Science: Scorpions

The appearance in English of The Life of the Scorpion,* the capstone in the great ten-volume series of Souvenirs Entomologiques, together with the centenary of his birth (1823) brings to mind again the life labor of Jean Henri Fabre, ” the insects’ Homer,” whom Darwin called “a savant who thinks like a philosopher and writes like a poet.” Fabre died in 1915 at the age of 92, but posthumous works are still coming out, enhancing the fame and affection which the world began to accord him only toward the end of his hardship-ridden life. The Life of the Scorpion is typical both of his method as a naturalist and of the charm of his style—a style which fascinates many a reader to whom a technical book on entomology would be anathema. The other insects that he studied include the spider, fly, mason-bee, bramble-bee, hunting wasp, ant, grasshopper, caterpillar, mason-wasp, weevil, glowworm, sacred beetle and other beetles. Fabre struggled for nearly 40 years, teaching physics, chemistry and mathematics (not the subjects that he loved) in provincial schools in Corsica and Avignon and writing textbooks to raise a large family and secure a modest competence that would allow him to devote himself wholly to his insect friends. At last, in 1879, he was able to buy some arid wasteland, called by the peasants harmas (worthless), at Serignan, a village in Provence. There in a small stucco cottage he lived till his death, a gentle, philosophical hermit, finding on his harmas a paradise of swarming insects. With tweezers, magnifying glass, tin box, he collected his living specimens, observed them in their diggings and dwellings, their battles, their search for food, their loves and hates, family life, births, deaths. “The scalpel of the experts,” wrote Fabre, “has made us acquainted with his [the scorpion’s] organic structure; but no observer . . . has thought of interviewing him, with any sort of persistence, on the subject of his private habits. Ripped up, after being steeped in spirits of wine, he is very well known; acting within the domain of his instincts, he is hardly known at all.” That, in parvo, was Fabre’s technique— “personal interviews” with his minute subjects. The Languedoeian scorpion (not the common black scorpion of Europe, which is harmless) is a grotesque, straw-colored beast, 3½ inches long, with bony armor and a hard, sharp, poison-tipped tail. Only a Fabre could be intimate with him. He digs his own home in the sand under rocks. He feels his way with his pincers, because, despite his eight staring eyes, he cannot see straight ahead. His courtship is an epic, ending in the slaughter of the ardent male by his cannibal mate. Fabre in his last years, though always living in poverty, received the acclaim of Science and of la patrie. He was the friend of many great men—John Stuart Mill, Hugo, Pasteur, Frédéric Mistral, Rostand, Maeterlinck (of whose The Life of the Bee he was the direct inspiration) —but to the end he retained his superhuman patience, humility, cheerfulness. The French Government purchased his harmas as a public museum and living laboratory, and a movement is on foot among his neighbors and admirers to erect a monument at Serignan in connection with his centenary, now being celebrated. Fabreana are now flowing liberally from the press. Other late items: The Life of J. Henri Fabre, by his kinsman, the Abbé Augustin Fabre (Dodd Mead, $2.50); The Human Side of Fabre, by Percy F. Bicknell (Century, $2.50); This Earth of Ours, a children’s geology by Fabre (Century, $2.50).

*Dodd, Mead ($2.50).