Fabre, Poet of Science

was well calculated to impress him. There the intense impressionability which the little peasant of Aveyron received at birth could only be confi

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,

ful, that in spite of a vague desire for change he now dreaded to leave it. He never wearied of admiring and exalting the beautiful and majest

tle, which yield intoxicating perfumes, the wastes of brushwood which the ploughshare has never turned, which cover the mountains from base to summit; the fi

lace where they dwell, a reef which rises from the surface of the ancient sea of alluv

famous Alp, "beside the peaks which rise about the gulf of Ajaccio, always crowned with clouds an

own by the lightning, shattered by the slow but sure action of the snows, and these vertiginous gulfs through which the four winds of heaven go roaring; these vast inclined planes on which snow-drifts form thirty, six

ng my eyes, I contemplate these results of the convulsion of the soil in my mind's eye, when I hear the screaming of the eagles, which go wheeling th

ts, amid the eternal snows; "you will put this in some book, and when, as you turn the leaves, the immortelle

feel, "if he had now to go to some trivial cou

ry. He would set out of a morning, visiting the coves and creeks, roving along the beaches of this ma

shwater shells also, extant or fossil. He asked his brother to collect for him all the shells he could find in the marshes of Lapalud, in the brooks and ditches of the neighbourhood of Orange. In his enthusiasm he tried to convince him of the immense interest of these researches, which might perhaps seem ridiculous or futile to him; but let him only think of geology; the humblest shell picked up might

is less learned than that of a snail: the eternal geometer has unrolled his transcendent spirals on the she

he found abundant and suggestive recreation. The properties of a figure or

d have proceeded from surprise to surprise...perceiving in the d

entre if its atmosphere reached as far as the earth? And this question gave rise to another, "without which the sequence stops then and there; number, space, movement, and order form a singl

two related foci, sending from one to the other a constant sum of vector radii"; the Hyperbole, "with repulsive foci, the desperate curve which plunges into space in infinite tentacles, approaching closer and closer to a straight line, the asymptote, without ever fi

egions in which Number, "irresistible, omnipotent, keystone of the vault of the universe

sbandman who p

uns in furrows

e tracks of fla

se list

or, Number h

indomitab

a bit i' the

thans, and wit

hem in the

lanks beneath t

nostrils vainl

lava; and in

their mettled

duly with the

ks buries his sp

es the mind, gives it the salutary habit of precision and lucidity, and puts it on its guard against ter

up other horizons to him. But Requien did at least enrich his memory by a prodigious quantity of names of plants with which he had not been acquainted.

bre was overwhelmed by the sad news. On that very day he had on the table before him a parcel of plants gathered for the dead botan

Requien to Corsica, to complete the work which the latter had left unfinished: the complete inventory of the prodigious wealth of vegetation, of the innumerable species an

larly scientists of his time. Fabre owed to him, not his genius, to be sure, but the defini

ve science such as botany. He did even more, by one day suddenly showing Fabre, between the fruit and the cheese, "in a plate of water," the anatomy of the snail. This was his first introduction to his true destiny b

s brother, still excited by this incident, "and you know better than

aim of satisfying his curiosity; he began to dissect with ardour, a thing he had never done before. He housed his tiny g

myself out of fine needles; my marble slab is the bottom of a saucer; my prisone

e that, much against his will, he had to beg for relief, and even insist upon his prompt return to the mainland. in the meantime he obtained sick-leave, and r

d but brief stay at Ajaccio he received the news

ed and his mind expanded, with settled