“Let us preserve the relic. It was where he toiled so hard to teach himself and make himself capable of teaching others; it was where he so long consumed his strength to find food for us when we were little. Let us keep the sacred plank.” I dare not believe in such a future for you. You will pass into strange hands, O my old friend; you will become a bedside-table laden with bowl after bowl of linseed-tea, until, decrepit, rickety, and broken-down, you are chopped up to feed the flames for a brief moment under the simmering saucepan. You will vanish in smoke to join my labours in that other smoke, oblivion, the ultimate resting-place of our vain agitations. [145] The little table protests to-day. It has no desire whatever to go up in smoke with the labour in which it has borne its part; it flatters itself, on the contrary, with the hope that having shared in the toil it may also have some chance of sharing the honour. Rather than this unjust sentence of death, it seems to hear a summons to life: “Let us go back, O my table, to the days of our youth, the days of your French polish and my smiling illusions,” and it stands proudly upon its legs, as though to serve as a support for these pages destined to recapitulate Fabre’s written work, all that work which it has helped him to compose, from the first line to the last. Of the first literary or scientific exercises of the youthful Fabre and the first quivers of the little table under the nervous, valiant, indefatigable pen of the young Carpentras schoolmaster, we shall say nothing, unless that there was really some excuse for trembling before the audacious and strenuous toil of the beginning, and all the exercise-books stuffed with figures and formulæ, diagrams and texts which represent the solitary and strictly personal work of preparation for two bachelor’s degrees, quickly followed by those of the licentiate and the doctor. It was an anatomical work, a memoir on the reproductive organs of the Myriapods, or Centipedes, that won for Fabre the degree of Doctor of Science. Fabre’s first contribution to the Press was a memoir on the Predatory Hymenoptera, published in the Annales des sciences naturelles. This attracted great attention among the masters of science. The Institute of France awarded him a prize for experimental physiology. Darwin, then at the height of his fame, saluted him with amazed and rather uneasy admiration. Léon Dufour, the patriarch of entomology in those days, wrote the author a most eulogistic and encouraging letter; happy to have directed his researches toward discoveries which he himself had not suspected, the venerable scientist emphatically exhorted his young friend to continue his journey along the path that was opening before him, a path so full of promise.