On the other hand, he did not become very intimate with these tiny peoples; his attention was dispersed over too many points; perhaps he was fundamentally incapable of concentrating himself for a long period upon a circumscribed object; perhaps he lacked that first condition of genius, patience, so essential to such researches: although he enriched science by an infinite multitude of precious facts and has recorded a quantity of details concerning the habits of insects, he did not succeed in representing any one of these innumerable little minds. He had an intense feeling for nature, but he was not able to interpret it, and his immense volume of work, scattered through nearly three hundred monographs, remains ineffective. Let us compare with his work the vast epic of the "Souvenirs." We become familiar with the whole life of the least insect, and all its unending related circumstances; we obtain sudden glimpses of insight into our own organization, with its abysses and its lacunae, and also into those rich provinces or faculties which we are only beginning to suspect in the depths of our unconscious activity. In the evening twilight, after the vast andante of the cicadae is hushed, at the hour when the shining glow-worms "light their blue fires," and the "pale Italian cricket, delirious with its nocturnal madness, chirrups among the rosemary thickets," while in the distance sounds the melodious tinkle of the bell-ringer frogs, replying from one hiding-place to another, the old master shows us that profound and mysterious magic with which matter is endowed by the faintest glimmer of life. He shows us the intimate connection of things, the universal harmony which so intimately allies all creatures; and he shows us also that everywhere and all around us, in the smallest object, poetry exists like a hidden flame, if only we know how to seek it. And in revealing so many marvellous energies in even the lowest creatures, he helps us to divine the infinity of phenomena still unguessed-at, which the subtlety of the unknowable force which thrills through the whole universe hides from us under the most trivial appearances. For he has not told everything; this incommensurable region, which had hitherto remained unworked, is far from being exhausted. How many unknown and hidden things are still left to be gleaned! There will be a harvest for all. Remember that "even the humblest species either has no history, or the little that has been written concerning it calls for serious revision" (14/8.); that a single bush, such as the bramble, suffices to rear more than fifty species of insects, and that each species, according to the just observation of Réaumur, "has its habits, its tricks of cunning, its customs, its industries, its art, its architecture, its different instincts, and its individual genius."