Chapter 10

"How did a miserable grub acquire its marvellous knowledge? Are its habits, its aptitudes, and its industries the integration of the infinitely little, acquired by successive experiences on the limitless path of time?"

It is in these words that Fabre presents the problem of evolution.

Difficult though it may be to follow the sequence of forms which have endlessly succeeded and replaced one another on the face of the earth, since the beginning of the world, it is certain that all living creatures are closely related; and the magnificent and fertile hypothesis of evolution, which seeks to explain how extant forms are derived from extinct, has the immense advantage of giving a plausible reason for the majority of the facts which at least cease to be completely unintelligible.

Otherwise we can certainly never imagine how so many instincts, and these so complex and perfect, could have issued suddenly "from the urn of hazard."

But Fabre will suppose nothing; he will only record the facts. Instead of wandering in the region of probabilities, he prefers to confine himself to the reality, and for the rest to reply simply that "we do not know."

This stern, positive, rigorous, independent, and observant mind, nourished upon geometry and the exact sciences, which has never been able to content itself with approximations and probabilities, could but distrust the seductions of hypotheses.

His robust common sense, which was always his protection against precipitate conclusions, too clearly comprehends the limits of science and the necessity of accumulating facts "upon the thorny path of observation and experiment" to indulge in generalization. He feels that life has secrets which our minds are powerless to probe, and that "human knowledge will be erased from the archives of the world before we know the last word concerning the smallest fly."

This is why he was regarded as "suspect" by the company of official scientists, to whom he was a dissenter, almost a traitor, especially at a moment when the theories of evolution, then in the first flush of their novelty, were everywhere the cause of a general elation.

No one as yet was capable of divining the man of the future in this modest thinker who would not accept the word of the masters interested, but in opposing the theory of transformation, far from being reactionary, Fabre revealed himself, at least in the domain of animal psychology, as an innovator, a true precursor.

Moreover, his observations, always so direct and personal, often revealed the contrary of what was asserted or foreseen by the magic formulae suggested by the mind.

To the ingenious mechanism invented by the transformists he preferred to oppose, not contrary argument, but the naked undeniable fact, the obvious testimony, the certain and irrefragable example. "Is it," he would ask them, "to repulse their enemies that certain caterpillars smear themselves with a corrosive product? But the larva of the Calosoma sycophanta, which feeds on the Processional caterpillar of the oak-tree, pays no heed to it, neither does the Dermestes, which feeds on the entrails of the Processional caterpillar of the pine-tree."

And consider mimicry. According to the theory of evolution, certain insects would utilize their resemblance to certain others in order to conceal themselves, and to introduce themselves into the dwellings of the latter as parasites living at their expense. Such would be the case with the Volucella, a large fly whose costume, striped with brown and yellow bands, gives it a rude resemblance to the wasp. Obliged, if not for its own sake at least for that of its family, to force itself into the wasp's dwelling as a parasite, it deceitfully dresses itself, we are told, in the livery of its victim, thus affording the most curious and striking example of mimicry; and naturalists insufficiently informed would regard it as one of the greatest triumphs of evolution.

Now what does the Volucella do? It is true that it lays its eggs without being disturbed in the nest of the wasp. But, as the rigorous observer will tell you, it is a precious auxiliary and not an enemy of the community. Its grubs, far from disguising or concealing themselves, "come and go openly upon the combs, although every stranger is immediately massacred and thrown out." Moreover, "they watch the hygiene of the city by clearing the nest of its dead and ridding the larvae of the wasps of their excretory products." Plunging successively into each chamber of the dormitory the forepart of their bodies, "they provoke the emission of that fluid excrement of which the larvae, owing to their cloistration, contain an extreme reserve." In a word, the grubs of the Volucella "are the nurses of the larvae," performing the most intimate duties." (9/1.)

What an astonishing conclusion! What a disconcerting and unexpected reply to the "theories in vogue"!

Fabre, however, with his poetic temperament and ardent imagination, seemed admirably prepared to grasp all that vast network of relations by which all creatures are connected; but what proves the solidity of his imperishable work is that all theories, all doctrines, and all systems may resort to it in turn and profit by his proofs and arguments.

