Fabre, Poet of Science

by Georges Victor Legros

But in cultivating our intuition, as Bergson invites us to do, would it be impossible to re-awaken, deep within us, these strange faculties, which perhaps are only slumbering? What of that species of indefinable memory which permits the red ant, the Bembex, the Cerceris, the Pompilus, the Chalicodoma and so many others to "find themselves," to orientate themselves with infallible certainty and incredible accuracy? Is it not to be found, according to travellers, in those men who have remained close to nature and accustomed from their remotest origins to listen to the silence of the great deserts?

Finally, the evolutionists, who "reconstruct the world in imagination," and who see in the relationship of neighbouring species a proof of descent or derivation, and a whole ideal series, will not fail to perceive throughout his work, in the elementary operations of the Eumenes and the Odynerus, cousins of the Cerceris, which sting their prey in places as yet ill determined, not indeed so many isolated attempts, but an incomplete process of invention, an attempt at procedures still in the fact of formation: in a word, the birth of that marvellous instinct which ends in the transcendent art of the Sphex and the Ammophila.

Although they have acquired such prodigious deftness, these master paralysers are not, in fact, always infallible. Occasionally the Sphex blunders and gropes, "operates clumsily"; the cricket revives, gets upon its feet, turns round and round, and tries to walk. But, inquires Fabre, do you say that having profited by a fortuitous act, which has turned out to be favourable to them, they have perfected themselves by contact with their elders, "thanks to the imitation of example," and that they have thus crystallized their experiences, which have been transmitted by heredity--thereby fixed in the race? [(9/7.)]

How much we should prefer that it were so! How much more comprehensible and interesting their life would become!

But "when the hymenopteron breaks its cocoon, where are its masters! Its predecessors have long ago disappeared. How then can it receive education by example?"

You who "shape the world to your whim," you will reply: "Doubtless there are no longer masters to‑day; but go back to the first ages of the globe, when the world in its newness, as Lucretius has so superbly said, as yet knew neither bitter cold nor excessive heat [(9/8.)]; an eternal springtide bathed the earth, and the insects, not dying, as to‑day, at the first touch of frost, two successive generations lived side by side, and the younger generation could profit at leisure by the lessons of example." [(9/9.)]

Let us return to Fabre's laboratory, to the covers of wire-gauze, and note what becomes, at the approach of winter, of the survivors of the vespine city.

In the mild and comfortable retreat where the wasps are kept under observation they die no less, despite their well-being and all the care expended on them, when once "the inexorable hour" has struck, and once the exact capital of life which seems to have been imparted to them ages ago is exhausted. With no apparent cause, we see death busy among them. "Suddenly the wasps begin to fall as though struck by lightning; for a few moments the abdomen quivers and the legs gesticulate, then finally remain inert, like a clockwork machine whose spring has run down to the last coil." [(9/10.)] This law is general; "the insect is born orphaned both of mother and father, excepting the social insect, and again excepting the dung-beetle, which dies full of days." [(9/11.)]

Moreover, Fabre is never weary of demonstrating that the insect, perfectly unconscious of the motive which makes it act, this thereby incapable of profiting by the lessons of experience and of innovation in its habits, beyond a very narrow circle. "No apprentices, no masters." In this world each obeys "the inner voice" on its own account; each sets itself to accomplish its task, not only without troubling as to what its neighbour is doing, but without thinking any further as to what it is doing itself; instance the Epeïra, turning its back on its work, yet "the latter proceeds of itself, so well is the mechanism devised"; and if by ill chance the spider acted otherwise it would probably fail.

Darwin knew barely the tenth part of the colossal work of Fabre. He had read firstly in the "Annals of Natural Science" of the habits of the Cerceris and the fabulous history of the Meloidae. Finally he saw the first volume of the "Souvenirs" appear, and was interested in the highest degree by the beautiful study on the sense of location and direction in the Mason-bees.