To collect the data which he requires for the foundation of his philosophical structures, Fabre is not content with observing the insect as it lives and labours when left to itself, writing down, so to speak, at its dictation the data which it deigns to give him as it would give them to any one who possessed the same patience and the same gift for observation. After these first overtures, he seeks more confidential information; to obtain this he inverts the parts played by observer and insect; from being passive he becomes active; he provokes and interrogates, and by different experiments, often of wonderful ingenuity, he enables and even compels the insect to confide to him what it would never have divulged in the normal course of its life and occupations. Fabre is the first to think of introducing this kind of artificial observation, which he calls experiment, into the study of the animal “soul.” To practise it more readily, he needs the insect close within his reach; more than that, he needs it under his hand, at his discretion, so to say. Neither the great museum of the fields nor the place of observation where the insects “roam at will amid the thyme and lavender” quite answers the requirements of this part of his programme. So at various points of the harmas all those appliances which we have already described were set up, “rustic achievements, clumsy combinations of trivial things.” In addition to these appliances in the open air, there are those inside the house: some are installed in the study, so that the experimenter “can see his insects working on the very table upon which he is writing their history”; [160] others are arranged in a separate room known as the “animal laboratory.” It is a great, silent, isolated room, brilliantly lighted by two windows facing south, upon the garden, one of which at least is always open that the insects may come and go at liberty.... The middle of the room is entirely occupied by a great table of walnut-wood, on which are arranged bottles, test-tubes, and old sardine boxes, which Fabre employs in order to watch the evolution of a thousand nameless or doubtful eggs, to observe the labours of their larvæ, the creation and hatching of cocoons, and the little miracles of metamorphosis, after a germination more wonderful than that of the acorn which makes the oak. Covers of metallic gauze resting on earthenware saucers full of sand, a few carboys and flower-pots or sweetmeat jars closed with a square of glass; these serve for observation or experimental cages in which the progress and the actions of these tiny, living machines can be investigated. [161]