Word: insects
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With reference to your article on Jean Henri Fabre and his world of insects [TIME, Aug. 22], one of the most interesting facts about the work of the great entomologist is that he constantly affirmed and reaffirmed that the insect world contained the living, moving proof that the whole idea of evolution was false, and the whole Darwinian concept founded on a series of misreadings of nature...
...argument was that ... no insect which passes through the larva, nymph and imago cycle of life has ever . . . been able to pass on any experience to its progeny. All that such insects know is known absolutely perfectly by an instinct which must be the result of creation...
Victor Hugo may have called Fabre the "Homer of the Insects," but Fabre was not so much a Homer as a St. Paul. The latter dug into the Old Testament to base his conclusions on revelation. Fabre . . . drew from the insect world conclusions which have not only never been explained but which have been ignored. To him there was revelation in nature...
...years before his death (at 91), that Fabre first attracted wide popular attention in his native France. In the U.S., although respect for him in scientific circles has always been deep, popular readership has been comparatively narrow; the only U.S. translations of his works are lengthy studies of single insects, published about the time of World War I. This week the publication of The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre (Edited by Edwin Way Teale; Dodd, Mead, $3.50) gave English-speaking readers their first full view of the patient Provengal scientist whom Victor Hugo called "The Homer of the Insects...
...raised heavenwards, her folded arms, crossed upon her breast, are in fact a sort of travesty of a nun in ecstasy." The travesty is complete when the mantis makes her kill: "With the sharpness of a spring, the toothed forearm folds back on the toothed upper arm; and the insect is caught between the blades of the double saw . . . Thereupon, without unloosing the cruel machine, the mantis gnaws her victim by small mouthfuls. Such are the ecstasies, the mystic meditations...