Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915)

Jean-Henri Fabre was a naturalist in what I would consider one of the golden ages of natural history. In the late 1800's he was publishing papers on entomology that were not always well received by his peers, mostly for 1 reason alone. They were WONDERFULLY well-written.

His writing is very elegant, and Fabre has enlightening things to say. Not just about nature, but about his childhood, his schooling, and about mistakes made by other entomologists. Fabre does have a tendency to ramble a bit show more at times, and I won't say I didn't find the book rather dull at times, but just when you are beginning to lose interest he says something overwhelmingly enlightening that it makes you wonder how you managed to lose focus. He really is a brilliant man.

Also, the pages are decorated with vibrant watercolors by Marlene McLoughlin, which perfectly accompany Fabre's writing. It's a beautiful book. show less

I read in part because I like horror stories and, as I knew from John Crompton's book, few creatures are more horrific than the hunting wasps. These monsters paralyze their victims by paralyzing them with a sting, then burying them alive with their eggs attached. When their eggs hatch, the larvae eat them alive, taking care to leave the most vital areas to the last.

This isn't due to sadism. Fabre, in one of his many experiments, learned that the larvae must eat their prey alive or fresh, for show more they are poisoned by any flesh that has even slightly rotted. He also learned that the larvae could eat different kinds of prey. Their mothers, however, couldn't paralyze different kinds of prey. They were programmed to attack the vital nerve in their prey that would paralyze but not kill it. I lost track of species and other classifications so I'm not sure of the exact taxonomic relationships between huntress and prey. I do know that Fabre tried to fool them by showing an insect that looked like it belonged in in their usual class of prey, but didn't, and by showing them an insect that was in their usual class of prey, but didn't look like it. He failed. The wasps could always identify the insect with the nerve.

Fabre didn't believe in insect intelligence, if intelligence meant the ability to learn something new. He tried to have them change their routines in many experiments and claimed that he always failed. Typical is his description of the Tachytes, which he tried to persuade to alter her routine in storing locusts. When she persisted in doing the same thing over and over, he dismissed her as which he described as "a narrow conservative, learning nothing and forgetting nothing." Do not … confound reason with intelligence … I deny the one, and the other is incontestable, within very modest limits." He pointed out that another wasp failed to solve a problem he had set for it, not only because it couldn't reason the problem back to its cause, but because it had no idea that there was a cause.

What insects had was what he praised as "the incomprehensible wisdom of instinct," "instinct, a gratuitous attribute, an unconscious aspiration, rivals knowledge, that most costly acquisition." showing in such matters as their knowledge of their prey's inner anatomy, said knowledge being the precise location of the nerve centers that they needed to strike to paralyze or kill their prey, anatomy that left them vulnerable to their unchanging and unchangeable method of attack. "The outer structure of the victims operated on counted for nothing in the method of operating. This is determined by the inner anatomy." "Modify the conditions ever so slightly; and these skillful paralyzers are at an utter loss." Their ability to sense said inner anatomy could be detected in related species that bore very little resemblance to each other and prevented from attacking insects that looked at their usual prey on the outside but were different where it mattered on the inside.

He opposed Darwin and the natural selection theory of evolution because of his observations of instinct. "This science is unconscious of itself has not been acquired, by her and her race, through experiments perfected from age to age and habits transmitted from one generation to the next … it is absolutely impossible to experiment and to learn an art when you are lost if you do not succeed at the first attempt." How did he explain it? After these statements, he gave the credit to "the universal knowledge in which all things move and have their being!" If that sounds vague and gooey, and it did to me, he made more frequently an argument that made more sense. He and other scientists could accumulate facts but they couldn't answer the great questions with them. "… if we go to the bottom of things, we know nothing about anything … To know how to know nothing might well be the last word of wisdom." He in short distrusted theorists and theories and despised armchair biologists who questioned his results without having observed the insects themselves. "First use your eyes and then you shall leave to argue!"

Darwin apparently believed that animals had intelligence; Fabre believed that his experiments had proven that they did not. "If the one has learned by prolonged practice in attack, the other should also have learnt by prolonged practice in defense, for attack and defense possess a like merit in the fight for life." How could a bee-hunting wasp, via natural selection, learned how to attack a bee while the bee never learned how to defend itself? "… the one knows without having learnt, the other does not know because she is incapable of learning." He was also impressed with how the behavioral patterns of cocoon building varied with each insect. He noted that two different species, confronted with the same building materials, would build very different cocoons. "The workshop, the work, the provisions have not determined the instinct. The instinct comes first; it lays down laws instead of being subject to them." show less

Following in the footsteps of his great entomological forebear, J. Henri Fabre, Fabre the much-younger creates an artistic “mythology” (in the words of the publisher) of insects. The book chronicles a love of bugs as profound and colorful as a recollection of an artistic movement, musical scene, or childhood respite. The drawings’ variety comes close to rivaling that of their diminutive subjects. This special gilt-decorated hardcover edition is numbered and stamped with the artist’s show more insignia. show less

What's not to like? Fabre's tales, or Fabre's able translator de Mattos, and de Mattos' translation retold by Mrs. Stawell - sorry, but what a tangle - of insects makes one admire their strangeness at the same time one is horrified by them. I think in particular of his time-consuming observation of the Anthrax fly's two - not one - larval forms, which comprises the final chapter in Fabre's Book of Insects. It is very unlikely that anyone before this 19th century naturalist of France ever show more pinpointed this particular aspect before, and this is but one example of his efforts. "I have gone forward with one aim always before me: to add a few pages to the history of insects," he wrote. show less