In the quiet little town whither he went to succeed his father, this military surgeon, turned country doctor, lived a busy and useful life. While occupied with his humble patients, whom he preferred to regard merely as an interesting clinic, and while keeping the daily record of his medical observations, he felt irresistibly drawn "to ferret in all the holes and corners of the soil, to turn over every stone, large or small; to shrink from no fatigue, no difficulty; to scale the highest peaks, the steepest cliffs, to brave a thousand dangers, in order to discover an insect or a plant. (14/5.) A disciple of Latreille, he shone above all as an impassioned descriptive writer. No one was more skilled in determining a species, in dissecting the head of a fly or the entrails of a grub, and no spectacle in the world was for him so fascinating as the triple life of the insect; those magical metamorphoses, which he justly considered as one of the most astonishing phenomena in creation. (14/6.) He saw further than Réaumur, and burned with the same fire as Fabre, for he also had the makings of a great poet. His curiosity had assembled enormous collections, but he considered, as Fabre considered, that collecting is "only the barren contemplation of a vast ossuary which speaks only to the eyes, and not to the mind or imagination," and that the true history of insects should be that of their habits, their industries, their battles, their loves, and their private and social life; that one must "search everywhere, on the ground, under the soil, in the waters, in the air, under the bark of trees, in the depth of the woods, in the sands of the desert, and even on and in the bodies of animals." Was not this in reality the ambitious programme which Fabre was later to propose to himself when he entered into his Harmas and founded his living laboratory of entomology; he also having set himself as his exclusive object the study of "the insects, the habits of life, the labours, the struggles and the propagation of this little world, which agriculture and philosophy should closely consider"? (14/7.) Dufour also had admirably grasped the place of the insect in the general harmony of the universe, and he clearly perceived that parasitism, that imbrication of mutually usurping lives, is "a law of equilibration, whose object is to set a limit to the excessive multiplication of individuals of the same type," that the parasites are predestined to an imprescriptible mission, and that this mysterious law "defies all explanation."