These last are not always the most scholarly nor the most learned nor the most patient, but they are those who possess in a high degree that special vision, that gift, properly speaking poetic, which is known as the clinical eye, which at the first glance perceives and confirms the diagnosis in all its detail. Fabre has a mind propitious to such processes; and if, by chance, circumstances had directed his attention to medicine, that science which is based upon an abundant provision of facts, but in which good sense and a kind of divination play a still wider part, there is no doubt that he would have been capable of becoming a shining light in this new arena. He was full of admiration for that other illustrious Vauclusian, François Raspail (7/16.), whose medical genius anticipated Pasteur and all the conceptions of modern medicine. It would seem that he found in him his own temper, his own fashion of seeing and representing things. He loved Raspail's books and his prescriptions, full of reason and a most judicious good sense, distrusting for himself and for his family the complicated formulae and cunning remedies of an art too considered and still unproved. At Carpentras, while his first-born, Émile, was hovering between life and death, and the physician who came to see him, "being at the end of his resources," did nothing more for him and soon ceased to come, thinking that the child would not last till the morrow, Fabre flew to the works of Raspail. "I searched to discover what his malady was. I found it, and he was treated day and night accordingly. To-day he is convalescent; and his appetite has returned. I believe he is saved, and I shall say, like Ambroise Paré, 'I have nursed him; God has cured him.'" (7/17.) The episode which he relates, when, at the primary school of Avignon, a retort had just burst, "spurting in all directions its contents of vitriol," right in the midst of the suddenly interrupted chemistry lesson, and when, thanks to his prompt action, he saved the sight of one of his comrades, does honour to his initiative and presence of mind. (7/18.)