Why should the man who has made a fortune, who has neither children nor relations, and who may die tomorrow, continue to work for himself alone, to employ his days and his energies in useless labours which will profit neither himself nor his kind? Ask of the Halictus, which, no longer capable of becoming a mother, makes herself guardian of a city, in order still to labour within the measure of her means. Ask of the Osmia, the Megachile, the Anthidium, which "with no maternal aim, for the sole joy of labour, strive to expend their forces in the accomplishment of their vain tasks, until the forces of life fail." Ask of the bee, which inaction leaves passive and melancholy so that she presently dies of weariness; of the Chalicodoma, so eager a worker that she will "let herself be crushed under the feet of the passer-by rather than abandon her task." Ask it of all nature, which knows neither halt nor repose, and who, according to the profound saying of Goethe "has pronounced her malediction upon all that retards or suspends her progress." Let us then labour, men and beasts, "so that we may sleep in peace; grubs and caterpillars in that torpor which prepares them for the transformation into moths and butterflies, and ourselves in the supreme slumber which dissolves life in order to renew it." Let us work, in order to nourish within ourselves that divine intuition thanks to which we leave our original impress upon nature; let us work, in order to bring our humble contribution to the general harmony of things, by our painful and meritorious labour; in order that we may associate ourselves with God, share in His creation, and embellish and adorn the earth and fill it with wonders. (16/4.) Forward then! always erect, even amid the tombs, to forget our griefs. Fabre finds no better consolation to offer his brother, who has lost almost in succession his wife and his eldest daughter: "Do not take it ill if I have not condoled with you on the subject of your recent losses. Tried so often by the bitterness of domestic grief, I know too well the inanity of such consolations to offer the like to my friends. Time alone does a little cicatrize such wounds; and, let us add, work. Let us keep on our feet and at work as long as we are able. I know no better tonic." (16/5.) And this exhortation to work, which recurs so often in the first letters of his youth, was to be the last word of the last volume which so splendidly terminates the incomparable series of his "Souvenirs": "Laboremus." ... Age has killed neither his courage nor his energies, and he continues to work with the same zeal at nearly ninety years of age, and with as much eagerness as though he were destined to live for ever.