And he himself, although he boasts with so much reason of putting forward no pretensions, no theories, no systems, has he not even so yielded somewhat to the suggestions of the prevailing school of thought, and have not his verdicts against evolution often been the more excessive in that he has paid so notable a tribute to the evolutionary progress of creation?

In the first place, he is far from excluding the undeniable influence of environing causes; the immense role of those myriad external circumstances on which Lamarck so strongly insisted; but the work of these factors is, in his eyes, only accessory and wholly secondary in the economy of nature; and in any case it is far from explaining the definite direction and the transcendent harmony which characterize evolution, both in its totality and in its most infinitesimal details.

In one of his admirable little textbooks, intended to teach and to popularize science, he complacently enumerates the happy modifications effected by that "sublime magician," selection as understood by Darwin. He evokes the metamorphoses of the potato, which, on the mountains of Chili, is merely a wretched venomous tubercle, and those of the cabbage, which on the rocky face of oceanic precipices is nothing but a weed, "with a tall stem and scanty disordered leaves of a crude green, an acrid savour, and a rank smell"; he speaks of wheat, formerly a poor unknown grass; the primitive pear-tree "an ugly intractable thorny bush, with detestable bitter fruit"; the wild celery, which grows beside ponds, "green all over, hard, with a repulsive flavour, and which gradually becomes tenderer, sweeter, whiter," and "ceases to distil its poison." (9/2.)

With profound exactitude this great biologist has also perceived the degree to which size may be modified; may dwindle to dwarfness when a niggardly soil refuses to furnish beast and plant alike with a sufficient nourishment.

Without any communication with the other scientists who were occupied by the same questions, knowing nothing of the results which these experimenters had attained in the case of small mammiferous animals, and which prove that dwarfness has often no other cause than physiological poverty, he confirmed and expanded their ideas from an entomological point of view. (9/3.)

Scarcely ever, indeed, was he first inspired by the doings of others in this or that direction; he read scarcely anything, and nature was his sole teacher. He considered that the knowledge to be obtained from books is but so much vapour compared with the realities; he borrowed only from himself, and resorted directly to the facts as nature presented them. One has only to see his scanty library of odd volumes to be convinced how little he owes to others, whether writers or workers.

A true naturalist philosopher, this profound observer has also thrown a light upon certain singular anomalies which, in the insect world, seem to constitute an exception, at all events in our Europe, to the general rules. It is not only to the curiosity and for the amusement of entomologists that he proposes these curious anatomical problems, but also, and chiefly, to the Darwinian wisdom of the evolutionists.

Why, for example, is the Scarabaeus sacer born and why does it remain maimed all its life; that is to say, deprived of all the digits on the anterior limbs?

"If it is true that every change in the form of an appendage is only the sign of a habit, a special instinct, or a modification in the conditions of life, the theory of evolution should endeavour to account for this mutilation, for these creatures are, like all others, constructed on the same plan and provided with absolutely the same appendages."

The posterior limbs of the Geotrupes stercorarius, "perfectly developed in the adult, are atrophied in the larvae, reduced to mere specks."

The general history of the species, of its migrations and its changes, will doubtless one day throw light upon these strange infirmities, here temporary and there permanent, which may perhaps be explained by unforeseen encounters with undiscovered specimens, strayed perhaps into distant countries. (9/4.)

What invaluable documents for the entomologist and the historian of the evolution of the species are those multiple and fabulous metamorphoses of the Sitares and the Meloïdae which this indefatigable inquirer has revealed in all their astonishing phases!

One of the finest examples of scientific investigation is the pursuit, through a period of twenty-five years, with a sagacity which seems to border on divination, of this problem of HYPER-METAMORPHOSIS. The larvae of those coleoptera which we have seen introduced, with infernal cunning, into the cells of the Anthophora (See Chapter 8 above.), suffer no less than four moults before they become nymphs.

These merely external transformations, which involve only the envelope, and respect the internal structure, correspond each with a change of environment and of diet. Each time the organism adapts itself to its new mode of existence, "as perfectly as when it becomes adult"; and we see the insect, which was clear-sighted, become blind; it loses its feet, to recover them later; its slender body becomes ventripotent; hard, it grows soft; its mandibles, at first steely, become hollowed out spoonwise, each modification of conformation having its motive in a fresh modification of the conditions of the creature's life.

How explain this strange evolution of a fourfold larval existence, these successive appearances of organs, which become entirely unlike what they were, to serve functions each time different?

