So intimate is the life which he leads among them all that he makes himself truly their companion, and relates his own history in narrating theirs; pleased to discover in their joys and sorrows his own trials and delights; mingling in their annals his memories and his impressions; delightful fragments of a childlike autobiography, encrusted in his learned work; moving and delightful pages in which all the ingenuity of this noble mind reveals itself with a touching sincerity, in which all the freshness of this charming and so profoundly unworldly nature is seen as through a pure crystal. There is no real communion with nature without sentiment, without an illuminating passion: often the sole and effectual grace which enables its true meaning to appear. Neither taste, nor intelligence, nor logic, nor all the science of the schools can suffice alone. To see further there is needed something like a gift of correspondence, surpassing the limits of observation and experience, which enables us to foresee and to divine the profound secrets of life which lie beneath appearances. Those who are so gifted have often only to open their eyes in order to grasp matters in their true light. A great observer is in reality a poet who imagines and creates. The microscope, the magnifying glass, the scalpel, are as it were the strings of a lyre. "The felicitous and fruitful hypothesis which constitutes scientific invention is a gift of sentiment" in the words of Claude Bernard; and of this king of physiology, who commenced by proving himself in works of pure imagination, and whose genius finally took for its theme the manifold variations of living flesh, of him too may we not say that he has explored the labyrinths of life with "the torch of poetry in his hand"? Similarly, do not the harmonious sequences which run through all the admirable discoveries of Pasteur give us the sensation of a veritable and gigantic poem? In Fabre also it seems that the passion which he brings to all his patient observations is in itself truly creative: "his heart beats with emotion, the sweat drips from his brow to the soil, making mortar of the dust"; he forgets food and drink, and "thus passes hours of oblivion in the happiness of learning." I have seen him in his laboratory studying the spawning of the bluebottle, when I, at his side, could scarcely support the horrible stench which rose from the putrefying adders and lumps of meat; he, however, was oblivious of the frightful odour, and his face was inundated with smiles of delight. Intelligence, then, must here be the servant of feeling and intuition; a kind of primitive faculty, mysterious and instinctive, which alone makes a great naturalist like Fabre, a great historian like Michelet, a great physician like Boherhaave or Bretonneau.