Nevertheless, he adored music, of which he knew something, having learned it, as he learned his drawing, without a master; but he preferred the naive songs of the country, or the melody of a flute; to the most scholarly concert-music. (15/16.) In the intimacy of the modest chamber which serves as the family salon, with its few shabby and old-fashioned pieces of furniture, he plays on an indifferent harmonium little airs of his own composition, the subjects of which were at first suggested by his own poetry. Like Rollinat, Fabre rightly considers that music should complete, accentuate, and release that which poetry has perforce left incomplete or indefinite. This is why he makes the bise laugh and sing and roar; why he imitates the organ-tones of the wind in the pines, and seeks to reproduce some of the innumerable rhythms of nature; the frenzy of the lizard, the wriggling of the stickle-back, the jumping gait of the frog, the shrill hum of the mosquito, the complaint of the cricket, the moving of the Scarabaei, and the flight of the Libellulae. Too busy by day to find time for much reading, it was at night that he would shut himself up. Retiring early to his little chamber, with bare walls and bare tile floor, and a window opening to the garden, he would lie on his low bed, with curtains of green serge, and would often read far into the night. This philosopher, to whose books the philosophers of the future will resort for new theories and original ideas, refuses to have any commerce with other philosophers, disdaining their systems and preferring to go straight to the facts. Even when he took up Darwin's "Origin of Species" he did little more than open the book; so wearisome and uninteresting, he told me, did he find the reading of it. On the other hand, he is full of the ancient philosophers, and as he did not read them very extensively in his youth and middle age, he has returned to them finally with love and predilection for "these good old books." Unlike many thinkers of the day, he is persuaded that we cannot with impunity dispense with classic studies; and he rightly considers that science and the humanities are not rivals, but allies. Above all he has a particular affection for Virgil; one may say that he is steeped in his poetry; and he knows La Fontaine by heart. The style of the latter is curiously like his own, and Fabre owns himself as his disciple; certainly La Fontaine's is the most active influence which his work reveals. He has a profound acquaintance with Rabelais, who was always his "friend" and who constantly crops up in his conversation and his chance remarks.