While he was soaring toward the heights, and making his way into unexplored regions, under the astounded gaze of the most eminent authorities, who saw themselves suddenly equalled and even surpassed, his scientific genius loved also to look downwards, to approach the beginners, to return, as it were, to the starting-point, in order to hold out his hand to them, and to trace out for them, through all the stages of science, the path that he had opened up for himself in the face of unheard-of difficulties.
He laboured to give them what he himself had felt the lack of almost as much as the [[300]]help of masters: the assistance of luminous, living books, capable of teaching without fatigue and without tedium. His class books are, in fact, models of their kind. In them you will find no vague phraseology, but the simplest, most precise, yet most natural language; no idle excess of erudition, but the most perfect lucidity of text as of diagram; no dryness, nothing commonplace, but everywhere something picturesque, original, and full of life, giving charm and relief to all that is learned; and above all the constant care never to isolate oneself from life, to keep in touch with reality, by leading the youthful mind from the spectacles which are most familiar to it to the conceptions of science and from these to such of their applications as are most usual and most familiar.
To sum up, a rare talent for simply and clearly expounding the most difficult theories in such a way as to render them accessible to the youngest minds; a wonderful power of capturing the attention from all sides, of breaking down the water-tight partition which too often exists between the mind and the heart, between science and life, between theory and practice: such are the essential characteristics which earned Fabre the title of “the incomparable populariser.” [[301]]
About 1866 and 1867, at the Normal College of Rodez, one of our professors used to read to us and teach us to admire certain little books by our as yet but little known compatriot, J. H. Fabre, who was born at Saint-Léons, so he told us, and had graduated from the Normal College of Avignon.
Such is the information recently given us by M. François Fabié, as “a detail that might perhaps give us pleasure, and which proves, in any case, that not all the inhabitants of the Rouergue, as was mistakenly said of late, were ignorant of the name, origin, and talent of J. H. Fabre.”[4] [[302]]
We are, indeed, glad to think that if he was unduly overlooked at a later time, he was at least known and admired at an early period in Aveyron, and that as early as 1866 his class books were especially recommended to the attention of our young schoolmasters at the Normal College of Rodez. They could have had none better conceived or compiled. Would to heaven our public schoolmasters had always been as happily inspired or as well advised in the choice of their textbooks! Would to heaven that, instead of the dismal and misleading suggestions of materialism and impiety, there were still a place in the manuals of science, put in the hands of our children, for reflections as sane and as lofty as these. “By their practical side the sciences verge upon agriculture, medicine, and industry; but they have before all a moral advantage which is not shared in the same degree by any other branch of human knowledge: in that by giving us a knowledge of the created universe they uplift the soul and nourish the mind with noble and salutary thoughts.”[5] [[303]]
The study of the heavenly bodies in particular has this inestimable result: “The things that we are told by stellar astronomy overwhelm the understanding and leave no room in our minds except for an impulse of religious wonder at the author of these marvels, the God whose unlimited power has peopled the abysses of space with immeasurable heaps of suns.”[6] But the divine work “perhaps appears more marvellous still in the infinity of littleness than in the infinity of magnitude: Magnus in magnis, it has been said of God, maximus in minimis.”[7] This fine saying is verified and more or less explicitly confirmed in a thousand passages of the Souvenirs.
Fabre’s works of popularisation are very numerous: they include no less than seventy to eighty volumes; they embrace all the elements of the sciences learned and taught by the author: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc.; but their principal aim was to teach the natural sciences, which furnish the material of more than fifty volumes intended for the primary or secondary degree of education. [[304]]
In his favourite domain of the natural sciences, as in that of the other sciences, the practical tendency of his teaching was by preference directed toward agricultural applications, as is shown by the very titles of many of his books: Eléments usuels des sciences physiques et naturelles, avec applications à l’hygiène et a l’agriculture—Le Livre des Champs—Les Auxiliaires—Les Ravageurs—Arithmétique agricole—Chimie agricole: indeed it was with the last volume that he inaugurated his series of initiatory textbooks. For the use of young girls and future housewives, he published books on Le Ménage, Hygiène and Economie domestique.
And all these little books are presented in a picturesque and attractive form. The very titles have nothing austere about them: Entretien de l’oncle Paul avec ses neveux sur les choses d’agriculture—Chimie de l’oncle Paul. There is also The Livre de Maître Paul, the Histoire des Bêtes, the Leçons des choses, the Livre d’Histoires and the Livre des Champs. Under different titles the other volumes evoke, like these, a sort of family atmosphere; they display the same concrete style of narrative and the same lifelike charm of dialogue. [[305]]