You may judge from this that he knows through and through the history of the creatures which form the subjects of his faithful narratives. He is informed of the smallest events of their lives. He possesses a calendar of their births; he records their chronology and the succession of generations; he has noted their methods of work, examined their diet, and recorded their meals. He discovers the motives which dictate their peculiarities of choice; why the Cerceris, for instance, among all the victims at its disposal, never selects anything but the Buprestis and the weevils. He is familiar too with their tactics of warfare and their methods of conflict. His gaze has penetrated even the most hidden dwellings; those in which the Halictus "varnishes her cells and makes the round loaf which is to receive the egg"; in which, under the cover of cocoons, murderous grubs devour slumbering nymphs; even the depths of the soil are not hidden from him, for there, thanks to his artifices, he has surprised the astonishing secret of the Minotaur. He sifts all doubtful stories; anecdotes, statements of supposed habits; all that is incoherent, or ill observed, or misinterpreted; all the cliches which the makers of books pass from hand to hand. In place of repetition he gives us laws, constant facts, fixed rules. With incomparable skill, he repeats and tests the ancient experiments of Réaumur. He is not content to show us that Erasmus Darwin is mistaken; he points out how it is that he has fallen into error. (7/33.) He sets himself to decipher the meaning of old tales, skilfully disengaging the little parcel of truth which usually lies beneath a mass of incorrect or even false statements. He criticises La Fontaine, and questions the statements of Horus Apollo and Pliny. From a mass of undigested knowledge he has created the living science of entomology, which had received from Réaumur a first breath of vitality, in such wise that each individual creature is presented in his work with its precise expression and the absolute truth of its character and attitudes; the inhabitants of the woods and fields, whether those which feed upon the crops or those which live in the crevices of the rocks, or the obscure workers that crawl upon the earth; all those which have a secret to tell or something to teach us; the Cigale, so different from the insect of the Fable; and above all that beetle whose name had hitherto been encountered arrayed in the most fantastic legends, the famous Scarabaeus sacer of the tombs, which Fabre preferred to place at the head of his epic as an agreeable prologue, although the inquiry relative to his amazing feats belongs chronologically to a comparatively recent period of his career.