The small and modest, provided they are valiant and ingenious, and more generally all those that commend themselves by unusual habits or singular technical aptitudes: such are the insects investigated by the author of the Souvenirs. These he follows up for years, sometimes in their natural environment, sometimes in his laboratory. He inquires into their manner of assuring themselves and their race of a livelihood, their fashion of behaviour toward their congeners and their offspring; their industry and their habits are his two chief preoccupations, those which are brought into prominence by the sub-title of his book: “Studies in the Instincts and Habits of the Insects,” and the titles of the two volumes of selections which have been published for the general reader: La Vie des Insectes and Les Mœurs des Insectes. It is, therefore, about these two principal themes, which are, for that matter, very closely connected and very subject to mutual interpenetration, that the data amassed in the ten volumes of the Souvenirs must be grouped and distributed, if we wish to attempt a classification in harmony with the character of the books and the nature of their contents. By thus assuming the point of view of the author himself and adopting the principle and the form of his classifications and denominations, we shall discover, in this little entomological world, which seems to have been staged a little at random, a society as rich and varied as our own, in which almost all trades and all characters are represented, all the industries and habits of humanity. Here, as among us, are honest toilers and free-booters, producers and parasites; good and bad husbands and wives; examples of beautiful devotion and hideous egoism; delightful amenities and ferocious cruelties, extending even to cannibalism; workers of every class and manufacturers of every kind, and, in a higher order of capacities, engineers and surgeons, chemists and physicists, naturalists and physiologists, topographers and meteorologists, geometricians and logicians, and many more, whose enumeration we will leave to the reader. “Let us assemble facts in order to obtain ideas,” said Buffon. In this process may be summed up the whole of the great Provençal naturalist’s scientific work. If he notes the least circumstances of the little lives that unfold themselves before his eyes, he does so not merely as an observer and an artist who would not miss the smallest element of knowledge or beauty, but also as a philosopher who wishes to understand all that he sees, and for that reason neglects nothing. In entomology the smallest facts are not only the most curious and picturesque, they are often the most significant: maxima in minimis. Those minute details which are in danger of being regarded as “puerilities are connected with the most solemn questions which it is possible for man to consider.” [172]