Before Fabre’s time entomology was a poor little science, with no savour of life or freshness about it, without a ray of sunshine, without a soul; like those poor little insects under glass or stuck on pins, which it was its mission to study. In his hands and in his books, as though by magic, entomology became truly a living science, provided with wings—the wings of imagination and poetry, of thought and philosophy. It is a far cry from the dense materialism of the “dust-to-dust” scientists who content themselves with dissecting poor little murdered bodies to the winged spiritualism of this open-air entomologist, interrogating with his bright, loving glance these little insect souls, at once so wonderful and so unconscious. And they all tell him the same thing: Ipse fecit nos et non ipsi nos. [206] (It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.) Some one has said, and it is a saying worth repeating, so just and admirable is it, and so characteristic of the man and his work: With Fabre we have every moment, so to speak, the feeling, the surprise, of rising toward the infinitely great while stooping over the infinitely little. Of this scientist, this philosopher, whose mind soars so readily from the “little things” to the great, to the “very great,” from the little curiosities of observation to the great problems that are to be encountered in the higher domains of thought, his friends conceived the idea of demanding a synthesis of the reflections scattered through the pages of the Souvenirs. This was his reply: Because I have shifted a few grains of sand upon the shore, am I in a position to understand the abysmal depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we know the last word concerning a gnat. Thus the Homer, the Plato of the insects. He is utterly unassuming. He will not allow his admirers to impose upon him. He does not allow himself to be snared by the lure of vivid, brilliant language, nor by the intoxicating problems of inner truths whose surface he grazes. According to him the sum of all his work has been but to “shift a few grains of sand upon the shore” of knowledge, and it is useless for him to endeavour to sound the mysteries of life; he has not even learned—he does not even think it possible to human knowledge to learn—“the last word concerning a gnat.” Does this imply that he has relapsed into scepticism; that finally, in despair, he renounces the ambition of his whole life, vitam impendere vero? By no means. He has striven to attain it even beyond his strength. When he considers himself incapable of adding further volumes to his work he busies himself with preparing a definitive edition, and in a touching farewell to his beloved studies he declares that they are so full of charm and unexplored marvels that could he live several lives he would devote them all to them without ever succeeding in “exhausting their interest.”