Very few people are really interested in the lower animals, and Fabre has been reproached with wasting his time over "childish histories, unworthy of serious attention and unlikely to make money," of wasting in frivolous occupations the time which is passing so quickly and can never return. And why should he have still further wasted so many precious hours in executing minute drawings whose reproduction would have involved an expenditure which his publisher would not dare to venture upon, and which he himself could not afford? For this universal inquirer was well fitted for such a task, and all these creatures which he had depicted he is capable of representing with brush and pencil as faithfully as with his pen. He had it in him to be not only a writer, but an excellent draughtsman, and even a great painter. He has reproduced in water-colour, with loving care, the decorations of the specimens of prehistoric pottery which his excavations have revealed, and which he has endeavoured to reconstruct, with all the science of an archaeologist. He has displayed the same skill in water-colour in that astonishing iconography, in which he has detailed, with marvellous accuracy, all the peculiarities of the mycological flora of the olive- growing districts. (16/14.) As for those "paltry figures" insufficient or flagrantly incorrect in drawing, with which many people are satisfied, he regards them as "intolerable" in his own books, and as absolutely contradicting the rigorous accuracy of his text. (16/15.) Of late years photography and the skill of his son Paul have supplied this deficiency. He taught his son to fix the insects on the sensitive plate in their true attitudes, in the reality of their most instantaneous gestures. However valuable such documents may be, how much we should prefer fine drawings, giving relief not only to forms and colours, but also to the most characteristic features and the whole living physiognomy of the creature! This is the function of art; but the great artist that was in Fabre was capable in this domain of rivalling the magical talent of an Audubon. Such work was relinquished, although so many romances of nature, so much dishonest patch-work, won the applause due to success. Fabre fell more and more into a state bordering on indigence, and finally he was quite forgotten. An opponent of evolution, he was out of the fashion. The encyclopaedias barely mentioned him. Lamarckians and Darwinians, who still made so much noise in the world, ignored him; and no one came now to open the gate behind which was ageing, in obscurity and deserted, "one of the loftiest and purest geniuses which the civilized world at that moment possessed; one of the most learned naturalists and one of the most marvellous of poets in the modern and truly legitimate sense of the word." (16/16.)