"What amusing and useful lessons" a well-balanced scheme of education might extract from this "academy of childish ingenuity"! (5/6.) At this time he was undertaking the education of his own children. His chemistry lessons especially had a great success. (5/7.) With apparatus of his own devising and of the simplest kind, he could perform a host of elementary experiments, the apparatus as a rule consisting of the most ordinary materials, such as a common flask or bottle, an old mustard-pot, a tumbler, a goose-quill or a pipe-stem. A series of astonishing phenomena amazed their wondering eyes. He made them see, touch, taste, handle, and smell, and always "the hand assisted the word," always "the example accompanied the precept," for no one more fully valued the profound maxim, so neglected and misunderstood, that "to see is to know." He exerted himself to arouse their curiosity, to provoke their questions, to discover their mistakes, to set their ideas in order; he accustomed them to rectify their errors themselves, and from all this he obtained excellent material for his books. For those more especially intended for the education of girls he took counsel with his daughter Antonia, inviting her collaboration, begging her to suggest every aspect of the matter that occurred to her; for instance, in respect of the chemistry of the household, "where exact science should shed its light upon a host of facts relating to domestic economy" (5/8.), from the washing of clothes to the making of a stew. Even now, to his despair, although freed from the cares of school life, he was always almost wholly without leisure to devote himself to his chosen subjects. It was at this period above all that he felt so "lonely, abandoned, struggling against misfortune; and before one can philosophize one has to live." (5/9.) And his incessant labour was aggravated by a bitter disappointment. In the year of Mill's death Fabre was dismissed from his post as conservator of the Requien Museum, which he had held in spite of his departure from Avignon, going thither regularly twice a week to acquit himself of his duties. The municipality, working in the dark, suddenly dismissed him without explanation. To Fabre this dismissal was infinitely bitter; "a sweeper-boy would have been treated with as much ceremony." (5/10.) What afflicted him most was not the undeserved slight of the dismissal, but his unspeakable regret at quitting those beloved vegetable collections, "amassed with such love" by Requien, who was his friend and master, and by Mill and himself; and the thought that he would henceforth perhaps be unable to save these precious but perishable things from oblivion, or terminate the botanical geography of Vaucluse, on which he had been thirty years at work!