And all these little books are presented in a picturesque and attractive form. The very titles have nothing austere about them: Entretien de l’oncle Paul avec ses neveux sur les choses d’agriculture—Chimie de l’oncle Paul. There is also The Livre de Maître Paul, the Histoire des Bêtes, the Leçons des choses, the Livre d’Histoires and the Livre des Champs. Under different titles the other volumes evoke, like these, a sort of family atmosphere; they display the same concrete style of narrative and the same lifelike charm of dialogue. Evidently Fabre was not one of these whose “life was strangled,” and his initiative stifled by the springes of University methods and the programmes beloved of the bureaucrats. On every side there was little but disdain for animals and plants; and it was these above all that he strove to popularise. When they are studied, it is only to dissect them or reduce them to abstract formulæ; but he considers them rather as they are in themselves and in their relations with human life. And while others speak of them as dead objects or as indifferent objects, to indifferent readers, Fabre speaks of them with sympathy and feeling, with the tenderness and geniality of an uncle speaking to his nephews, and he excels in communicating to his hearers the sacred fire which inspires him—the passionate love which he feels for all natural things. It was Fabre’s fine independence that made him a pioneer. Certain of his manuals may no longer be sufficiently up to date, but his methods and his tendencies are precisely those that best respond to the needs and aspirations of the present time. For a wave of serious public opinion is revealing itself in favour of a renewal of our public education. A time will come, let us hope, when the schools will be less artificial and removed from real life, and will no longer systematically ignore religion, the family, the country and the vocation of the pupils. When that time comes, the schoolmasters will turn again to the classic Fabre handbooks, or at all events to books modelled upon his, in order to teach the little peasant boys to love their fields, their beasts, their agricultural and pastoral labours; to teach them also sometimes to lift their heads from the furrows in order to look up at the returning stars.