With Moquin-Tandon new vistas opened before me. Here it was no longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory; he was a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast like that: “Leave your mathematics,” he said. “No one will take the least interest in your formulæ. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to listen to you.” We made an expedition to the centre of the island, to Monte Renoso, [46] with which I was extremely familiar. I made the scientist pick the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon-grass (Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans call erba muorone; the downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum), which, clad in wadding, shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm than by the hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountain-top, my mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned. On the day before his departure, he said to me: “You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.” And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family workbasket, and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine-shoot, which served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a Snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life. [47] Fabre was a wonderful and indefatigable self-teacher; a truly self-made man. The impulse had been given, but he had everything, or almost everything, to learn of the living world of Nature. The way was open, but the whole length of it had to be travelled. He trod it henceforth with a high courage, for he was marching beneath the star that the Master of minds had hung in the dawn of his days above the hills of Lavaysse; the star that now, in the noon-day of life, shone through the passing mists of morning in the flawless Corsican sky, to guide his steps along the humblest tracks of the world of animals to the highest summits of human knowledge; ay, more, to those calm regions which are the dwelling of that uncreated Light and Life of which all the lights and all the lives of earth are but the pale reflections and feeble vestiges.