At the beginning of this chapter should we not have placed the insects themselves at the head of Fabre’s collaborators in his researches? When the insect takes a hand, Favier himself is out of the running. In the meantime we have no intention of belittling Favier, or of retracting the praise which has been lavished upon him. Despite his inevitable deficiencies, and sometimes even because of them, Fabre owes him much. He owes him important manual services; he owes him curious data and inestimable discoveries; lastly, he owes him hitherto unknown opinions relating to evolution, for Favier is an evolutionist, and a highly original one. For him the bat is a rat that has grown wings; the cuckoo is a sparrow-hawk that has retired from business; the slug, a snail which, through advancing age, has lost its shell; the night-jar, the etraoucho-grepaou, as he calls it, is an old toad which, having developed a passion for milk, has grown feathers in order to enter the folds and milk the goats. It would be impossible to get these fantastic ideas out of his head. Favier is, as will be seen, an evolutionist after his fashion, and a daring evolutionist. Nothing gives him pause in tracing the descent of animals. He has a reply for everything: this comes from that. If you ask why, he replies: “See how like they are!” Shall we reproach him for these insanities when we hear scientists acclaiming the pithecanthropos as the precursor of man, led astray as they are by the formation of the monkey? Shall we reject the metamorphoses of the chavucho-grapaou when there are men who will seriously tell us that in the present condition of science it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some vaguely sketched monkey? Of the two transformations Favier’s seems to me the more admissible. A painter, a friend of mine, the brother of the great musician, Félicien David, imparted to me one day his reflections concerning the human structure. “Vé, moun bel ami,” he said, “vé: l’homé a lou dintré d’un por et lou déforo d’uno mounino” (Man has the inside of a pig and the outside of a monkey). I recommend the painter’s jest to those who wish to derive man from the wild boar, when the monkey is out of fashion. According to David the descent is confirmed by internal resemblances: “L’homé a lou dintré d’un por.” And, therefore, the naturalist proceeds to make some wise reflections which we owe in the first place to Favier: Let us avoid generalisations that are not founded upon sufficiently numerous and solid foundations. Where these foundations are lacking the child is the great generaliser.