A straightforward boy who loves insects has become a "popular science expert" in 60 years

On December 21, 1823, a boy was born in a poor farmer's home in the small town of Saint-Leon in southern France. He was the famous entomologist and writer Fabre. Growing up in the countryside, Fabre had a strong curiosity about nature since he was a child, and everything was his object of observation. Among them, his favorite was the humble insect.

Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre (1823-1915), known as the "Homer of insects, the Virgil of insects" | Wikimedia Commons

At the age of 56, he finally owned the "Huangshi Garden"

Fabre came from a poor family and had to drop out of school at the age of 10 to work. But he did not give up studying. He taught himself with the salary he earned through hard work and received a scholarship for his excellent grades. At the age of 15, he returned to a normal school to study and stayed on as a teacher after graduation. While teaching, Fabre continued to study on his own and obtained a bachelor's and doctoral degree in natural sciences after he turned 30.

Fabre's stone garden, now the Fabre Museum | Renaud Camus / Wikimedia Commons

He supported his family with his meager salary as a teacher, as well as teaching private lessons and public courses. He also devoted his spare time to observing and studying insects. Fabre was envied, slandered, and even kicked out of his job despite the difficult life. Later, he quit his teaching job and made a living by writing popular science books and compiling teaching materials. He used the royalties to buy a house and one hectare of wasteland, and gave it a nice name - "Wasteland Garden". He finally had a small plot of land for insect observation and research.

Fabre built a platform in his garden to observe various scavenging insects | Yodie / Wikimedia Commons

Fabre was 56 years old at this time.

Short of money? Then do research in the most economical way

Unlike his contemporaries, Fabre did not travel around the world to collect specimens and conduct taxonomic research. Instead, he immersed himself in his own small stone garden with the insects he was most familiar with, carefully observing and recording their behavior, and designing experiments to confirm his conjectures about insects. I think he may not have been unwilling to conduct long-distance research, but he did not have a wealthy father and a prominent family background like Darwin, so he could only choose the most economical and suitable way to understand his beloved insects.

Dung beetle, one of Fabre's favorite animals to study, illustration from the 1921 edition of Fabre's Book of Insects | Drawing by Edward Julius Detmold/Wikimedia Commons

In 1878, Fabre compiled his notes from 30 years of observation and research on insects into the first book "The Insect Life". In the last chapter of the book, he especially mourned his beloved son Jules who died in 1877. Jules was as obsessed with insects as his father, especially Hymenoptera. Fabre named three species of Hymenoptera bees after "Jules" to express his commemoration and grief for his son. After that, he spent more than 30 years to complete the 10-volume "The Insect Life" with more than 2 million words at a rate of one volume every three years. When he finished the last volume, he was already a white-haired old man.

Cicada. Illustration from the 1921 edition of Fabre's Book of Insects | Drawing by Edward Julius Detmold/Wikimedia Commons

The original French name of "The Insect World" means "Memoirs of an Entomology: Studies on the Instincts and Habits of Insects" (French: Souvenirs entomologiques). In the book, Fabre used beautiful literary language to tell readers the stories of many insects and invertebrates in the wasteland stone garden.

French version of "Insect Life" in all ten volumes | siamesepuppy / Flickr

Fabre was an upright person. He believed in science, dared to question, and was not superstitious about authority. He used what he saw with his own eyes and first-hand information obtained from experiments he designed to refute the wrong views that were circulating at the time. In order to verify the feeding habits of insects, Fabre forced leaf-eating beetles to eat feces and made leaf salad for the feces-eating insects. In order to study saprophytic insects, Fabre asked the forest ranger to get him rotten wood and mole corpses. In order to find out why pine caterpillars sting so painfully, Fabre actually rubbed the poisonous hairs of pine caterpillars on his body, extracted the venom of pine caterpillars and applied it to his skin...

In front of insects, Fabre was as innocent as a child. Curiosity drove him to use various methods to verify his doubts and record the various behaviors of insects.

The insect epic that is always in reprint

In addition to being scientific, "The Insect World" is also highly literary, filled with Fabre's deep affection for insects and his thoughts on the world. It was praised by the famous French writer Victor Hugo as the "epic of insects."

The Insect World was introduced to China in the 1920s and was highly recommended by Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren. The name of the translation of the book was also first chosen by Zhou Zuoren. In his article "Fabre's Insect World" published in 1923, Zhou Zuoren wrote: "Fabre's book talks about the life of insects, but we find it more interesting and meaningful than reading those boring novels and dramas... I envy young people in other countries who have such good books to read, and I also hope that someone in China will do the translation and compilation..."

In 1933, the Commercial Press published the first Chinese translation of "Insect Life". Today, translations of "Insect Life" in various languages ​​have spread all over the world, and the Chinese version alone is countless and has remained popular for a long time.

Although limited, it is still dazzling

But Fabre also had the limitations of his time.

In the past 100 years, science and technology have been updated rapidly, and the update of entomological knowledge is no exception. Although Fabre's observations were meticulous, some of the information is inevitably outdated and contains some errors.

Another point is that Fabre questioned Darwin's theory of evolution. In his book The Insect Life, he often expressed fierce criticism of the theory of evolution. Darwin did not mind such criticism, but instead respected Fabre. In a letter to Fabre, he wrote: "I think no one in Europe admires your research more than I do."

Statue of Fabre in the village of Sérignan du Comtat, France | Jean-Marc Rosier / Wikimedia Commons

Today, the theory of evolution has been widely recognized, and modern evolutionary biologists have made more supplements and corrections to the problems existing in Darwin's theory of evolution and developed modern evolutionary biology.

Fabre's doubts about the theory of evolution were not wrong, but looking back now, we have different opinions from Fabre, and some newer research has answered his doubts at the time. In any case, "The Insect Life" is still dazzling to us today. The ten-volume "The Insect Life" has preserved the diamond of thought for more than a hundred years, allowing us to see the footprints of great people.

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

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