to make the dimensions uniform with those of the other volumes of
the series, the purely autobiographical essays comprised in the
Souvenirs. These essays, though they have no bearing upon the
life of the fly, are among the most interesting that Henri Fabre
has written and will, I am persuaded, make a special appeal to the
reader. The chapter entitled The Caddis Worm has been included
as following directly upon The Pond.

Since publishing The Life of the Spider, I was much struck by a
passage in Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's stimulating work, The Childhood
of Animals, in which the secretary of the Zoological Society of
London says: 'I have attempted to avoid the use of terms familiar
only to students of zoology and to refrain from anatomical detail,
but at the same time to refrain from the irritating habit assuming
that my readers have no knowledge, no dictionaries and no other
books.'

I began to wonder whether I had gone too far in simplifying the
terminology of the Fabre essays and in appending explanatory
footnotes to the inevitable number of outlandish names of insects.
But my doubts vanished when I thought upon Fabre's own words in
the first chapter of this book: 'If I write for men of learning,
for philosophers...I write above all things for the young. I want
to make them love the natural story which you make them hate; and
that is why, while keeping strictly to the domain of truth, I
avoid your scientific prose, which too often, alas, seems borrowed
from some Iroquois idiom!'

And I can but apologize if I have been too lavish with my notes to
this chapter in particular, which introduces to us, as in a sort