We are, indeed, glad to think that if he was unduly overlooked at a later time, he was at least known and admired at an early period in Aveyron, and that as early as 1866 his class books were especially recommended to the attention of our young schoolmasters at the Normal College of Rodez. They could have had none better conceived or compiled. Would to heaven our public schoolmasters had always been as happily inspired or as well advised in the choice of their textbooks! Would to heaven that, instead of the dismal and misleading suggestions of materialism and impiety, there were still a place in the manuals of science, put in the hands of our children, for reflections as sane and as lofty as these. “By their practical side the sciences verge upon agriculture, medicine, and industry; but they have before all a moral advantage which is not shared in the same degree by any other branch of human knowledge: in that by giving us a knowledge of the created universe they uplift the soul and nourish the mind with noble and salutary thoughts.” [149] The study of the heavenly bodies in particular has this inestimable result: “The things that we are told by stellar astronomy overwhelm the understanding and leave no room in our minds except for an impulse of religious wonder at the author of these marvels, the God whose unlimited power has peopled the abysses of space with immeasurable heaps of suns.” [150] But the divine work “perhaps appears more marvellous still in the infinity of littleness than in the infinity of magnitude: Magnus in magnis, it has been said of God, maximus in minimis.” [151] This fine saying is verified and more or less explicitly confirmed in a thousand passages of the Souvenirs. Fabre’s works of popularisation are very numerous: they include no less than seventy to eighty volumes; they embrace all the elements of the sciences learned and taught by the author: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc.; but their principal aim was to teach the natural sciences, which furnish the material of more than fifty volumes intended for the primary or secondary degree of education. In his favourite domain of the natural sciences, as in that of the other sciences, the practical tendency of his teaching was by preference directed toward agricultural applications, as is shown by the very titles of many of his books: Eléments usuels des sciences physiques et naturelles, avec applications à l’hygiène et a l’agriculture—Le Livre des Champs—Les Auxiliaires—Les Ravageurs—Arithmétique agricole—Chimie agricole: indeed it was with the last volume that he inaugurated his series of initiatory textbooks. For the use of young girls and future housewives, he published books on Le Ménage, Hygiène and Economie domestique.