What is the reason, the intention, the high law which presides over these visible changes, these successive envelopments of creatures one within the other, these multiple transfigurations?

By what bygone adaptations has the Sitaris successively acquired these diverse extraordinary phases of life, indicating possibly for each corresponding age some ancient and remote heredity? (9/5.)

How many other arguments might evolution derive from his books, and what illustrations of the Darwinian philosophy has he unconsciously furnished! Does he not even allow the admission to escape him that "the spirit of cunning and deception is transmitted"? He sees in the persecutions of the Dytiscus, the "pirate of the ponds," the origin of the faculty which the Phryganea has of refashioning its shield when demanded of it. "To evade the assault of the brigand, the Phryganea must hastily abandon its mantle; it allows itself to sink to the bottom, and promptly removes itself; necessity is the mother of invention." (9/6.)

Returning to the lacunae which it so amazes Fabre to discover in our organization, even in the most perfect of us, are they fundamentally very real? These mysterious and unknown senses which he has so greatly contributed to elucidate in the case of the inferior species: why, he asks, have we not inherited them, if we are truly the final term and the supreme goal of creation?

But in cultivating our intuition, as Bergson invites us to do, would it be impossible to re-awaken, deep within us, these strange faculties, which perhaps are only slumbering? What of that species of indefinable memory which permits the red ant, the Bembex, the Cerceris, the Pompilus, the Chalicodoma and so many others to "find themselves," to orientate themselves with infallible certainty and incredible accuracy? Is it not to be found, according to travellers, in those men who have remained close to nature and accustomed from their remotest origins to listen to the silence of the great deserts?

Finally, the evolutionists, who "reconstruct the world in imagination," and who see in the relationship of neighbouring species a proof of descent or derivation, and a whole ideal series, will not fail to perceive throughout his work, in the elementary operations of the Eumenes and the Odynerus, cousins of the Cerceris, which sting their prey in places as yet ill determined, not indeed so many isolated attempts, but an incomplete process of invention, an attempt at procedures still in the fact of formation: in a word, the birth of that marvellous instinct which ends in the transcendent art of the Sphex and the Ammophila.

Although they have acquired such prodigious deftness, these master paralysers are not, in fact, always infallible. Occasionally the Sphex blunders and gropes, "operates clumsily"; the cricket revives, gets upon its feet, turns round and round, and tries to walk. But, inquires Fabre, do you say that having profited by a fortuitous act, which has turned out to be favourable to them, they have perfected themselves by contact with their elders, "thanks to the imitation of example," and that they have thus crystallized their experiences, which have been transmitted by heredity-- thereby fixed in the race? (9/7.)

How much we should prefer that it were so! How much more comprehensible and interesting their life would become!

But "when the hymenopteron breaks its cocoon, where are its masters! Its predecessors have long ago disappeared. How then can it receive education by example?"

You who "shape the world to your whim," you will reply: "Doubtless there are no longer masters to-day; but go back to the first ages of the globe, when the world in its newness, as Lucretius has so superbly said, as yet knew neither bitter cold nor excessive heat (9/8.); an eternal springtide bathed the earth, and the insects, not dying, as to-day, at the first touch of frost, two successive generations lived side by side, and the younger generation could profit at leisure by the lessons of example." (9/9.)

Let us return to Fabre's laboratory, to the covers of wire-gauze, and note what becomes, at the approach of winter, of the survivors of the vespine city.

In the mild and comfortable retreat where the wasps are kept under observation they die no less, despite their well-being and all the care expended on them, when once "the inexorable hour" has struck, and once the exact capital of life which seems to have been imparted to them ages ago is exhausted. With no apparent cause, we see death busy among them. "Suddenly the wasps begin to fall as though struck by lightning; for a few moments the abdomen quivers and the legs gesticulate, then finally remain inert, like a clockwork machine whose spring has run down to the last coil." (9/10.) This law is general; "the insect is born orphaned both of mother and father, excepting the social insect, and again excepting the dung- beetle, which dies full of days." (9/11.)

