And then, my dear insects, if you cannot convince those good
people, because you do not carry the weight of tedium, I, in my
turn, will say to them: 'You rip up the animal and I study it
alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I
cause it to be loved; you labor in a torture chamber and
dissecting room, I make my observations under the blue sky to the
song of the cicadas, you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical
tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry
into death, I pry into life. And why should I not complete my
thought: the boars have muddied the clear stream; natural history,
youth's glorious study, has, by dint of cellular improvements,
become a hateful and repulsive thing. Well, if I write for men of
learning, for philosophers, who, one day, will try to some extent
to unravel the tough problem of instinct, I write also, I write
above all things for the young. I want to make them love the
natural history 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."

But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the
bit of land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of
living entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained
in the solitude of a little village. It is a harmas, the name
given, in this district [the country round Serignan, in Provence],
to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the
thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of the plow; but the
sheep passes there in spring, when it has chanced to rain and a
little grass shoots up.