Begun in 1862 by the publication of a book on agricultural chemistry, Fabre’s work of popularisation was continued until the appearance in 1879 of his first volume of the Souvenirs. It forms as it were a preface to the great entomological masterpiece. Thanks to the deserved success of the series, rather than to his wretched emoluments as professor, he achieved the security and independence necessary to the accomplishment of his mission. His class-books were the ransom that set him free. They enabled him to leave the town and escape into the fields. They even enabled him to realise his dream of a solitary corner of the earth and a life of leisure wholly dedicated to the patient and disinterested study of his beloved insects. From another point of view this long and patient effort of scientific popularisation and intense literary production was not without its results as regard his later work. It enabled him to obtain a mastery of his medium, to exercise his faculty of expression and his mind, to vary and mature his observations, and finally to realise that tour de force of writing, for specialists, books that he who runs may read, and of performing the miracle of arousing the enthusiasm of men of letters for books that compel the admiration of scientists, and attracting the attention of the scientists to books that delight the man of letters. The brilliance, colour, and vitality which enhance without ever diminishing the high scientific value of his Souvenirs are due, no doubt, to his native qualities, to the limpid and harmonious Gallic genius of which he affords so admirable a type; he owes them also, as we have said, to all those tiny lives, so vibrant with diligence, and so picturesque, whose lights and shades and naïve emotions seem to have found their way into his own heart, into his style; but he owes them still more to his young friends, the primary school-children, to the pains which he took, the ingenuity which he expended in bringing within the grasp of the child’s mind, in impressing upon his imagination and sensibility as well as his understanding, the creatures and the doings of the living world. As we have recorded, it was only in 1879 that Fabre inaugurated his great and immortal collection of Souvenirs entomologiques. From this same year dates the acquisition, so greatly desired, of the open-air laboratory and his installation in the cherished solitude of Sérignan, where he was able to give free play to his entomological tastes, and to continue to add to the Souvenirs.