to decide the definite trend of his ideas.

It was this incident which then and there developed the germs already
latent within him. These had only awaited such an occasion as that which so
fortunately came to pass one evening of the winter of 1854.

Fabre offers yet another example of the part so often played by chance in
the manifestations of talent. How many have suddenly felt the unexpected
awakening of gifts which they did not suspect, as a result of some unusual
circumstance!

Was it not simply as a result of having read a note by the Russian chemist
Mitscherlich on the comparison of the specific characteristics of certain
crystals that Pasteur so enthusiastically took up his researches into
molecular asymmetry which were the starting-point of so many wonderful
discoveries?

Again, we need only recall the case of Brother Huber, the celebrated
observer of the bee, who, having out of simple curiosity undertaken to
verify certain experiments of Réaumur's, was so completely and immediately
fascinated by the subject that it became the object of the rest of his
life.

Again, we may ask what Claude Bernard would have been had he not met
Magendie? Similarly Léon Dufour's little work was to Fabre the road to
Damascus, the electric impulse which decided his vocation.

It dealt with a very singular fact concerning the manners of one of the
hymenoptera, a wasp, a Cerceris, in whose nest Dufour had found small
coleoptera of the genus Buprestis, which, under all the appearances of