See him lying on the sand where everything is grilling in the burning rays of the sun, watching some wasp that is digging its burrow, noting its least movement, trying to divine its intentions, to make it confess the secret of its actions, following the labours of the innumerable Scarabaei that clean the surface of the soil of all that might defile it—the droppings of large animals, the decomposing bodies of small birds, moles, or water-rats; putting unexpected difficulties in their way, slily giving these tiny life-companions of his problems of his own devising to solve. [6] That is well-expressed, and it gives us a fairly correct idea of the vital and poetic charm of the Souvenirs. The same writer asks, speaking of the well-defined tasks performed by all these little creatures beloved of the worthy biologist of Sérignan: “Who has taught each one its trade, to the exclusion of any other, and allotted the parts which they fill, as a rule with a completeness unequalled, save by ‘their absolute unconsciousness of the goal at which they are aiming?’ This is a very important problem: it is the problem of the origin of things. Henri Fabre has no desire to grapple with it. Living in perpetual amazement, amid the miracles revealed by his genius, he observes, but he does not explain.” For the moment we can no longer subscribe to the assertions of the learned Academician, [7] nor to his fashion of writing history, which is decidedly too free. The truth is that Fabre, who delights in the pageant of the living world, does not always confine himself to recording it; he readily passes from the smallest details of observation to the wide purviews of reason, and he is at times as much a philosopher as a poet and a naturalist. The truth is that he often considers the question of the origins of life, and he answers it unequivocally like the believer that he is. It is enough to cite one passage among others, a passage which testifies to a brief uplifting of the heart that presupposes many others: “The eternal question, if one does not rise above the doctrine of dust to dust: how did the insect acquire so discerning an art?” And the following lines from the close of the same chapter: “The pill-maker’s work confronts the reflective mind with a serious problem. It offers us these alternatives: either we must grant the flattened cranium of the Dung-beetle the distinguished honour of having solved for itself the geometrical problem of the alimentary pill, or we must refer it to a harmony that governs all things beneath the eye of an Intelligence which, knowing all things, has provided for all?” [8]