hereafter.[7]
This is what we need at the head of the seventh chapter of the second volume of the Souvenirs. Especially coming after what has gone before them, these few lines shed a more brilliant light upon Fabre’s secret attitude toward those very thinkers whose ideas he opposes most keenly than could any number of lectures. We have here the practical exemplification of that beautiful profession of faith inspired by Saint Augustine, which he has recorded elsewhere: “I wage war boldly upon those ideas that I believe untrue: [[286]]but God preserve me from ever doing so upon those who maintain them.”[8]
In his constant skirmishes against the theory of evolution, even in the set battles which he occasionally fights, whenever he writes Charles Darwin’s name he mentions it with evident accents of respect and sympathy, gladly referring to him as “the master,” “the illustrious master,” “the venerated master.”
On his part the English scientist does full justice to the French scientist’s incomparable mastery in the study of insects. We have often mentioned the title of “inimitable observer” which he gives him in his work on the Origin of Species. In a letter dated the 16th of April 1881, he wrote to Mr. Romanes, who was preparing a book on Animal Intelligence: “I do not know whether you [[287]]would care to discuss in your book some of the more complicated and marvellous instincts. It is an ungrateful task.… But if you discuss some of these instincts, it seems to me that you could not take a more interesting point than that of the animals that paralyse their prey, as Fabre has described in his astonishing memoir in the Annales des sciences naturelles, a memoir which he has since amplified in his admirable Souvenirs.”
When he wrote this Darwin was acquainted only with the first volume of the Souvenirs.[9] What would he have said if he could have enjoyed the whole of the learned entomologist’s masterly work?
In reading this first volume, the attention of the English naturalist had been especially struck by the operations of the Hunting Wasps, which were peculiarly upsetting to his theories.
Darwin was visibly preoccupied by the problem of instinct as propounded by the irrefutable observations of the French entomologist, but he did not despair of finding a solution in conformity with his system. Fabre, on his side, believed that his position [[288]]was inexpugnable, and was not without hope of converting Darwin by what appeared to him to be the evidence of the facts.
Nowhere does the theory of evolution come full tilt against so immovable an obstacle. Darwin, a true judge, did not fail to realise this. He greatly dreaded the problem of the instincts. My first results in particular had left him anxious. If he had known the tactics of the Hairy Ammophila, the Mantis-hunting Tachytus, the Philanthus apivorus, the Calicurgus, and other predatory insects which have since been investigated, his anxiety, I believe, would have become a frank avowal of his inability to get instinct to enter the world of his formula. Alas! the philosopher of Down left us when the discussion was only just beginning, with experiment to fall back upon, a method superior to all arguments. The little that I had published at that period left him still some hope of explanation. In his eyes instinct is always an acquired habit.