The Life of the Caterpillar

by Jean-Henri Fabre

I have no objection, if by that you mean that the animal’s nasal passages are the organ of perception; but is the thing perceived always a mere smell, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, an effluvium such as our own senses understand it? I have some reason to doubt this. Let us set the matter forth.

I have had the good fortune on several occasions to accompany a Dog who was a great expert at his trade. Certainly he was nothing to look at, this artist whom I was so anxious to see at work: just a Dog, placid and deliberate in his ways, ugly, unkempt; the sort of Dog that you would never admit to your fireside. Talent and poverty often go hand in hand. [[303]]

His master, a celebrated rabassier[3] in the village, convinced that I had no intention of stealing his secrets and one day setting up in competition, allowed me to join him in his expeditions, a favour which he did not often grant. The worthy man was quite willing to fall in with my views, once he saw that I was not an apprentice but merely an enquirer who made drawings[4] and wrote down lists of underground vegetable things, instead of marketing my bagful of treasure-trove, the glory of the Christmas Turkey.

It was agreed between us that the Dog should act as he pleased and receive a bit of bread as his reward after each discovery, indiscriminately. Every spot scratched up by his paws was to be dug and the object indicated extracted without our troubling about its commercial value. In no case was the master’s experience to intervene and divert the dog from a spot where practice told him [[304]]that nothing saleable was to be found, for, in drawing up my botanical lists, I preferred wretched and unmarketable products to the choicest morsels, though these of course were welcomed when they appeared.

Thus conducted, the underground botanizing was very fruitful. With his perspicacious nose, the Dog made me gather indifferently the large and the small, the fresh and the putrid, the scented and the unscented, the fragrant and the stinking. I was amazed at my collection, which comprised the greater part of the hypogean fungi in my neighbourhood.

What a variety of structure and above all of odour, the primary quality in this question of scent! There are some that have nothing more noticeable than a vague fungous mustiness, which is more or less evident in all. Some smell of turnips, of rotten cabbage; some are fetid enough to fill the collector’s house with their stench. The real truffle alone possesses the aroma dear to the epicure.

If smell, as we understand it, is the Dog’s only guide, how does he manage to find his way through all these incongruous odours? [[305]]Is he apprised of the contents of the soil by a general emanation, the fungous effluvium common to the different species? In that case an extremely embarrassing question arises.

I paid some attention to the ordinary mushrooms, many of which, as yet invisible, announced their coming as imminent by cracking the surface of the ground. Now I never saw the Dog stop at any of those points where my eyes divined the cryptogam pushing back the earth with the thrust of its cap, points where the ordinary fungous smell was certainly most pronounced. He passed them by scornfully, with not a sniff, with not a stroke of his paw. And yet the thing was underground; and its reek was similar to others which he sometimes pointed out to us.

I came back from the Dog’s school with the conviction that the truffle-detecting nose has a better guide than smell, in the sense in which our olfactory powers realize it. It must perceive, in addition, effluvia of a different order, full of mystery to us, who are not equipped accordingly. Light has its dark rays, which are without effect upon our retinæ, but not apparently upon all. Why should not [[306]]the domain of smell have its secret emanations, unknown to our senses but perceptible to a differently constructed organ of smell?

If the scent of the Dog leaves us perplexed to this extent, that it is impossible for us to say exactly or even to suspect what it perceives, it at least tells us plainly that we should be greatly mistaken to compare everything by human standards. The world of sensations is far larger than the limits of our sensibility admit. What a number of facts in the working of the forces of nature escape us for want of organs delicate enough to perceive them!