"Good society I avoid as much as possible; I prefer my own company. So I have seen no one; I did not respond to the principal's invitation to make the official round of visits." (4/8.) When obliged to accept some invitation, apart from occasions of too great solemnity, when he was really constrained to dress himself in the complete livery of circumstance and ceremony, he remained faithful to his black felt hat, which made a blot among all the carefully polished "toppers" of his colleagues. He was called to order; he was reprimanded; he obeyed unwillingly, or worse, he resisted; he revolted, and threatened to send in his resignation. To pay court to people, to endeavour to make himself pleasant, to grovel before a superior, were to him impossibilities. He could neither solicit, nor sail with the wind, nor force himself on others, nor even make use of his relations. However, when he went to Paris to take his doctor's degree in natural sciences, he did not forget Moquin-Tandon, who had formerly, in Corsica, revealed to him the nature of biology, and whom he himself had received and entertained in his humble home. The ex-professor of Toulouse, who was now eminent in his speciality, occupied the chair of natural history in the faculty of medicine in Paris. What better occasion could he wish of introducing himself to a highly placed official? Fabre had formerly been his host; he could recall the happy hours they had spent together; he could explain his plans, and ask for the professor's assistance! Fate pointed to him as a protector. But if Fabre had been capable of climbing the professor's stairs with some such ambitious desires, he would quickly have been disabused. The "dear master" had long ago forgotten the little professor of Ajaccio, and his welcome was by no means such as Fabre had the right to expect. Far from insisting, he was disheartened, perhaps a little humiliated, and hastened to take his leave. The theses which Fabre brought with him, and which, he had thought, ought to lead him one day to a university professorship, did not, as a matter of fact, contain anything very essentially original. He had been attracted, indeed fascinated, by all the singularities presented by the strange family of the orchids; the asymmetry of their blossoms, the unusual structure of their pollen, and their innumerable seeds; but as for the curious rounded and duplicated tubercles which many of them bore at their base, what precisely were they? The greatest botanists--de Candolle, A. de Jussieu--had perceived in them nothing more than roots. Fabre demonstrated in his thesis that these singular organs are in reality merely buds, true branches or shoots, modified and disguised, analogous to the metamorphosed tubercle of the potato. (4/9.) He added also a curious memoir on the phosphorescence of the agaric of the olive-tree, a phenomenon to which he was to return at a later date.