Dufour’s little work was a revelation; a flash of light revealing his vocation. It was like the electric impulse that bursts the seed about to open, that sends the genius ready to unfold its wings soaring into the heavens. It was to the chance perusal of a certain passage that another prince of science owed the awakening of his genius. We are speaking of Pasteur, whom we shall presently see in his dealings with Fabre. “It was through reading a note by the Russian chemist, Mitscherlich, on the comparison of the specific characters of certain crystals that Pasteur became interested in those investigations of the subject of molecular dissymmetry which were the starting-point of so many wonderful discoveries.” [67] Does it not seem that there must be a special Providence for the elect of science? In Dufour’s memoir, which gave Fabre so decisive an impulsion toward entomology, a singular fact is mentioned: the naturalist of the Landes found in the nest of a species of Wasp known as the Cerceris some small beetles of the Buprestis family, which, although apparently dead, remained as fresh as though alive during the period occupied by the rearing of the larvæ for whose nourishment they are destined to serve. Dufour supposed that these Buprestes were simply dead, and, “in order to explain this marvellous preservation of their flesh, which makes an insect that for several weeks has been motionless as a corpse a kind of game that does not become high but remain as fresh as at the moment of capture during the greatest heat of summer, he presumed the use of a liquid antiseptic, acting in the same manner as the preparations used to preserve anatomical specimens. This liquid could only be the venom of the Hymenopteron inoculated into the victim’s body. The tiny drop of poisonous humour that accompanies the sting, the lancet employed in the inoculation, is supposed to perform the office of a kind of pickle or preservative liquid for preserving the flesh set aside for the nourishment of the larvæ.” But Fabre was burning with curiosity to observe for himself a phenomenon which an old practitioner like Dufour proclaims the most curious and extraordinary known to the history of the insect kingdom. [68] He did not hesitate to go to Carpentras, to search for the Buprestis-hunting wasp, which does not occur in the neighbourhood of Avignon. A minute inspection of the Cerceris’ victims enabled him to prove that, not only was the flesh intact, but the joints were flexible, the viscera were moist, defalcation persisted, and vestiges of irritability even were present, all of which facts were scarcely compatible “with the supposition of an animal absolutely dead, the hypothesis of a true corpse rendered incorruptible by the effect of a liquid preservative.” He was thus led to conclude that the insect was not dead, but only benumbed and reduced to a state of immobility.