figure or a curve which he had newly discovered prevented his sleep for
several nights.

"All this morning I have been busy with star-shaped polygons, and have
proceeded from surprise to surprise...perceiving in the distance, as I
advanced, unforeseen and marvellous consequences."

Here, among others, is one question which suddenly presented itself to his
mind "in the midst of the spikes" of his polygons: what would be the period
of the rotation of the sun on its own centre if its atmosphere reached as
far as the earth? And this question gave rise to another, "without which
the sequence stops then and there; number, space, movement, and order form
a single chain, the first link of which sets all the rest in motion."
(3/6.) And the hours went by quickly, so quickly with "x," the plants and
the shells, that "literally there was no time to eat."

For Fabre was born a poet, and mathematics borders upon poetry; he saw in
algebra "the most magnificent flights," and the figures of analytical
geometry unrolled themselves in his imagination "in superb strophes"; the
Ellipse, "the trajectory of the planets, with its two related foci, sending
from one to the other a constant sum of vector radii"; the Hyperbole, "with
repulsive foci, the desperate curve which plunges into space in infinite
tentacles, approaching closer and closer to a straight line, the asymptote,
without ever finally attaining it"; the Parabola, "which seeks fruitlessly
in the infinite for its second, lost centre: it is the trajectory of the
bomb: it is the path of certain comets which come one day to visit our sun,
then flee into the depths whence they never return." (3/7.)

And one fine morning we behold him mounting, thrilled by a lyric passion,
to the lofty regions in which Number, "irresistible, omnipotent, keystone