Not only in the certainty and the detailed nature of his facts, but also in the colour and reality of his descriptions is his mastery revealed. In him the naturalist is reduplicated by a man of letters and a poet, who “understands how to cast over the naked truth the magic mantle of his picturesque language,” [5] making each of his humble protagonists live again before our eyes, each with its characteristic achievements. So striking is this power of his that Victor Hugo described him as “the insects’ Homer,” while one of the most accomplished of our scientists, Mr. Edmond Perrier, Director of the Museum of Natural History, not content with saluting him as “one of the princes of natural history,” speaks of his literary work in the following terms: The ten volumes of his Souvenirs Entomologiques will remain one of the most intensely interesting works which have ever been written concerning the habits of insects, and also one of the most remarkable records of the psychology of a great observer of the latter part of the nineteenth century. In them the author depicts to the life not only the habits and the instincts of the insects; he gives us a full-length portrait of himself. He makes us share his busy life, amid the subjects of observation which incessantly claim his attention. The world of insects hums and buzzes about him, obsesses him, calling his attention from all directions, exciting his curiosity; he does not know which way to turn. Overwhelmed by the innumerable winged army of the drinkers of nectar who, on the fine summer days, invade his field of observation, he calls to his aid his whole household: his daughters, Claire, Aglaé, and Anna, his son Paul, his workmen, and above all his man-servant Favier, an old countryman who has spent his life in the barracks of the French colonies, a man of a thousand expedients, who watches his master with an incredulous yet admiring eye, listening to him but refusing to be convinced, and shocking him by the assertion, which nothing will induce him to retract, that the bat is a rat which has grown wings, the slug an old snail which has lost its shell, the night-jar a toad with a passion for milk, which has sprouted feathers the better to suck the goats’ udders at night, and so forth. The cats and the dog join the company at times, and one almost regrets that one is not within reach of the sturdy old man, so that one might respond to his call.