Fabre, Poet of Science

by Georges Victor Legros

In many species the material fact of maternity is reduced to its simplest expression.

The Pieris limits herself to depositing her eggs on the leaves of the cabbage, "on which the young must themselves find food and shelter."

"From the height of the topmost clusters of the centaury the Clythris negligently lets her eggs fall to the ground, one by one, here or there at hazard; without the least care as to their installation.

"The eggs of the Locustidae are implanted in the earth like seeds and germinate like grain."

But stop before the Lycosa, that magnificent type of maternal love which Fabre has already depicted. "She broods over her eggs with anxious affection. With the hinder claws resting on the margin of the well she holds herself supported above the opening of the white sac, which is swollen with eggs. For several long weeks she exposes it to the sun during half the day. Gently she turns it about in order to present every side to the vivifying light. The bird, in order to hatch her eggs, covers them with the down of her breast, and presses them against that living calorifer, her heart. The Lycosa turns hers about beneath the fires of heaven; she gives them the sun for incubator." (10.2.) Could abnegation be more perfect? What greater proof could there be of renunciation and self-oblivion?

But appearances are vain. Substitute for the beloved sac some other object, and the spider "will turn about, with the same love, as though it were her sac of eggs, a piece of cork, a pincushion, or a ball of paper," just as the hen, another victim of this sublime deception, will give all her heart to hatching the china nest-eggs which have been placed beneath her, and for weeks will forget to feed.

The young brood hatches, and the spider goes a-hunting, carrying her little ones on her back; she protects them in case of danger, but is incapable of recognizing them or of distinguishing them from the young of others. The Copris and the Scorpion are no less blind, "and their maternal tenderness barely exceeds that of the plant, which, a stranger to any sense of affection or morality, none the less exercises the most exquisite care in respect of its seeds."

Moreover, the impulse to work is only a kind of unconscious pleasure. When the Pelopaeus "has stored her lair with game," when the Cerceris has sealed the crypt to which she has confided the future of her race, neither one nor the other can foresee "the future offspring which their faceted eyes will never behold, and the very object of their labours is to them occult."

With them, as with all, life can only be a perpetual illusion.

Yet the marvellous edifice of the "Souvenirs entomologiques" is consummated by the astonishing history of the Minotaur, whose habits surpass in ideal beauty all that could be imagined.