Moreover, Fabre is never weary of demonstrating that the insect, perfectly unconscious of the motive which makes it act, this thereby incapable of profiting by the lessons of experience and of innovation in its habits, beyond a very narrow circle. "No apprentices, no masters." In this world each obeys "the inner voice" on its own account; each sets itself to accomplish its task, not only without troubling as to what its neighbour is doing, but without thinking any further as to what it is doing itself; instance the Epeïra, turning its back on its work, yet "the latter proceeds of itself, so well is the mechanism devised"; and if by ill chance the spider acted otherwise it would probably fail.

Darwin knew barely the tenth part of the colossal work of Fabre. He had read firstly in the "Annals of Natural Science" of the habits of the Cerceris and the fabulous history of the Meloidae. Finally he saw the first volume of the "Souvenirs" appear, and was interested in the highest degree by the beautiful study on the sense of location and direction in the Mason- bees.

This was already more than enough to excite his curiosity and to make him wonder whether all his philosophy would not stumble over this obstacle.

After having succeeded in explaining so luminously--and with what a lofty purview--the origin of species and the whole concatenation of animal forms, would it not be as though he halted midway in his task were the sanctuary of the origin of instinct to remain for ever inscrutable?

Fabre had not yet left Orange when Darwin engaged in a curious correspondence which lasted until the former had been nearly two years at Sérignan, and which showed how passionately interested the great theorist of evolution was in all the Frenchman's surprising observations.

It seems that on his side Fabre took a singular interest in the discussion on account of the absolute sincerity, the obvious desire to arrive at the truth, and also the ardent interest in his own studies, of which Darwin's letters were full. He conceived a veritable affection for Darwin, and commenced to learn English, the better to understand him and to reply more precisely; and a discussion on such a subject between these two great minds, who were, apparently, adversaries, but who had conceived an infinite respect for one another, promised to be prodigiously interesting.

Unhappily death was soon to put an end to it, and when the solitary of Down expired in 1882 the hermit of Sérignan saluted his great shade with real emotion. How many times have I heard him render homage to this illustrious memory!

But the furrow was traced; thenceforth Fabre never ceased to multiply his pin-pricks in "the vast and luminous balloon of transformism (evolution), in order to empty it and expose it in all its inanity." (9/12.) By no means the least original feature of his work is this passionate and incisive argument, in which, with a remarkable power of dialectic, and at times in a tone of lively banter, he endeavoured to remove "this comfortable pillow from those who have not the courage to inquire into its fundamental nature." He attacked these "adventurous syntheses, these superb and supposedly philosophic deductions," all the more eagerly because he himself had an unshakable faith in the absolute certainty of his own discoveries, and because he asserted the reality of things only after he had observed and re-observed them to satiety.

This is why he cared so little to engage in argument relating to his own works; he did not care for discussion; he was indifferent to the daily press; he avoided criticism and controversy, and never replied to the attacks which were made upon him; he rather took pains to surround himself with silence until the day when he felt that his researches were ripe and ready for publicity.

He wrote to his dear friend Devillario, shortly after Darwin's death:

"I have made a rule of never replying to the remarks, whether favourable or the reverse, which my writings may evoke. I go my own gait, indifferent whether the gallery applauds or hisses. To seek the truth is my only preoccupation. If some are dissatisfied with the result of my observations- -if their pet theories are damaged thereby--let them do the work themselves, to see whether the facts tell another story. My problem cannot be solved by polemics; patient study alone can throw a little light on the subject. (9/13.)

"I am profoundly indifferent to what the newspapers may say about me," he wrote to his brother seventeen years later; "it is enough for me if I am pretty well satisfied with my own work." (9/14.)

He read all the letters he received only in a superficial manner, neglecting to thank those who praised or congratulated him, and above all shrinking from all that idle correspondence in which life is wasted without aim or profit.

"I fume and swear when I have to cut into my morning in order to reply to so-and-so who sends me, in print or manuscript, his meed of praise; if I were not careful I should have no time left for far more important work."

His beloved Frédéric, "the best of his friends," was himself often treated no better, and to excuse his silence and the infrequency of his letters, Henri, even in the years spent at Carpentras and Ajaccio, could plead only the same reasons; his stupendous labours, his exhausting task, "which overwhelmed him, and was often too great, not for his courage, but for his time and his strength." (9/15.)

Nevertheless, while evading the question of origins, his far-sighted intellect was bound to "read from the facts" concerning the genesis of new species in process of evolution; and his observations throw a singular light on the quite recent theory of sudden mutations.

