Fabre applied himself thenceforth with all his heart, and for nine years
never lifted his hand.

How insipid, how forbidding were the usual classbooks, the second-rate
natural histories above all, stuffed with dry statements, with raw
knowledge, which brought nothing but the memory into play! How many
youthful faces had grown pale above them!

What a contrast and a deliverance in these little books of Fabre's, so
clear, so luminous, so simple, which for the first time spoke to the heart
and the understanding; for "work which one does not understand disgusts
one." (5/1.)

To initiate others into science or art, it is not enough to have understood
them oneself; it is not enough even that one should be an artist or a
scientist. Scientists of the highest flight are sometimes very unskilful
teachers, and very indifferent hands at explaining the alphabet. It is not
given to the first comer to educate the young; to understand how to
identify his understanding with theirs, to measure their powers. It is a
matter of instinct and good sense rather than of memory or erudition, and
Fabre, who had never in his life been the pupil of any one, could better
than any remember the phases through which his mind had passed, could
recollect by what detours of the mind, by what secret labours of thought,
by what intuitive methods he had succeeded in conquering, one by one, all
the difficulties in his path, and in gradually attaining to knowledge.

It is wonderful to watch the mastery with which he conducts his
demonstrations, the simplest as well as the most involved, singling out the
essential, little by little evoking the sense of things, ingeniously
seeking familiar examples, finding comparisons, and employing picturesque