Fascinated and intrigued by Dufour’s discovery, Fabre wished to see the process for himself, and as a result he made the first and the finest of his own entomological discoveries, which he was later on to enrich by more precise and more remarkable details. But at the same time he was forced to realise how incomplete and superficial were the observations of the man whom he nevertheless revered as the first among his masters. How often was he to find occasion for revising the statements of his predecessors! They were not merely incomplete; they were often erroneous, even when they had the greatest names to recommend them. Must we then ignore all that has been said and written and wholly repudiate the inheritance of the centuries and the scientists of the past? Heaven preserve us from such stupidity! But while it would not be reasonable or even possible to make a clean sweep of all that has been acquired by our predecessors, it is none the less prudent not to accept, in blind confidence, the whole heritage of the past, but to subject to the control of facts the statements even of the masters when these appear at all extravagant. Otherwise we run the risk, if not of perpetrating error by repeating it on our own responsibility, at all events of following a false trail on which we may lose much time and which may finally lead us to envy the lot of those who are able to attack their subject, from the very first, with minds empty of all information and any preconceived ideas. This was brought well home to Fabre by the repeated experience of errors which had escaped the most learned authors and erroneous methods suggested by the best books. And the persuasive effect of the highly symptomatic example afforded by an absolutely unrivalled master was even more eloquent. Unexpectedly, one fine day [writes Fabre], Pasteur rang my door-bell: the Pasteur who was presently to acquire so great a celebrity. His name was known to me. I had read his beautiful essay on the dissymmetry of tartaric acid; I had followed with the keenest interest his researches concerning the generation of the Infusoria. Every period has its scientific craze; to-day it is evolution; then it was spontaneous generation. By his glass bulbs, made sterile or fertile at will, by his experiments, magnificent in their rigorous simplicity, Pasteur exploded for ever the insanity which professed to see life arising from a chemical conflict in a mass of putrescence. Aware of this dispute, so victoriously elucidated, I gave my illustrious visitor the best of welcomes. The scientist had come to me in the first place for certain information. I owed this notable honour to my quality of colleague as a teacher of physics and chemistry. Ah, but what a humble, obscure colleague!