The nymph of the Onthophagus presents "a strange paraphernalia of horns and spurs which the organism has produced in a moment of ardour--a luxurious panoply which vanishes in the adult."

The nymph of the Oniticella also decks itself in "a temporary horn, which departs when it emerges."

And "as the dung-beetle is recent in the general chronology of creatures, as it takes rank among the last comers, as the geological strata are mute concerning it, it is possible that these horn-like processes, which always degenerate before they reach completion, may be not a reminiscence but a promise, a gradual elaboration of new organs, timid attempts which the centuries will harden to a complete armour, AND IF THIS WERE SO THE PRESENT WOULD TEACH US WHAT THE FUTURE IS TO BE." (9/16.)

Here is a specific transformation, a veritable creation; fortuitous, blind, and silent; one of those innumerable attempts which nature is always making, for the moment a mere matter of hazard, until some propitious circumstance fixes it in future incarnations.

Thus millions of indeterminate creatures are incessantly roughed out in the substance of that microcosm which is the initial cell; and it is here that Fabre sees the real secret of the law of evolution.

He refutes the great principle of Leibnitz, which was so brilliantly adopted by Darwin, that changes occur by degrees, by "fine shades," by slow variations, as the result of successive adaptations, and that there is no jumping-off place in nature. On the contrary, life often passes suddenly from one form to another, by abrupt and capricious leaps, by irregular and disorderly steps, and it is in the egg that Fabre sees the first lineaments of these mysterious and spontaneous variations.

Species are therefore born as a whole, each at the same time, AT THE SAME MOMENT, "bringing into being its new organism, with its individual properties and peculiarities, its indelible and innate faculties and tendencies, like "so many medals, each struck with a different die, which the gnawing tooth of time attacks only sooner or later to annihilate it."

However, Fabre affirms the continuity of progress; he believes in a better and more merciful future, a more complete humanity, ruled by more harmonious or less brutal laws.

With what profound intelligence and what generous enthusiasm he seeks to conjecture what this future might be, in his beautiful observations on the young of the Lycosa (9/17.), which can live for weeks and months in absolute abstinence, although we can perceive no reserve of nutriment!

We know no other sources of animal activity save the energy derived from food. Vegetables draw the materials of their nourishment from the soil and the air, and the sunlight is only an intermediary which enables the plant to fix its carbon. The animal species in turn borrow the elements indispensable to their existence from the vegetable world, or restore their flesh and blood with the flesh and blood of other animals.

Now the young Lycosae "are not inert on their mother's back; if they fall from the maternal chine they quickly pick themselves up and climb up one of her legs, and once back in place they have to preserve the equilibrium of the mass. In reality they know no such thing as complete repose. What then is the energetic aliment which enables the little Lycosae to struggle? Whence is the heat expended in action derived?"

Fabre sees no other source than "the sun."

"Every day, if the sky is clear, the Lycosa, loaded with her little ones, crawls to the edge of her well, and for long hours lies in the sun. There, on the maternal back, the young ones stretch themselves out, saturate themselves in the sunshine, charging themselves with motor reserves, steeping themselves in energy, directly converting into movement the calorific radiations coming from the sun, the centre of all life."

The Scorpion also is able to live for months without nourishment, restoring directly, in the form of movement, "the effluvia emanating from the sun or from other ambient energies--heat, electricity, light--which are the soul of the world."

Perhaps, among the innumerable worlds of space, there is somewhere, gravitating round a fixed star, a planet invisible to us where "the sunlight sates the hunger of the blind."

The gentle philosophy of the ingenious dreamer soothes itself with the vision, entertained by great and noble minds, of a humanity "whose teeth will no longer attack sensible life, nor even the pulp of fruits"; "when creatures will devour one another no longer, will no longer feed upon the dead; when they will be nourished by the sunlight, without conflict, without war, without labour; freed from all care, and assured against all needs!"

Thus, in the humblest creatures, he sees the most marvellous perspectives; the body of the lowest insect becomes suddenly a transcendent secret, lighting up the abyss of the human soul, or giving it a glimpse of the stars.

And although his work is in contradiction to the theories of the evolutionists, it ends with the same moral conclusion, namely, that all creation moves slowly and without intermission on its gradual ascent towards progress.