The little table protests to-day. It has no desire whatever to go up in smoke with the labour in which it has borne its part; it flatters itself, on the contrary, with the hope that having shared in the toil it may also have some chance of sharing the honour. Rather than this unjust sentence of death, it seems to hear a summons to life:
“Let us go back, O my table, to the days of our youth, the days of your French polish and my smiling illusions,” and it stands proudly upon its legs, as though to serve as [[296]]a support for these pages destined to recapitulate Fabre’s written work, all that work which it has helped him to compose, from the first line to the last.
Of the first literary or scientific exercises of the youthful Fabre and the first quivers of the little table under the nervous, valiant, indefatigable pen of the young Carpentras schoolmaster, we shall say nothing, unless that there was really some excuse for trembling before the audacious and strenuous toil of the beginning, and all the exercise-books stuffed with figures and formulæ, diagrams and texts which represent the solitary and strictly personal work of preparation for two bachelor’s degrees, quickly followed by those of the licentiate and the doctor. It was an anatomical work, a memoir on the reproductive organs of the Myriapods, or Centipedes, that won for Fabre the degree of Doctor of Science.
Fabre’s first contribution to the Press was a memoir on the Predatory Hymenoptera, published in the Annales des sciences naturelles. This attracted great attention among the masters of science. The Institute of France awarded him a prize for experimental physiology. Darwin, then at the height of his fame, saluted him with amazed and [[297]]rather uneasy admiration. Léon Dufour, the patriarch of entomology in those days, wrote the author a most eulogistic and encouraging letter; happy to have directed his researches toward discoveries which he himself had not suspected, the venerable scientist emphatically exhorted his young friend to continue his journey along the path that was opening before him, a path so full of promise.
Some time after this he published another entomological work which was by no means calculated to disappoint the hopes aroused by the first. It dealt with an insect related to the Cantharides, the Sitaris humeralis, and it contained matter no less unsuspected and no less astonishing than the first.
The impression produced was all the more profound in that the miracle of instinct was here accompanied by a physiological miracle, a phenomenon of metamorphosis wholly unknown, to describe which Fabre hit upon the very happy term hypermetamorphosis. To the ordinary series of transformations through which the insect passes in proceeding from the larval condition to that of the nymph and the perfect insect, this strange little beast adds another as a prelude to the first, so that the larva of the Sitaris passes through four different forms, known as the [[298]]primary larva, the secondary larva, the pseudo-chrysalis, and the tertiary larva, and these resemble one another so little that only the most sustained attention on the observer’s part enables him to believe the testimony of his eyes.
All these revelations keenly stimulated the curiosity and emulation of the specialists, and set them “on the track of the history, hitherto mysterious, of the Cantharides and all the insects resembling them.… A number of naturalists, Beauregard, Riley, Valéry-Mayet, Künckel d’Herculais, Lichtenstein, and others began to study the insects more or less adapted to the preparation of blisters: the Mylabres, the Meloës, the Cantharides. Lichtenstein even carried the larvæ of the Cantharides in his watch pocket, enclosed in small glass tubes, so that he could keep them warm and observe them at any moment.”
It was by reading the memoir on the peregrinations and metamorphoses of the Sitaris that M. Perrier[2] made the acquaintance of Fabre’s work, of which he was to become one of the most competent judges and fervent and eloquent admirers. He referred to this essay last year in his speech at the Sérignan jubilee: [[299]]
It was in 1868. I had only just left the Higher Normal College, and was a very youthful assistant naturalist at the Museum. I can still see myself on the box-seat of an omnibus, crossing the Place de la Concorde, with an open book on my knees; I was reading the history of the Sitaris humeralis; I was marvelling at its complicated metamorphoses and its ruses for making its way into the nest of the solitary Bee.[3]
These early essays were followed by many others, also published in the Annales des sciences naturelles, and were always received with the same favour by all the notable scientists of the time.