Not only do these reflections, which spontaneously pass through our mind, appear to us in harmony with the natural signification of the facts and the circumstances; we have the pleasant assurance that they are an epitome of the intimate feelings of our famous compatriot, as they are expressed in plain words in a thousand passages of his writing and as they were openly revealed in his conversation. We know, in short, that God and the activities of God in the world were questions which he was fond of considering, without regarding the world’s opinion. His essays are full of the subject. But we will quote only one passage, which has the advantage of bringing us an echo of the jubilee celebrations which were celebrated at Sérignan while this volume was being written: When the venerable nonogenarian was being fêted, one of his visitors asked him the question: “Do you believe in God?” To which he replied emphatically: “I can’t say I believe in God; I see Him. Without Him I understand nothing; without Him all is darkness. Not only have I retained this conviction; I have ... aggravated or ameliorated it, whichever you please. Every period has its manias. I regard Atheism as a mania. It is the malady of the age. You could take my skin from me more easily than my faith in God.” We may add, in order to throw some light upon the religion of the Aliborons of our villages, that the eminent biologist shares this belief with almost all our great scientists. Corsica, which vouchsafed Fabre the revelation of his vocation as naturalist, inspired him also with such love and enthusiasm as he had never hitherto known. There the intense impressionability which the little peasant of Aveyron received at birth could only be confirmed and increased. He felt that this superb and luxuriant nature was made for him, and that he was born for it; to understand and interpret it. He would lose himself in a delicious intoxication, amid the deep woodlands, the mountains rich with scented flowers, wandering through the maquis, the myrtle scrub, through jungles of lentisk and arbutus; barely containing his emotion when he passed beneath the great secular chestnut-trees of Bastelica, with their enormous trunks and leafy boughs, whose sombre majesty inspired in him a sort of melancholy at once poetic and religious. Before the sea, with its infinite distances, he lingered in ecstasy, listening to the song of the waves, and gathering the marvellous shells which the snow-white breakers left upon the beach, and whose unfamiliar forms filled him with delight.