In this desperate struggle what became of the favourite branch of science of this great nature-lover? It was necessarily sacrificed. “I reprimanded myself,” he says, “at the slightest longing for emancipation, fearing to let myself be seduced by some new grass, some unknown beetle. I did violence to myself. My books on natural history were condemned to oblivion, relegated to the bottom of a trunk.” A fine lesson in perseverance in work and sacrifice, which all those who are inspired by some noble desire or merely by some legitimate ambition will find useful and comforting to contemplate: “Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metam Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit; Abstinuit venere et vino.” [34] But this matter must be expounded in greater detail, were it only to confirm the courage of other students disinherited by fortune, reduced as was Fabre to shaping themselves in the “harsh school of isolation.” They will witness miracles of perseverance; and they will realise that opportunities of exercising the mind and strengthening the will are seldom lacking to those who understand how to seize them. When I left the Normal School, my stock of mathematics was of the scantiest (writes Fabre). How to extract a square root, how to calculate and prove the surface of a sphere: these represented to me the culminating points of the subject. Those terrible logarithms, when I happened to open a table of them, made my head swim, with their columns of figures; actual fright, not unmixed with respect, overwhelmed me on the very threshold of that arithmetical cave. Of algebra I had no knowledge whatever. I had heard the name; and the syllables represented to my poor brain the whole whirling legion of the abstruse. Besides, I felt no inclination to decipher the alarming hieroglyphics. They made one of those indigestible dishes which we confidently extol without touching them. I greatly prefer a fine line of Virgil, whom I was now beginning to understand; and I should have been surprised indeed had any one told me that, for long years to come, I should be an enthusiastic student of the formidable science. Good fortune procured me my first lesson in algebra, a lesson given and not received, of course. A young man of about my own age came to me and asked me to teach him algebra. He was preparing for his examination as a civil engineer; and he came to me because, ingenuous youth that he was, he took me for a well of learning. The guileless applicant was very far out in his reckoning. His request gave me a shock of surprise, which was forthwith repressed on reflection: “I give algebra lessons?” said I to myself. “It would be madness: I don’t know anything about it!” And I left it at that for a moment or two, thinking hard, drawn now this way, now that by my indecision: