Lastly, there was needed—and this was not the least requirement of the work—a mind ever ready to cope with the riddles which, among those little objects, rise up at every step as enormous as those which fill the skies and perhaps more numerous, more imperious and more strange, as though nature had here given a freer scope to her last wishes and an easier outlet to her secret thoughts. Fabre shrinks from none of those boundless problems which are persistently put to us by all the inhabitants of that tiny world where mysteries are heaped up in a denser and more bewildering fashion than in any other. He thus meets and faces, turn by turn, the redoubtable questions of instinct and intelligence, of the origin of species, of the harmony or the accidents of the universe, of the life lavished upon the abysses of death, without counting the no less vast, but so to speak more human problems which, among infinite others, are inscribed within the range, if not within the grasp, of our intelligence: parthenogenesis; the prodigious geometry of the wasps and bees; the logarithmic spiral of the snail; the antennary sense; the miraculous force which, in absolute isolation, without the possible introduction of anything from the outside, increases the volume of the Minotaurus’ egg tenfold, where it lies, and, during seven to nine months, nourishes with an invisible and spiritual food, not the lethargy, but the active life of the scorpion and of the young of the Lycosa and the Clotho Spider. He does not attempt to explain them by one of those generally-acceptable theories, such as that of evolution, which merely shifts the ground of the difficulty and which, I may say in passing, emerges from these volumes in a somewhat sorry plight, after being sharply confronted with incontestable facts.

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Waiting for chance or a god to enlighten us, he is able, in the presence of the unknown, to preserve that great religious and attentive silence which is dominant in the best minds of the day. There are those who say:

“Now that you have reaped a plentiful harvest of details, you should follow up analysis with synthesis and generalize the origin of instinct in an all-embracing view.”

To these he replies, with the humble and magnificent loyalty that illumines all his work:

“Because I have stirred a few grains of sand on the shore, am I in a position to know the depths of the ocean?

“Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the archives of the world before we possess the last word that a Gnat has to say to us....

“Success is for the loud talkers, the self-convinced dogmatists; everything is admitted on condition that it be noisily proclaimed. Let us throw off this sham and recognize that, in reality, we know nothing about anything, if things were probed to the bottom. Scientifically, Nature is a riddle without a definite solution to satisfy man’s curiosity. Hypothesis follows on hypothesis; the theoretical rubbish-heap accumulates; and truth ever eludes us. To know how not to know might well be the last word of wisdom.”

Evidently, this is hoping too little. In the frightful pit, in the bottomless funnel wherein whirl all those contradictory facts which are resolved in obscurity, we know just as much as our cave-dwelling ancestors; but at least we know that we do not know. We survey the dark faces of all the riddles, we try to estimate their number, to classify their varying degrees of dimness, to obtain an idea of their position and their extent. That already is something, pending the day of the first gleams of light. In any case, it means doing in the presence of the mysteries all that the most upright intelligence can do to-day; and that is what the author of this incomparable Iliad does, with more confidence than he professes. He gazes at them attentively. He wears out his life in surprising their most minute secrets. He prepares for them, in his thoughts and in ours, the field necessary for their evolutions. He increases the consciousness of his ignorance in proportion to their importance and learns to understand more and more that they are incomprehensible.

EVIL-SPEAKING