Fabre, Poet of Science

by Georges Victor Legros

The caterpillar of the Greater Peacock moth teaches us the same lesson; when occupied in weaving its cocoon it does not know how to repair an artificial rent; and "in spite of the certainty of its death, or rather that of the future butterfly, it quietly continues to spin, without troubling to cover the rent; devoting itself to a superfluous task, and ignoring the treacherous breach, which leaves the cocoon and its inhabitant at the mercy of the first thief that finds it." [(8/8.)]

Thus "because one action has just been performed, another must inevitably be performed to complete the first; what is done is done, and is never repeated. Like the watercourse, which cannot climb the hills and return to its source, the insect does not retrace its steps or repeat its actions, which follow one another invariably, and are inevitably connected in a necessary order, like a series of echoes, one of which awakens another...The insect knows nothing of its marvellous talents, just as the stomach knows nothing of its cunning chemistry. It builds like a bricklayer, weaves, hunts, stabs, and paralyses, as it secretes the venom of its weapons, the silk of its cocoon, the wax of its comb, or the threads of its web; always without the slightest knowledge of the means and the end." [(8/9.)]

Thus instinct is one thing and intelligence is another; and for Fabre there is no transition which can transform the one into the other.

But how profound and abundant, how infinite is the source from which this manifold activity derives, distributed as it is throughout the entire animal kingdom; and which in ourselves commands the profoundest part of our nature; unconscious, or even in opposition to our wonderful intelligence, which it often silences or altogether overwhelms.

Although the insect "has no need of lessons from its elders" in order to accomplish its beautiful masterpieces, the comprehensive concept of the genius which rises spontaneously and at a single step to the loftiest conceptions is not always a product of pure reason.

Compare the sublime logic of animal maternity, the impeccable dictates of instinct, with the hesitations, the gropings, the uncertainties, the errors and tragic failures of human maternity, when it seeks to replace the unerring commands of instinct by the clumsy efforts of the intelligence!

If all is darkness to the animal, apart from its habitual paths, how feeble and hesitating, how faltering and unequal is reason when it seeks to oppose its laborious inductions to the infallible wisdom of the unconscious!

It is, in fact, to this concatenation of actions, narrowly connected by a mutual dependence, that we owe this inexhaustible series of cunning industries and wonderful arts. To Fabre they are so many feats of a learned unconsciousness.

"See the nest, the accustomed masterpiece of mothers; it is more often than otherwise an animal fruit, a coffer full of germs, containing eggs in place of seeds."

The satin bag of the Epeïra fasciata, in which her eggs are enclosed, "breaks at the caress of the sun, like the skin of an over-ripe pomegranate."