[9] M. Albert Gaudry is a sometime professor of palæontology in the Museum of Natural History, who, by virtue of his palæontological discoveries and works, has acquired a great authority in the scientific world. His Enchaînements du Monde Animal dans les Temps Géologiques is especially valued and often cited. Gaudry, who is a good Catholic as well as a scientist of the first rank, very definitely accepts the evolution of species; but for him, as for Fabre, the activity of the animal kingdom, like that of the world in general, is inconceivable apart from a sovereign mind which has foreseen all things and provided for all things. [10] Those journals which claim him as a native of Sérignan are therefore mistaken. “At Sérignan (Vaucluse), his native countryside, the peasants familiarly call him Moussu Fabré” (Univers, March 3, 1910). [11] In the reminiscences of his childhood, which are intermingled with his entomological memoirs, Fabre does not mention a single proper name, whether of person or place; only the vague expression, “the table-land of the Rouergue,” which he once incidentally employs, might give an attentive reader a hint as to the place of his origin. Souvenirs, VI., p. 38; The Life of the Fly, chap. v., “Heredity.” [12] These paternal grandparents, of whom our hero has retained so vivid a recollection, bore the names of Jean-Pierre Fabre and Elisabeth Poujade. Patient searching of the archives, assisted, fortunately, by the goodwill of M. Toscan, registrar to the Justice of the Peace for Vezins, has enabled us to reproduce their marriage contract, which is full of information hitherto unpublished, and curious details of domestic life which will not fail to interest the reader: