Fabre reveals a consummate skill in this difficult and delicate art of experimentation and inducing the insect to speak. The smallest incident, insignificant to a mind less alert than his, suggests further questions or gives rise to sudden intuitions and preconceived ideas which are immediately subjected to the test of experiment. But it is not enough to question the insect; one must understand its replies; it is not enough to collect or even to provoke data. One must know how to interpret them. And here truly we come to the prodigy; for his sympathy for animals gives M. Fabre a sort of special sense, which enables him to grasp the meaning of its actions, as though there were between it and himself some actual means of communication, something in the nature of a language. [162] But there is something even more remarkable than this penetration and certainty of analysis; it is the prudence with which he goes forward step by step, without leaving anything vague or doubtful; the reserve with which he pronounces upon all that goes beyond the obvious meaning of the facts; the frankness and modesty with which he admits that he hesitates or does not know. It often happens that this scrupulous spirit leads to doubt. “The more I observe and experiment, the more I feel rising before me, in the cloudy blackness of the possible, a vast note of interrogation.” We might even find that on certain occasions the fear of going astray has caused him to limit to excess the range of his interpretation. But this is done only to give greater weight to his assertions, wherever they are expressed firmly and with quiet assurance. In short, there is reason to subscribe to the flattering judgment of his first biographer, who sees in the Souvenirs not only the most wonderful entomological repertory, but a true “essay upon method,” which should be read by every naturalist, and the most interesting, instructive, familiar, and delightful course of training that has ever been known. [163] The most interesting, instructive, and delightful course of training: his books are this, not only in virtue of the writer’s method and point of view, but in virtue of his language. For the living scenes of the Souvenirs, as well as the interpretations interspersed between them, are expressed in words so simple and so well chosen that they are realised without effort and in the most striking relief in the reader’s mind and imagination. Fabre hates to see science make use of pedantic and pseudo-scholastic terminology. Apart from the fact that it may repel the reader, all this idle apparatus of obscurity serves only too often to mask error or vagueness of thought.