opening up other horizons to him. But Requien did at least enrich his
memory by a prodigious quantity of names of plants with which he had not
been acquainted. He revealed to him the immense flora of Corsica, which he
himself had come to study, and for which Fabre was to gather such a vast
amount of material.

Fabre found in Requien more especially a friend "proof against anything";
and when the latter died almost suddenly at Bonifacio, Fabre was
overwhelmed by the sad news. On that very day he had on the table before
him a parcel of plants gathered for the dead botanist. "I cannot let my
eyes rest upon it," he wrote at the time, "without feeling my heart wrung
and my sight dim with tears." (3/9.)

But the most admirably fruitful encounter, as it exercised the profoundest
influence upon his destiny, was his meeting with Moquin-Tandon, a Toulouse
professor who followed Requien to Corsica, to complete the work which the
latter had left unfinished: the complete inventory of the prodigious wealth
of vegetation, of the innumerable species and varieties which Fabre and he
collected together, on the slopes and summits of Monte Renoso, often
botanizing "up in the clouds, mantle on back and numb with cold." (3/10.)

Moquin-Tandon was not merely a skilful naturalist; he was one of the most
eloquent and scholarly scientists of his time. Fabre owed to him, not his
genius, to be sure, but the definite indication of the path he was finally
to take, and from which he was never again to stray.

Moquin-Tandon, a brilliant writer and "an ingenious poet in his
Montpellerian dialect," (3/11.) taught Fabre never to forget the value of
style and the importance of form, even in the exposition of a purely
descriptive science such as botany. He did even more, by one day suddenly