Here, as among us, are honest toilers and free-booters, producers and parasites; good and bad husbands and wives; examples of beautiful devotion and hideous egoism; delightful amenities and ferocious cruelties, extending [[332]]even to cannibalism; workers of every class and manufacturers of every kind, and, in a higher order of capacities, engineers and surgeons, chemists and physicists, naturalists and physiologists, topographers and meteorologists, geometricians and logicians, and many more, whose enumeration we will leave to the reader.
“Let us assemble facts in order to obtain ideas,” said Buffon. In this process may be summed up the whole of the great Provençal naturalist’s scientific work. If he notes the least circumstances of the little lives that unfold themselves before his eyes, he does so not merely as an observer and an artist who would not miss the smallest element of knowledge or beauty, but also as a philosopher who wishes to understand all that he sees, and for that reason neglects nothing. In entomology the smallest facts are not only the most curious and picturesque, they are often the most significant: maxima in minimis. Those minute details which are in danger of being regarded as “puerilities are connected with the most solemn questions which it is possible for man to consider.”[6] [[333]]
There are philosophical meditations in Fabre’s work, evoked by his observations, and, like his observations, they are not presented in a preconceived order. His arguments are scattered throughout his work. Nowhere in the Souvenirs is there any body of doctrine. They contain only studies of the habits of individual insects; and it is only when he has gathered certain data or made certain experiments that the author gives us his conclusions or explanations or attacks the errors of the theories in vogue.
Yet it is not difficult, such is their degree of prominence and continuity, to disengage and synthesise the general ideas scattered throughout this vast collection of facts. We shall make the attempt in order to give the reader at least a glimpse of the writer’s attitude toward the problems of science and of life.
From the achievements and actions of the insects, the philosophic mind of the naturalist first of all deduces, very clearly, the general laws of their activity.
What strikes us at once is the wonderful degree of knowledge presupposed by certain of their actions: for all that instinct impels the insect to do is marked by perfect wisdom, comparable and even superior to [[334]]human wisdom. This first law of instinct is brought into especial prominence by the author of the Souvenirs in his study of the Hunting Wasps.
These Wasps, which are themselves purely vegetarian, know that their larvæ must have animal food; fresh succulent flesh still quivering with life.
Some, like the Common Wasp, which watches over the growth of its offspring, feed the larvæ from day to day, as the bird brings beakfuls of food to its nestlings, and these kill their prey, which they are thus able to serve to their larvæ perfectly fresh.
But the majority do not watch over the hatching or the growth of their larvæ. They are forced therefore to lay up a store of food beforehand. They know this, and are not found wanting. But here they are confronted by a most difficult problem. If the prey carried to the nest is dead, it will quickly putrefy; it cannot possibly keep fresh, as it must, for the weeks and months of the larva’s growth. If it is alive it cannot easily be seized by the larvæ, and will represent a menace or even a deadly danger. The Wasp must discover the secret of producing, in her victims, the immobility of death together with the incorruptibility of life. And the [[335]]Wasps have discovered this secret, for the prey which they provide for their larvæ remain at their disposal to the end without movement and without deterioration. Do these tiny creatures know intuitively the secrets of asepsis which Pasteur discovered with so much difficulty? Such was the conclusion with which Dufour was forced to content himself. He presumed the existence, in the Hunting Wasps, of a virus which was at once a weapon of the chase and a liquid preservative, for the immolation and conservation of the victims. But even if aseptic a dead insect would shrivel up into a mummy. Now this must not occur, and as a matter of fact the Wasp’s victims remain moist indefinitely, just as if alive. And in reality they are not dead; they are still alive. Fabre has demonstrated this by proving the persistence of the organic functions, and by feeding some of them by hand. In short, it is incontestable that the victims are not put to death but merely deprived of movement, smitten with paralysis. How has this result, more miraculous even than asepsis, been obtained by the insect? By the procedure that the most skilful physiologist would employ. By plunging its sting into the victim’s body, not at random, which might kill it, but at certain definite [[336]]points, exactly where the invisible nervous ganglia are located which control the various movements.