Produced by Gerry Rising THE LIFE OF THE FLY: With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography By J. Henri Fabre Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos Fellow of the Zoological Society of London CONTENTS TRANSLATOR'S NOTE I THE HARMAS II THE ANTHRAX III ANOTHER PROBER (PERFORATOR) IV LARVAL DIMORPHISM V HEREDITY VI MY SCHOOLING VII THE POND VIII THE CADDIS WORM IX THE GREENBOTTLES X THE GRAY FLESH FLIES XI THE BUMBLEBEE FLY XII MATHEMATICAL MEMORIES: NEWTON'S BINOMIAL THEOREM XIII MATHEMATICAL MEMORIES: MY LITTLE TABLE XIV THE BLUEBOTTLE: THE LAYING XV THE BLUEBOTTLE: THE GRUB XVI A PARASITE OF THE MAGGOT XVII RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD XVIII INSECTS AND MUSHROOMS XIX A MEMORABLE LESSON XX INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY TRANSLATOR'S NOTE The present volume contains all the essays on flies, or Diptera, from the Souvenirs entomologiques, to which I have added, in order to make the dimensions uniform with those of the other volumes of the series, the purely autobiographical essays comprised in the Souvenirs. These essays, though they have no bearing upon the life of the fly, are among the most interesting that Henri Fabre has written and will, I am persuaded, make a special appeal to the reader. The chapter entitled The Caddis Worm has been included as following directly upon The Pond. Since publishing The Life of the Spider, I was much struck by a passage in Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's stimulating work, The Childhood of Animals, in which the secretary of the Zoological Society of London says: 'I have attempted to avoid the use of terms familiar only to students of zoology and to refrain from anatomical detail, but at the same time to refrain from the irritating habit assuming that my readers have no knowledge, no dictionaries and no other books.' I began to wonder whether I had gone too far in simplifying the terminology of the Fabre essays and in appending explanatory footnotes to the inevitable number of outlandish names of insects. But my doubts vanished when I thought upon Fabre's own words in the first chapter of this book: 'If I write for men of learning, for philosophers...I write above all things for the young. I want to make them love the natural story which you make them hate; and that is why, while keeping strictly to the domain of truth, I avoid your scientific prose, which too often, alas, seems borrowed from some Iroquois idiom!'