Follow him, for example, in the "The Sky" (5/2.), which seems to thrill with the ardent and comprehensive genius of a Humboldt, and admire the ease with which he surmounts all the difficulties and smooths the way for the vast voyage on which he conducts you, past the infinity of the suns and the stars in their millions, scintillating in the cold air of night, to descend once more to our humble "Earth" (5/3.); first an ocean of fire, rolling its heavy waves of molten porphyry and granite, then "slowly hardening into strange floes and bergs, hotter than the red iron in the fire of the forge," rounding its back, all covered with gaping pustules, eruptive mountains and craters, and the first folds of its calcined crust, until the day when the vast mist of densest vapours, heaped up on every hand and of immeasurable depth, begins gradually to show rifts, giving rise at last to an infinite storm, a stupendous deluge, and forming the strange universal sea, "a mineral sludge, veiled by a chaos of smoke," whence at length the primitive soil emerges, "and at last the green grass." And although "a little animal proteid, capable of pleasure and pain, surpasses in interest the whole immense creation of dead matter," he does not forget to show us the spectacle of life flowing through matter itself; and he animates even the simple elementary bodies, celebrating the marvellous activities of the air, the violence of Chlorine, the metamorphoses of Carbon, the miraculous bridals of Phosphorus, and "the splendours which accompany the birth of a drop of water." (5/4.) A man must indeed love knowledge deeply before he can make others love it, or render it easy and attractive, revealing only the smiling highways; and Fabre, above all things the impassioned professor, was the very man to lead his disciples "between the hedges of hawthorn and sloe," whether to show them the sap, "that fruitful current, that flowing flesh, that vegetable blood," or how the plant, by a mysterious transubstantiation, makes its wood, "and the delicate bundle of swaddling-bands of its buds," or how "from a putrid ordure it extracts the flavour and the fragrance of its fruits"; or whether he seeks to evoke the murderous plants that live as parasites at the cost of others; the white Clandestinus, "which strangles the roots of the alders beside the rivers," the Cuscuta, "which knows nothing of labour," the wicked Orobanche, plump, powerful and brazen, the skin covered with ugly scales, "with sombre flowers that wear the livery of death, which leaps at the throat of the clover, stifling it, devouring it, sucking its blood." (5/5.) Botany, by this genial treatment, becomes a most interesting study, and I know of no more captivating reading than "The Plant" and "The Story of the Log," the jewels of this incomparable series.