Science: Insects’ Homer

“What a spectacle, in the spring, beneath a dead mole!” wrote Jean Henri Fabre. “The horror of this laboratory is a beautiful sight for one who is able to observe and meditate. Let us overcome our disgust; let us turn over the unclean refuse with our foot. What a swarming there is beneath it, what a tumult of busy workers! The Silphae,* with wing cases wide and dark, as though in mourning, flee distraught, hiding in the cracks in the soil; the Saprini,* of polished ebony which mirrors the sunlight, jog hastily off, deserting their workshop; the Dermestes,* of whom one wears a fawn-colored tippet flecked with white, seek to fly away, but, tipsy with the putrid nectar, tumble over and reveal the immaculate whiteness of their bellies, which forms a violent contrast with the gloom of the rest of their attire.”

In such a lyric manner, did Fabre, one of the world’s great entomologists, record the daily lives of insects: fired by devotion to his “dear friends,” he could describe the horrid or the humdrum in paragraphs almost like fairy tales in their mystery and charm.

Narrow & Deep. Yet it was not until 1909, six years before his death (at 91), that Fabre first attracted wide popular attention in his native France. In the U.S., although respect for him in scientific circles has always been deep, popular readership has been comparatively narrow; the only U.S. translations of his works are lengthy studies of single insects, published about the time of World War I. This week the publication of The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre (Edited by Edwin Way Teale; Dodd, Mead, $3.50) gave English-speaking readers their first full view of the patient Provengal scientist whom Victor Hugo called “The Homer of the Insects.”

Fabre, son of an unsuccessful innkeeper and his illiterate peasant wife, worked his way through teachers’ school by hiring out as a laborer, doing odd jobs, selling lemonade at fairs. For nearly 20 years he was a professor at the Lycee of Avignon, at a salary which never came to more than $320 a year. Sacked in 1870 for letting girls come to his science classes, he supported a wife and five children for nine years by grubbing out popular science books. In the end, he saved enough money to realize a lifetime dream, buying a couple of sun-scorched, rocky acres on the outskirts of the town of Sérignan, in the department of Vaucluse. On this scrap of earth, which he fondly called his Eden, Henri Fabre settled down, at the age of 55, to the full-time pursuit of his life work: the study of living insects.

Mystic Meditations. He describes the praying mantis, “or, as they say in Provence, lou Prégo Diéou, the Pray-to-God,” with keen observation and lively imagination. “Her long pale green wings, like spreading veils, her head raised heavenwards, her folded arms, crossed upon her breast, are in fact a sort of travesty of a nun in ecstasy.” The travesty is complete when the mantis makes her kill: “With the sharpness of a spring, the toothed forearm folds back on the toothed upper arm; and the insect is caught between the blades of the double saw . . . Thereupon, without unloosing the cruel machine, the mantis gnaws her victim by small mouthfuls. Such are the ecstasies, the mystic meditations, of the Prégo Diéou.”

He watches, absorbed, the mating dance of the scorpions: “These hideous devotees of gaiety provide a dance that is not wholly devoid of charm . . . They seek one another and fly precipitately the moment they touch, as though they had mutually burnt their fingers … At times there is a violent tumult; a confused mass of swarming legs, snapping claws, tails curving and clashing, threatening or fondling, it is hard to say which. All, large and small alike, take part in the brawl; it might be a battle to the death, a general massacre; and it is just a wanton frolic.”

Fabre shunned the “solemnity, nay, better, the dryness, of the schools” in his writing, as he did the dreary probing of dead insects in his studies. To the pedants he said: “You rip up the animal and I study it alive . . . You pry into death, I pry into life.”

*All beetles.