A man must indeed love knowledge deeply before he can make others love it,
or render it easy and attractive, revealing only the smiling highways; and
Fabre, above all things the impassioned professor, was the very man to lead
his disciples "between the hedges of hawthorn and sloe," whether to show
them the sap, "that fruitful current, that flowing flesh, that vegetable
blood," or how the plant, by a mysterious transubstantiation, makes its
wood, "and the delicate bundle of swaddling-bands of its buds," or how
"from a putrid ordure it extracts the flavour and the fragrance of its
fruits"; or whether he seeks to evoke the murderous plants that live as
parasites at the cost of others; the white Clandestinus, "which strangles
the roots of the alders beside the rivers," the Cuscuta, "which knows
nothing of labour," the wicked Orobanche, plump, powerful and brazen, the
skin covered with ugly scales, "with sombre flowers that wear the livery of
death, which leaps at the throat of the clover, stifling it, devouring it,
sucking its blood." (5/5.)

Botany, by this genial treatment, becomes a most interesting study, and I
know of no more captivating reading than "The Plant" and "The Story of the
Log," the jewels of this incomparable series.

Employ Fabre's method if you wish to learn by yourself, or to evoke in your
children a love of science, and, according to the phrase of the gentle
Jean-Jacques, to help them "to buy at the best possible of prices." Give
them as sole guides these exquisite manuals, which touch upon everything,
initiating them into everything, and bringing within the reach of all, for
their instruction or amusement, the heavens and the earth, the planets and
their moons, the mechanism of the great natural forces and the laws which
govern them, life and its materials, agriculture and its applications. For
more than a quarter of a century these catechisms of science, models of
lucidity and good sense, effected the education of generations of