This hypothesis, which was one day suggested to Fabre by a friend of great intellectual culture (11/8.), charmed and interested him keenly. I noticed that he was more than usually attentive, and he seemed to me to be suddenly reassured and appeased. For him it was as though a faint ray of light had suddenly fallen among these impenetrable and distressing problems. It seemed to him that by setting before our eyes the spectacle of so many woes, universally distributed, and doubtless necessary, woes which do not spare even the humblest of creatures, the Sovereign Intelligence intends to exhort us to examine ourselves truly and to dispose us to greater love and pity and resignation. All his work is highly and essentially religious; and while he has given us a taste for nature, he has not also endeavoured to give us, according to the expression of Bossuet "the taste for God," or at least a sense of the divine? In opposing the doctrine of evolution, which reduces the animal world to the mere virtualities of the cell; in revealing to us all these marvels which seem destined always to escape human comprehension; finally, by referring us more necessarily than ever to the unfathomable problem of our origins, Fabre has reopened the door of mystery, the door of the divine Unknown, in which the religion of men must always renew itself. We should belittle his thought, we should dwarf the man himself, were we to seek to confine to any particular thesis his spiritualistic conception of the universe. Fabre recognizes and adores in nature only the great eternal Power, whose imprint is everywhere revealed by the phenomena of matter.