While he was soaring toward the heights, and making his way into unexplored regions, under the astounded gaze of the most eminent authorities, who saw themselves suddenly equalled and even surpassed, his scientific genius loved also to look downwards, to approach the beginners, to return, as it were, to the starting-point, in order to hold out his hand to them, and to trace out for them, through all the stages of science, the path that he had opened up for himself in the face of unheard-of difficulties. He laboured to give them what he himself had felt the lack of almost as much as the help of masters: the assistance of luminous, living books, capable of teaching without fatigue and without tedium. His class books are, in fact, models of their kind. In them you will find no vague phraseology, but the simplest, most precise, yet most natural language; no idle excess of erudition, but the most perfect lucidity of text as of diagram; no dryness, nothing commonplace, but everywhere something picturesque, original, and full of life, giving charm and relief to all that is learned; and above all the constant care never to isolate oneself from life, to keep in touch with reality, by leading the youthful mind from the spectacles which are most familiar to it to the conceptions of science and from these to such of their applications as are most usual and most familiar. To sum up, a rare talent for simply and clearly expounding the most difficult theories in such a way as to render them accessible to the youngest minds; a wonderful power of capturing the attention from all sides, of breaking down the water-tight partition which too often exists between the mind and the heart, between science and life, between theory and practice: such are the essential characteristics which earned Fabre the title of “the incomparable populariser.” About 1866 and 1867, at the Normal College of Rodez, one of our professors used to read to us and teach us to admire certain little books by our as yet but little known compatriot, J. H. Fabre, who was born at Saint-Léons, so he told us, and had graduated from the Normal College of Avignon. Such is the information recently given us by M. François Fabié, as “a detail that might perhaps give us pleasure, and which proves, in any case, that not all the inhabitants of the Rouergue, as was mistakenly said of late, were ignorant of the name, origin, and talent of J. H. Fabre.” [148]